Trump inaugural: cultural conservatives think they've won the culture war
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And what progressives should do about it.
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Hello from an increasingly frigid Washington. There is much talk here of the imminent arrival of the “polar vortex”, which in a neat twist sounds quite similar to what Donald Trump is threatening to do to Greenland. Either way the city is full of rather forlorn looking groups of middle-aged men in scarlet MAGA caps wondering quite what they’re going to do with themselves now Trump has announced his inauguration will be taking place inside the Capitol building, owing to the Nuuk-like temperatures in the city. Many have shelled out thousands of dollars to be here. The last time DC saw this many pissed off Maga types Congress ended up on fire. But I’m sure they’ll take some comfort from the fact that Suella Braverman and Laurence Fox will be available to talk to instead.
In all seriousness, the atmosphere in the city is deeply weird. Many locals have left town for the weekend, wishing to avoid the Trump jamboree at its most ebullient. They’ve been replaced by an invasion of alt-right grifters and attention seekers from around the world, desperate to show their followers that they too are part of the conservative revolution- that they’re players. They intend to enjoy the next few days and they will.
It’s rare that an election victory feels like it has changed so much, so quickly, before a candidate has even taken office. But that’s because it feels like the final battle in a very long conflict- a moment where progressivism firmly stopped advancing in the discourse and culture. In other words, the election seemed to mark the passing of an era of liberal cultural dominance- one that arguably began with the election of Obama in 2008 and was fortified and developed at pace partly in response to Trump’s own victory in 2016, to the MeToo movement of 2017 and of the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd in the early part of this decade. With it came the advent of equal marriage, the strengthening of transgender rights, discourses on structural racism, privilege, “cancel culture”, fierce debates on the policing of language, DEI policies in corporates, extremely liberal ideas about the border - what came to be known collectively as wokeism.
As I say, Trump’s victory in 2016, widely regarded as illegitimate or accidental by many American liberals but also US power brokers, intensified these trends, as the “resistance” grew. Locked out of political power, liberalism reinforced itself in the redoubts of cultural power. Meanwhile and partly because of this, cultural, economic, media and technological elites kept Trump at arms length and actively embraced progressive causes. Liberals comforted themselves that while the Republicans might win elections, the arc of cultural history firmly bent in their direction.
Demonstrating Democrats are still struggling to grasp Trump’s comeback
2024 bent the arc back. This time Trump’s victory (whilst still narrow) felt totalising and as a result the cordon sanitaire around him from many American elites has all but collapsed. Corporate, media and tech aristocrats have signalled that they intend to move their businesses in Trump’s ideological direction.
Trumpism’s sharpest edges have been normalised and Elon Musk has subverted an entire information ecosystem to disseminate its ideas and theories. As the FT reported recently, Walmart has stopped considering race and gender in granting its supplier contracts, has ceased staff racial equity training and will not renew funding for the Center for Racial equity, something it started funding after George Floyd. McDonald’s has dropped diversity targets. Zuckerberg has declared Meta is getting “back to its roots” and declared that US companies “need more masculine energy.” This sits alongside a wider conservative shift in popular culture. In December Disney pulled a transgender character in one of its animated series. Country music, with emphases on traditional gender roles is having a moment. Studios have noted the potential for films with a strongly conservative bent to do well at the box office- see Reagan starring Denis Quaid, critically panned but appreciated by audiences in red states. The MAGA new media ecosystem runs straight through the online podcast space which is proudly, unremittingly male, prizing traditional gender roles and norms. In previously liberal strongholds in Brooklyn and Chicago it has become not uncommon to see young men wearing MAGA caps- unimaginable only a few years ago . As Kendall Cunningham has written: “2024 was all about the straight white bro.”
And as Ian Ward, from Politico has argued:
“We’re living in a moment of global rightward political retrenchment. I think it’s safe to assume that our cultural products will reflect that. I would add that, fairly or not, Trump and MAGA have taken on a certain countercultural appeal — and that tends to jive with artistic subcultures that position themselves against the cultural mainstream. It’s not cool or subversive right now to be a Democratic partisan, who are seen as defenders of the status quo. There’s a certain subversiveness to being MAGA, and I think we’ll see that echo throughout the cultural sphere — though I’m not entirely sure what it will look like.”
Once conservative, reductive, backward looking- MAGAism now appears futuristic and cutting edge. This is why Trump has become such a convert to TikTok and will likely try and fashion a reprieve for the embattled platform in his new presidency’s earliest days- and quite possibly win a tonne of Gen-Z admirers in the process. An old truism about politics from the 1990s was that the right had won on the economy but the left on culture. In the 2020s with statist economic nationalism in greater vogue, but conservatism’s cultural ascent, it almost feels as if that could be reversed. What is certainly true is that cultural liberalism, having reached a zenith, is heading for a period of retrenchment. Not all of that will be a bad thing. There was overreach in these last years- too much declarative politics, not enough argument and genuine attempt to change minds, too many assumptions that the young would always be onside and create the world in the image liberals wanted. Given Gen-Z’s increasing cultural and political diversity, that is all in doubt.
