The election of 2016, both Donald Trump’s shocking victory and Bernie Sanders’s socialist insurgency, created a sudden swell of ideological ambition. Conservative thinkers rushed to fill in the outlines of Trumpian populism, building various intellectual frameworks for an incipient “post-liberal” age. Meanwhile among progressives there were two big projects: a cultural revolution in the name of antiracism and social justice that gathered force throughout Trump’s presidency, and a Sanders-inspired revival of big-spending social democratic blueprints.
These efforts seemed to promise that a great clash of visions would define the 2020s, pitting some version of a “new right” against some kind of post-neoliberal left.
But whatever the current election season is delivering, it isn’t a grand ideological debate. Instead, there is a flight from ideological ambition on both sides, with the Democratic candidate offering a mix of poll-tested incrementalism and nonspecific pabulum and the Republican candidate closing out his campaign with inconsistent pandering — tax cuts for some, legal pot for others, mass deportations but also free I.V.F.
So where do the ideologies that took shape between 2016 and 2020 actually stand in 2024?
Start with the Great Awokening that swept through American institutions in the summer following the murder of George Floyd. Social justice progressivism’s position at the moment might be characterized as a mixture of retreat and consolidation. The retreat is most obvious in national politics, where Kamala Harris would clearly like everyone to forget some of the more outré positions she staked out four years ago. But it’s apparent elsewhere in the culture as well: The reputations of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo have fallen on hard times, corporate America is cutting D.E.I. jobs and university leaders are trying to tiptoe back toward political neutrality.
At the same time the Awokening is hardly giving up all the territory it claimed. When The Economist produced a special report this week on wokeness’s supposed eclipse, the trends in various indicators — the use of ideological buzzwords in media and academia, say — were more likely to show a leveling-off or modest diminishment than a real decline. This suggests that wokeness is more in abeyance than full retreat, still potent despite being held at arm’s length by leading Democrats.
The same can’t be said of its fellow traveler, the neo-socialism that crested either with Sanders’s 2020 campaign or with the initial Biden administration spending spree. The Sanders left notched some policy victories in the latter period, but as a forward-looking movement it looks rudderless, its grand ambitions frustrated by divided government and by the left’s ancient enemy, inflation.
Maybe neo-socialism will revive in the later 2020s under Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or in the 2030s under an A.I. simulacrum of a younger Bernie Sanders. But for now the dream of Medicare for All, a universal basic income or a European-scale welfare state feels almost as distant as it did before Sanders’s first presidential campaign. And whereas wokeness can endure and thrive without direct political power because it’s a cultural movement above all, socialists without a path to controlling the means of production are always in danger of turning into a private debating club.
Finally, what of the post-liberal right? In one sense it seems well positioned: Trump has a good chance at a restoration, he’s making nationalist promises on immigration and tariffs once again, and his running mate is a fellow traveler of the populist intelligentsia.
But in another sense much of the work that intelligentsia tried to do to prepare for this moment appears sterile or unpalatable or simply incomplete. The new right’s promise was that a lot more would be added to Trump’s 2016 campaign: big ideas for industrial and family policy, a revived social conservatism pushing back against libertarian excess, a post-Reaganite vision of the common good.
The reality is that Trump 2.0 has stiff-armed social conservatism, his vision of blue-collar revival hasn’t progressed much beyond building the wall and paying for it with tariffs, and he remains more focused on statecraft as score-settling than as soulcraft. Meanwhile, the ideologists of the new right can’t agree on what they’re for — some trying to staple policy ideas to Trump’s campaign, others marinating in various paranoias, and others subsiding into disillusionment.
The most effective part of the new right might be the cultural movement that is building up classical education and establishing beachheads in red-state universities. But relative to progressivism’s cultural cadres, this is just a small guerrilla force.
So what worldviews have gained ground in the 2024 campaign? I think you would have to say the ideas that were influential before Trump and Sanders upset everything — a small-ball form of progressive policymaking, supply-side economics for Republicans and cultural libertarianism. Tax cuts and tax credits and abortion rights, a Democrat bragging about owning a handgun while her Republican rival endorses legal pot: I don’t expect it to last, but for at least the next six weeks, it’s springtime for neoliberalism.
The New York Times
