Trumpian Amoralism Cannot Defeat Woke Moralism

An extended version of my recent Quillette piece.

What is the optimal level of morality in society? Having lived through the frenzy of woke moralism which began in the early 2010s and peaked after 2020, we now find ourselves in a world where, at least in the United States, Trump-Musk have overcorrected, taking us into a morality-free zone. Their ethos is that of the twitter troll in power, a vulgarized Schmittian-Nietzscheanism.

An ethical narrative suffusing our institutions is needed to produce the good society: laws alone won’t do. This has been the secret of the West’s – especially the northwestern European-derived West’s – success. However, morality can become excessive, damaging human flourishing.

Think of the golfer who incessantly scolds his foursome about etiquette and pace of play. In golf as in life, we need enough rule-following to produce a social good, but not so much that it ruins life for individuals, undermining that social good.

The task for national conservatives and moderate liberals is to forge a new public morality that absorbs the populist critique of progressive moralism but introduces a suitably rebalanced set of restrictions over our individual and national ids and egos. A place of sanity that avoids both the Scylla of woke extremism and Charybdis of ‘might makes right’ amoralism.

Moralistic Extremism

An honest conversation about public morality must begin with the illiberal fundamentalism of the cultural left - its attack on expressive freedom and objective truth, and vandalism of cherished traditions. As I define it in my 2024 book The Third Awokening (in North America) / Taboo (UK and elsewhere), woke is the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual minorities. Anything that offends the most hypothetically sensitive member of a totemic group is grounds for excommunication from the community. In other words, cancellation.

The post-2013 Great Awokening produced a well-documented surge of no-platformings and attempts to fire professors for legal and reasonable speech. In 2015, woke students surrounded Yale Professor Nicholas Christakis, screaming at him because his wife had the gall to suggest that the university had no business telling students what to wear on Halloween. Bret Weinstein was chased off campus at Evergreen State in 2017 for having the temerity to question the idea that whites should not be excluded from the campus in obeisance to an anti-white victimhood ritual cooked up by radical staff, students and administrators.

The death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, a statistically unrepresentative freak event, led to progressive moral panic in America and beyond. By contrast, identical singularities such as the police killing of white victims like Tony Timpa were ignored. American faculty were far more likely to report self-censoring than during the McCarthy period. During 2021-23, 75 to 80 percent of Americans, Canadians and Britons agreed with the statement, ‘political correctness has gone too far.’

The ensuing emotional frenzy saw world leaders like Joe Biden and Britain’s Keir Starmer take the knee and otherwise abase themselves before the idols of a post-truth age. Lies about young black men being at imminent risk of being shot by police were circulated - including by President Biden - to the point that most liberal Americans thought young black men were at greater risk of being shot by police than of being killed in a car accident (in fact the latter is 10 times more risky for them).

In Canada, the progressive establishment, desperate for its Floyd moment, latched on to the hoax of ‘mass graves’ of buried indigenous residential school students in Kamloops, British Columbia. Justin Trudeau bowed his head while clutching a teddy bear at the site and ordered the national flag lowered to half mast until indigenous leaders allowed him to raise it 6 months later. The invented traditions known as land acknowledgements and ‘indigenous knowledge’ hit Canadian universities like a class 5 hurricane. Statues of the country’s founding father, Sir John A Macdonald, were toppled, removed or boarded up, the country’s history trashed.

Outside the US, in western countries from Sweden to Spain, Ireland to New Zealand, a routinized wokery has consolidated its grip on elite culture and institutions. In Anglo countries like Canada and Australia, the writ of transactivists runs through prisons, hospitals, sports, women’s shelters, government bodies and schools, with opponents characterized as ‘far right’ miscreants. Canada is in many ways the worst, with ideologically corrupt courts and professional associations fueling the woke juggernaut. Politicians who resist this cultural revolution are accused of stoking a culture war while the cultural revolutionaries launder themselves as being ‘inclusive.’ The progressive-dominated media in these countries pushes for vague and illiberal misinformation and hate speech laws, including sending police to people’s homes to arrest them or threaten them for online speech or even challenging the leadership at their local school. No one should kid themselves that western societies outside America represent the good society.

Trump 2.0: From Moralism to Amoralism

But if Canada, Australasia and parts of Europe are mired in woke illiberalism, the American government has reacted against this in a haphazard and disappointing way. Many conservatives around the world hoped the new Trump administration would clean house on DEI and transactivism and secure the border, but respect the law and act in an internationally responsible manner. This could have built powerful international momentum against woke and open borders based on the moral critique that the Democrats’ cultural socialist revolution abrogated free speech, equal rights and due process. Meanwhile its unwillingness to defend the border violated its social contract to protect the citizenry and uphold the law. If there is no boundary between the nation and the world, why should people pay half their income in tax?

