Over the years, Republicans have portrayed Democrats as beholden to bespoke identities (they/them), obsessed with an alleged genocide (Gaza) and in thrall to anti-American revisionism (see the efforts to recenter our national narrative on slavery).
We are critics of diversity, equity and inclusion programs who largely agree with that characterization. We believe the Republicans’ war on woke has made America a fairer, safer place by checking some of the worst excesses of modern progressivism, from antiwhite discrimination in corporate America to biological men competing in women’s sports.
But we are also concerned that this backlash is morphing into something darker, dumber and ultimately self-defeating. Today the right has begun to resemble its depiction of the left: There are invented identities like heritage American, claims of white genocide in South Africa and arguments from right-wing influencers that the Allies weren’t the good guys in World War II.
The rise of this so-called woke right is sometimes blamed on the ability of podcast bros and online streamers to circumvent official G.O.P. messaging. But it also reflects the way the Republican Party transformed in reaction to the woke era, moving further to the right on race and gender and losing its immune response to genuine cranks.
In practice, antiwokeness has eroded taboos against open bigotry in a party that is losing Latinos ahead of the 2026 midterms. It has made it harder to frame the G.O.P. as the moderate option in a year when candidates who have called for defunding the police are winning Democratic primaries. And it has widened the gap between the two parties, leaving less room for a truce in the culture war.
Some liberals may scoff at the notion that a truce was ever possible with what they see as a backward Republican Party that is racist and sexist to its core. But that argument is belied by the party’s response to the progressivism of the late 2010s, with which the G.O.P. nearly made peace.
This was an era when Donald Trump issued a presidential proclamation for Pride Month and condemned laws limiting bathroom access for transgender people. These so-called bathroom bills were widely seen as a dead-end after North Carolina’s short-lived experiment with one in 2016. The law triggered widespread backlash, a corporate boycott and the eventual downfall of the state’s Republican governor, with polls showing that a majority of Americans opposed similar measures. Even Ron DeSantis backed away from the laws during his campaign for governor of Florida, stating in 2018 that “getting into the bathroom wars” was not “a good use of our time.”
But by 2022 — around the time that wokeness peaked — the political incentives had begun to flip. That was the year that the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas won the women’s N.C.A.A. championship after switching from the men’s team to the women’s and the year The New York Times published a major article on the growing concerns around puberty blockers. It was also when support for trans restrictions began rising significantly, with nearly 80 percent of Americans (including 67 percent of Democrats) in a 2025 Ipsos poll saying that biological men do not belong in women’s sports.
What changed, in other words, were the facts on the ground. The Republican Party responded organically to a shift in public opinion, which was itself a response to a more assertive form of transgender activism — one whose definition of inclusion seemed to compromise basic notions of fairness. Once regarded as a political albatross, bathroom bills are now on the books in 21 states.
A similar dynamic drove the right’s dwindling tolerance for affirmative action and D.E.I. The first Trump administration allowed affirmative action in federal contracting and only sporadically targeted D.E.I. programs in the private sector. But as race and gender preferences became more overt and widespread, so did the grievances of young white men, who saw their professional opportunities diminish.
White men went from 39 percent of tenure-track humanities positions at Harvard in 2014 to 21 percent in 2024, from 56 percent of Amazon middle managers in 2014 to 34 in 2024 and from over 30 percent of American medical students in 2014 to 19 in 2025.
The G.O.P. responded by starting a scorched-earth campaign against D.E.I. And white men, in turn, began flocking to the G.O.P. In 2013, 26 percent of white men ages 18 to 29 identified as Republicans. By 2024, the number had shot up to 36 percent, with most of the increase happening after 2021. Mr. Trump won 56 percent of young men in 2024, compared with just 41 percent in 2020 — a 15-point jump in one election cycle. He made inroads with Black and Latino men as well, improving his margin with the latter group by 35 points compared with 2020.
The trouble for the G.O.P. is that the party is becoming more diverse at a moment when the right is losing its will to gatekeep open bigotry. Frustrated by the suppression of mainstream, center-right views, conservatives increasingly reject as cancel culture any public repudiation of genuinely fringe ideas, creating a subculture of racism, sexism and antisemitism that did not exist to the same degree even five years ago.
The change was evident in the way JD Vance defended a staff member at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Marko Elez, who had been fired for racist social media posts, including one that read, “Normalize Indian hate.” (He was eventually reinstated.) It was also visible in the Heritage Foundation’s refusal to cut ties with Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who has stated that “white people are every single bit justified in being racist” and coined the phrase “your body, my choice.”
“The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people,” its president, Kevin Roberts, said. “I disagree with and even abhor things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer, either.”
In these and other cases, conservatives framed wagon circling as a legitimate corrective to cancel culture, laundering prejudice as principle and keeping far-right figures in the fold. There was comparatively little appetite to defend those who ran afoul of racial sensitivities during the first Trump administration, which in 2018 fired a speechwriter, Darren Beattie, for attending a conference two years earlier at which white nationalists were present. (He now occupies a senior role in the State Department.)
The question is whether this hesitance to gatekeep will become for Republicans what wokeness became for the Democrats: an impulse that fractures the coalition it was meant to unite. Most voters alarmed by D.E.I. and gender ideology did not sign up for white nationalism when they voted for Mr. Trump in 2024 — just as most voters alarmed by Mr. Trump did not sign up for open borders when they voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
This has put the Republicans in a bind going into the 2026 midterms. On the one hand, Republicans would be foolish to abandon the culture war when candidates like Darializa Avila Chevalier — a democratic socialist who in the past called to abolish prisons, borders and the police — are winning Democratic primaries. On the other hand, such left-wing victories may reinforce the revanchism and sense of siege that have made Republicans unwilling to clamp down on their own radicals, often at the expense of the colorblind values they officially espouse.
To thread the needle, the right will need to erect a firewall between antiwokeness, which is more than justified by progressive excess, and actual bigotry, which is not. We doubt a cordon sanitaire will be constructed in the near term, since it would require a repudiation of the “no enemies to the right” ethos, which has yet to cost the G.O.P. as much as wokeness ultimately cost the Democrats. But it may soon. The danger is that the G.O.P. will come to be seen as the mirror image of left-wing identity politics, causing antiwoke swing voters to defect from the coalition.
Such defections would be a brutal blow to a party that has, despite Mr. Trump’s sagging popularity, kept midterm polls reasonably close. And it would deny Republicans the opportunity to capitalize on the democratic socialist surge in their opponents’ ranks, which has resurrected many of the most unpopular ideas of the early years of this decade.
Republicans have a chance to keep that insurgency at bay, but only if they avoid the Democrats’ mistakes.
Gregory Conti is an associate professor of politics at Princeton University. Aaron Sibarium is a staff writer at The Washington Free Beacon.
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