What's next for the MAGA movement after Trump?
What might a fightback like- a counter revolution, to the counter revolution, in both in the cultural and the political arenas? Well the first thing that progressives in America, Britain and elsewhere must not do is panic. Though cultural conservatism is having a moment, there is too much fatalism about its durability.
There is always a period after a party’s election win, especially in the American system which builds in a lengthy transition so a president-elect enjoys prestige without responsibility (exactly what Trump wants), when it appears they are invulnerable and have created a permanent political settlement. That is never the case. Very similar dynamics played out in 2004 with George W. Bush’s win, and barely 4 years later the Democrats were near-hegemonic across much of the United States- ditto Obama between 2008 and 2010. Cultural conservatives and alt-right figures are over-interpreting what was an historically narrow win, anchored in everyday “kitchen table” economic issues and concern about the border, as an overwhelming mandate for their highly jaundiced views.
Though corporate America is shifting and shifting rapidly, America itself is much the same country it was a few months ago, neither as liberal as the last years might imply, nor as conservative as these post-elections days might make it seem. It is just as likely that this is a high watermark of cultural conservatism as it is the start of a new era, especially if Trump and those around him overplay their hand, punch-drunk on their own power, and govern in a way which is far beyond the expectations of the median American voter.
How do I know this? Because it’s precisely what happened after 2020 under Joe Biden. He and Democrats at the time interpreted a narrowish electoral win as carte blanche to govern further to left than any Democrat in half a century. This high point of aggressive liberal ideological expansionism damaged the Democrats in the long run.
The apogee of this was the 2020 primary campaign, which forced candidates to adopt what were objectively quite extreme positions- something which came to haunt Kamala Harris when she ran last year. In a primary debate in 2019 when asked whether illegal border crossings should be decriminalised, eight of the presidential candidates said yes. This period of cultural advancement, especially on immigration alienated Democrats from median American voters. Biden was if anything to some extent a moderating force on these impulses in office, but on economics he was the opposite, spending too much on the recovery package in the early days, and stoking inflation. The combination of these two forces was the handmaiden to Trump’s restoration.
Trump and his team are repeating the same mistakes, but worse. Because he’s a populist, the dynamic of political and cultural overreach is stronger for him: populists always believe that they are in some way more representative of “the people”, or ordinary person than their opponents and less cautious as a result.
His movement is studded with weirdos who are made more weird by the online political world they inhabit. They are egged on by ever more conservative commentators and media outlets and TV stations to have ever more extreme views, with those views and policies becoming a litmus test of being a real Republican or conservative. A backlash could come quickly if Trump and those around him pursue policies which are too extreme or plain cruel on deportation, on gender, on abortion, on tariffs- any and all of which will alienate key electoral constituencies. That presents opportunities for his opponents.
But Democrats and progressives must place themselves in a position to seize them. And in order to do so they must not fall into the trap which those on the “People’s March” in Washington were this weekend. I went along for The News Agents to see the 10,000 or so (way fewer than 50,000 organisers suggested). A taste of the day can be watched below.
You will note that these people are making the same mistakes as progressives have been making about Trump for the last decade. To start advancing again, progressives must move away from academic arguments around authoritarianism, fascism, of talking about Hitler, of rooting their objections to the particular problems of each individual component of the identity politics rainbow coalition. Instead the left should argue from a place centred on the whole- the vast majority of the electorate, an argument which should be anchored in an anti-oligarchy politics. Few are listening to Biden now but he was right in his analysis of where we are going and warning of the emerging tech-industrial complex.
Trump ran as a populist, on the side of the ordinary man and woman: he is about to hand over massive amounts of commercial, economic and political power to the richest men in America, who will not only have traditional economic hegemony, like the Robber Barons of old, but also control over what we see, learn and do online and what our kids do online. They are literally paying for his inauguration.
The next generation of Democrats and progressives in Britain and beyond should fashion a real, inclusive populist politics of their own in opposition to this new conservatism and alliance between the alt-right, big tech and Wall Street- focussed on taking economic democracy seriously, rooted in opposition to their overwhelming power: a power which makes a mockery of their claim that they care about the sovereignty of the nation state.
Given the pact between the political right and the online titans, that task could be mammoth- just getting the message across will be an enormous challenge. And that’s why the premium for progressive politicians in the years ahead will be on those who in their bones, instinctively, reflexively understand how to communicate in the digital age, who understand that the battle is for eye-balls and ears and can win it consistently.
As Ezra Klein has written: “What Democrats have is an attention problem, not a media problem, and it stems partly from the fact that they still treat attention as something the media controls rather than as something they have to fight for themselves.”
We have tested to destruction the idea that just doing is enough- that was Biden, who did lots but said and explained little. I fear Starmer may fall into the same trap. The result is a discourse and politics which is more culturally conservative than ever. Having long been used to having a monopoly on the zeitgeist, for the first time in a long time liberalism will have to start to fight for it. Perhaps, that’s no bad thing.
Listen to the latest episode of The News Agents.
