“Do you think wokeness is over, now that President Trump is in power?”
I was asked this question recently in Nashville on a tour across the country for screenings of Live Not by Lies, the documentary series based on my 2020 book of the same name. Both the film and the book tell the stories of former Soviet bloc dissidents who resisted Communist totalitarianism, and are disturbed by the totalitarian tendencies in the illiberal ideological movement across the West we came to call wokeness.
The experience of Soviet communism gives these people their instinct for danger. But Americans—whether because wokeness called itself “social justice” or because they have had the uniquely American luxury of being on a holiday from history—often don’t see the totalitarian threat.
But by the time my book came out we were six months into Covid and after the summer of George Floyd’s killing. By that point what I was describing was undeniable.
Americans might not have faced arrest and imprisonment for dissenting from the DEI or gender party line, but fear of losing their jobs, or of having their businesses destroyed and their reputations ruined, can be an effective means of achieving the same goal. By 2020 huge numbers of people in this country dwelled in fear of being fired, canceled, or targeted by ideological mobs for deviating even slightly from the approved orthodoxy.
Live Not by Lies helped people make sense of what they were experiencing. It told them that they were not crazy, that something wicked was passing through our society, masquerading as morality and justice. And it gave them advice, via the stories told by men and women who had lived through the “hard” totalitarianism of Soviet rule, for how to resist.
By spring 2025, much has changed, not least the man in the White House. What inspired the questioner in Nashville was the sense that wokeness may have peaked, and indeed was in retreat thanks to certain welcome measures taken by the Trump administration.
They wanted me, I think, to tell her that everything was going to be fine now.
This essay is about why I couldn’t. And why this recent trip across America—to cities and towns in states like New York and Alabama and Tennessee—shocked me to my core.
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Author: Rod Dreher
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