When revolutionaries come into power, they often come to resemble their nemeses. After spending years decrying left-wing “wokeness” and cancel culture, Republicans are now deploying tactics they once deplored against their opponents. Rather than restoring academic freedom, the Trump administration has tried to force private universities into accepting commissars to oversee whom they admit and what they teach. President Donald Trump decried the many civil and criminal cases against him and his supporters. Instead of ending lawfare, the president is publicly jawboning his attorney general into prosecuting his political antagonists, such as former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, even when the underlying evidence seems weak.
Two weeks ago, the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a close ally of the White House, brought threats of even more reprisals. Those who say unsympathetic things about Kirk should be reported to their employer, the vice president said. Left-wing political groups should be investigated, the White House deputy chief of staff said. The late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel should be taken off the air, the Federal Communications Commission chair said. (ABC briefly obliged.)
Those threats are difficult to reconcile with the pledges Trump made in his second inaugural address: to “stop all government censorship and bring back free speech in America” and to never again let “the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.” Instead, cancel culture has been rehabilitated by the right and rebranded as “consequence culture”—the exact phrase used by its enemies on the left.
Extreme partisanship disables principled thinking in almost every arena of American life, but this cycle of tit-for-tat illiberalism is especially dangerous. Liberal democracy depends on a shared belief in individual rights, equality of all citizens, and the rule of law. The major political factions must not behave as if they have a monopoly on the truth or a right to power. Illiberal actors think they have both.
Republicans have genuine grievances with progressive orthodoxy, which has afflicted the highest echelons of media, universities, corporations, and—via the Democratic-staffer class—the government itself. The phenomenon became known by shorthand as wokeness—a worldview that blames systems of oppression for society’s ills and seeks to undo them by changing the collective consciousness. Wokeness has relied on the left’s cultural hegemony to achieve its social ends. Companies would impose diversity targets on their own initiative; universities and school boards would decolonize themselves; platforms would voluntarily remove harmful content; individuals would “do the work.”
Anti-wokeness apes some of the same tactics—by seeking to cancel the cancelers—but does so through state action. It is a counterrevolution from above, and it is now occurring at all levels of government, not just federal. “Radical leftist teachers’ unions have dominated classrooms for far too long, and we are taking them back,” Ryan Walters, the elected school superintendent of Oklahoma schools, wrote when he announced that every high school in the state would host a chapter of Turning Point USA, the activist organization that Kirk founded. (He resigned the next day to run a conservative education nonprofit.) Whenever power changes hands, a self-perpetuating cycle encourages stronger suppression of whoever is newly deemed an enemy of freedom. It is not hard to imagine, after a few more turns of the wheel, a permanently postliberal America. How did things get so bad?
Liberalism was once the dominant ideology of the two major political parties in America. Over the past decade, however, a pincer attack from both flanks has worn it down. On the left, acolytes of critical race theory believe that American law and capitalism are so saturated with white supremacy that full rights for the oppressed are unattainable without a radical moral reckoning. Others on the left believe that economic inequality has grown so large as to disable the fundamental equality of all citizens.
Some postliberal thinkers on the right, such as Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, have largely accepted the left’s economic critiques of inequality and globalization. They have argued for a conservatism based not on individualism but on using the state to promote the common good. But the real energy is in the Trumpian revolution, grounded not so much in political ideology as in a baser psychological instinct. Grievances have become the core of Republican politics—with the president’s personal grudges fusing with those of conservative activists against the meritocratic and globalist elite.
Grievance politics are the basic justification for the illiberal reprisals that Trump and his supporters are now pursuing. Most of their complaints begin with a kernel of truth. Elite universities did constrain academic freedom by obsessing over most oppressions except for anti-Semitism and by forcing aspiring faculty to write “diversity statements” that seemed awfully like declarations of allegiance to progressivism. Some decent journalists did lose their job amid the fervor for racial justice that swept through their industry in 2020 and 2021. In the weeks before the 2020 election, social-media companies did suppress stories about salacious material stored on Hunter Biden’s laptop, later shown to be credible.
But the original offenses have become exaggerated and distorted in many conservatives’ memory, and the remedies that Trump is now imposing are disproportionately punitive. Academic freedom is not restored by expelling immigrant students who write critically of Israel or by freezing research funding unless university presidents cede their authority to the federal government. Freedom of association is not restored when Vice President J. D. Vance explicitly names the nonprofits, such as the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, that he would like to have investigated. Rule of law isn’t restored by the president targeting his enemies and pardoning his allies.
Some influential conservatives do not deny the lack of justifiable principle; they revel in it. “I have to say, I do want President Trump to be the ‘dictator’ the Left thinks he is, and I want the right to be as devoted to locking up and silencing our violent political enemies as they pretend we are,” Laura Loomer, an adviser to the president, recently wrote on X.
A culture of self-censorship is destructive. But prescribing state ideology as a cure is like treating a migraine with a lobotomy. Many on the right today have made a disturbing break from their predecessors. Constitutional conservatives, the kinds who dominated the conservative legal movement, treated the Bill of Rights as sacrosanct—a bulwark against encroachment of the federal government on political freedom. Old grievances and political antagonism did not warrant exemptions. Reagan Republicans revered the founding of the country as a moment of enlightened genius that guaranteed fundamental rights to all Americans. Their reaction to the growth of the state was libertarian: to shrink it and return authority to citizens.
Trumpian Republicans depart from every stage of this analysis. Their concept of America is not a country defined by an enduring social contract, but a nation rooted in blood and soil. They see rights not as fundamental but as contingent on power: You have them only when your side controls the institutions that grant them. For that reason, the machinery of the state is not to be turned off but repurposed toward different ends. That is how you can be simultaneously victimized by state power and justified in wielding it against your enemies.
When power does return to the American left, what temptations will it face? Would court-packing, already an aim among some progressives, become a major priority for the Democratic Party? Would the Trump loyalists at the Department of Justice be replaced with different partisans, creating a dangerous spoils system? Would the innovations of the Trump administration—the intervention of the FCC on adjudicating acceptable content—be repaid in kind by directly regulating “misinformation” on right-wing networks? Would a Democratic president use expansive Trump-style declarations of emergency power to bypass Congress’s policy agenda? Would disfavored right-wing groups face concerted state harassment?
Polarization has led to extreme policy swings in ever more areas: on trade, immigration, the environment, now even vaccines. A more dangerous escalation, infringing the basic rights afforded to the ruling party’s opponents, is not hard to imagine. Future Democratic leaders may well be enraged populists, not institutionalists. The party does not know what it believes. It arguably has not known for a long time, which is why it was susceptible to hijacking by previously radical ideas such as abolishing police, pursuing racial equity instead of equality, and stopping immigration enforcement. Forbearance from reprisal and tolerance of harsh dissenting views would be the right course of action. But the temptation to finish off Trumpism by whatever means necessary might be too strong.
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