Many international audiences cheered J.D. Vance’s Munich speech about European elites running roughshod over free speech while failing to control immigration. This might have furnished the basis for a new western moral consensus.

But no sooner had Trump ascended high office than his administration went off the rails on foreign policy and law enforcement. Vance’s riposte to Niall Ferguson over Ukraine, accusing Ferguson of spouting ‘moralistic garbage’ nicely illustrated how a valid populist critique of moralism can tip into political amoralism.

While the idea of the January 6 protestors as insurrectionists was a catastrophizing liberal trope, the fact that there was a violent core of MAGA activists who called for Mike Pence’s scalp - posing an imminent threat of violence - cannot be denied. In addition, storming the capitol with the aim of protesting valid election results is a symbolic attack on the legitimacy of the democratic process which warrants at least some sanction (as should also have been handed out to leftists for attacking police stations and threatening the Supreme Court if decisions did not go their way). Trump’s blanket pardoning of even violent January 6 protestors, without justifying these actions in ethical terms (perhaps he might have argued that the charges were excessive in relation to precedent), made it clear that he would do as he pleased without regard for moral restraints and traditions. This was an exercise in hard power without even a fig leaf of principled legitimation.

The administration followed up by smearing Volodymyr Zelensky, a heroic figure who risked his life to resist Vladimir Putin’s invading Russian army. At the White House, Trump and Vance scolded and humiliated Zelensky in front of the world’s cameras, to the delight of Putin. Lavishing praise on a blood-soaked tyrant responsible for the large-scale destruction of Ukrainian cities and massacre of civilians in places like Bucha (not to mention the capture and deportation of men, women and children) was a new low. Even if there was a tactical reason for this, it damages the legitimacy of the administration. Aggressive territorial claims on Canada (‘the 51st state’), Greenland and the Panama Canal soon followed, alarming allies. Trashing allies as scroungers who were ‘ripping off’ America while failing to address counterarguments about how international arrangements also benefit America, Trump slapped tariffs on them while speaking softly toward Russia and China. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico while banning the Associated Press for refusing to use the new name, the administration then took to chaotically firing government workers while ending their right to work from home. Talk of free speech was quickly undermined by the abrogation of due process for anti-Israel student protester Mahmoud Khalil and the wrongful detention of suspected illegal immigrants. Welcoming Andrew Tate to America, a sleazy figure accused of running a prostitution ring in Romania, fit the unprincipled ‘anything that triggers the libs’ ethos.

While Trump has commendably crippled DEI in government and at universities, he has failed to persuade moderates because his administration has not developed a compelling moral narrative for the pushback. Instead, along with Elon Musk, Trump is acting like a troll. The White House’s posting of an AI-generated cartoon of an illegal immigrant crying in handcuffs reflects the nihilistic new aesthetic. Shitposting is no way to be president. And while Vance has struck some considered notes about free speech, anti-Semitism and elites who betray the democratic wishes of their people, this is undermined by his parroting of Trump-Musk talking points on foreign policy and the (mis)rule of law.

Significant numbers of serious liberals and centrists have been railing against woke, recognizing a counter-progressive ‘vibe shift’ in the culture. The most interesting new ideas on the left are coming from moderate leftists like Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith or Ezra Klein who - despite their pro-immigration sympathies - are at least willing to recognize the importance of reason and border control. The new self-reflection offers an opportunity for the intellectual right to leverage the new mood, broaden their coalition, and fashion what I term a ‘rational populist’ consensus that can marginalize left-liberal extremism.

This could open the way to lifting the longstanding elite suppression of moderate white and male identities - a key source of populist grievance.

The outlines of a new public morality are reasonably clear. Human flourishing and cultural wealth, not cultural socialism. Resilience rather than fragility and personal victimhood. A free speech ethos with norms of civil discourse. Equal rights to express group identities, which should take moderate form. Respect for tradition and civilizational forebears with space for criticism that does not airbrush the sins of totemic victim groups (viz. indigenous conquest and non-European slavery) while exaggerating those of whites and men.

Instead, Trump’s antics threaten to delegitimate the international right’s civilizational project, setting it back the way the religious right’s ‘stealth’ campaigns to impose Creationism in the 1990s produced anti-religious blowback.

There is no shortcut for making an ethical case for a reform of DEI and immigration rooted in a new public morality based on full-spectrum human flourishing. That is, valuing minority equality and protection, but also freedom, reason, majority rights, cohesion and excellence.

When it comes to reforming the culture, ‘move fast and break things’ feels good but, unguided by principle, is likely to only produce a pyrrhic victory.

Click here to see Quillette (shortened and edited) version