California Governor Gavin Newsom doesn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The presumptive 2028 presidential candidate knows that it’s blowing against wokeness. As recently as November, Newsom called a special session of the state legislature to “Trump-proof” California laws and defend “California values” against the incoming administration on matters of immigration, abortion, and LGBT rights. Yet on Thursday, in the very first episode of his new podcast “This is Gavin Newsom,” the governor rejected usage of the word “Latinx,” proudly insisted that his state law enforcement officials “coordinate with ICE on … deportation,” called efforts to defund the police “lunacy,” agreed that the Republican Party’s “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” campaign ad was “devastating” for Democrats, referred to transgender Americans as “these poor people” wracked by “anxiety and depression,” and proclaimed biological male athletes competing in girls sports to be “deeply unfair.”
“Politics and culture create one another.”
Newsom is hardly the only figure on the cultural left exhibiting buyer’s remorse on wokeness. Not so very long ago, Amazon was not simply among the largest corporations in the world. It was also among the wokest. In 2017, the company earned its first perfect score from the LGBT rights organization Human Rights Campaign, which granted founder and CEO Jeff Bezos the organization’s “Equality Award.” After George Floyd’s death in 2020, Amazon was among the first to pledge millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter and similar organizations to counteract the “inequitable and brutal treatment of Black and African Americans.” In 2021, the company’s vice president of public policy enjoined the US Congress to pass the Equality Act while Amazon Studios announced a new “inclusion policy” and “inclusion playbook” mandating quotas for the representation of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ and disabled persons, for both content and creators. In 2022, the parent company announced generous funding of employee and dependent travel to procure out-of-state abortions. Throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s, Amazon either refused to sell or shadow-banned multiple books it perceived as critical of transgenderism.
Amazon remains one of the largest corporations in the world, but over the past year it has become noticeably less woke. In September 2024, Amazon Studios scrubbed the inclusion playbook from its website. In December, the parent company told employees it was “winding down” certain undefined DEI initiatives. In February 2025, careful observers noted that “inclusion and diversity” no longer appear as stated workforce goals in Amazon’s annual report.
Amazon is hardly alone. Even before Donald Trump’s victory in November, old-economy stalwarts including Ford, Toyota, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, and Molson Coors were pressured by conservative activists into backtracking on DEI. Boeing eliminated its entire global DEI department. Since the election, Meta, Google, Disney, Walmart, Goldman Sachs, Accenture, and McDonald’s have all announced limited rollbacks of their DEI programs. JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock pulled out of climate change organizations. At least a dozen major corporations have stopped participating in Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.
From the beginnings of the Great Awokening in the early 2010s through the middle of Joe Biden’s presidential term, progressive ideological influence was on a seemingly unstoppable ascent. The reelection of Donald Trump was a rupture in that advance, a shift so great that it casts the legacy of all progressive politics since Barack Obama’s presidency into doubt. But the seeds of Trumpist vengeance were sown long before Nov. 6.
America’s Thermidorian Reaction was preceded by two years of concerted political and economic action led by a small number of key state and corporate actors. None were more important than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and X Chairman Elon Musk. Each attacked wokeness not simply as an ideology but as an institution. They struck at the professional class, the social locus of wokeness, and its central institution, the university. They also attacked woke capital and the professional class in the private sector. Trump’s current shock-and-awe campaign against the American professional class broadly, targeting the federal bureaucracy, higher education at the national scale, and the NGO sector, was made possible by these predecessors.
The American right’s attack on institutions makes the current political moment about far more than vibes. Cultural conservatives have long been under the spell of Andrew Breitbart and his famous slogan “politics is downstream from culture.” This claim has always been false. Politics and culture create one another; neither is “downstream” or “upstream” from the other. Both are about institutions, which are not only the very stuff of social life but the vectors through which social life changes. It is far too early to say whether the right will make its own long march through the institutions of American society as the progressive left did over the past 50 years. But MAGA’s newfound focus on institutions is the real reason we should all take its efforts seriously.
The brand of progressivism known as wokeness—a mélange of identity claims, cultural libertarianism, therapeutic values, anti-racism, and victimhood culture—is an ideology of the American professional class, born of the university, the central institution that produces and nurtures that class. Wokeness lodged itself everywhere professionals can be found as a group: medicine; law; science; the NGO sector; K-12 education; state bureaucracies. It also burrowed into corporations via “creative professionals” in tech, media, publishing, and entertainment, as well as through human resources, the private sector’s version of the helping professions.
“DeSantis’s example shouldn’t be forgotten.”
To dislodge woke ideology and practices requires dislodging professionals and the positions and institutions they control. This demands state power. Prior to Trump’s second inauguration, nowhere was such an effort more sustained and more consequential than in Florida. And no figure was more important to Florida’s efforts than Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Florida began with public elementary education. Being under the financial and legal control of state and local government, it was a relatively soft target. With an overwhelmingly professional-class labor force—two-thirds of all US public K-12 school employees are teachers and librarians—it was also an attractive target. In March 2022, DeSantis signed the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, dubbed by the media as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. This law bans “classroom instruction” regarding sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-3 (later expanded by the state Board of Education to all grades, excepting classes specifically on health and reproduction). Even before the bill made it out of conference, national professional class organizations and the country’s NGO sector began rallying against it. Organized by Human Rights Campaign, so too did hundreds of the country’s largest corporations. President Biden gave moral support to the opponents and his administration pledged to “monitor” the law’s implementation for signs of constitutional violation. Yet despite the tremendous political pressure arrayed against him, DeSantis defended the bill vigorously, wearing his opponents’ condemnation “like a badge of honor.”
This bill, in turn, flushed out into the open the Florida state government’s second target. The Walt Disney Company, the state’s top employer, came under siege from its own employees and was forced to publicly oppose the legislation. The pattern that had been established over the past decade in states from Arizona to Arkansas to North Carolina was that DeSantis would now surrender to the demands of his state’s largest and most powerful corporation. Instead, he took the fight directly to Disney. Sensing that CEO Bob Chapek was embattled, DeSantis spearheaded an especially aggressive repeal of Disney’s de facto county governmental authority over its 39-square-mile resort in Orlando. He extended the legislature’s special session specifically so it could do so. For the post-Ronald Reagan Republican Party to take up such a belligerent stance toward business was simply unheard of. In the end, DeSantis won the fight. Just six weeks after Chapek announced Disney’s opposition to the parental rights bill, the Florida legislature repealed the special law that had governed the state’s relationship with the company for 55 years.
The Florida state legislature pursued other backlash legislation. In 2022, it also passed the Stop WOKE Act, seeking to ban critical race theory “training” from public schools and, more ambitiously, the state’s private corporations. While the law was ultimately found unconstitutional, it set the aggressive tone DeSantis wanted. In 2023 the state legislature created a new governance structure for Disney headed by a five-member board appointed by the Governor. DeSantis crowed at the time, “The corporate kingdom finally comes to an end. There’s a new sheriff in town.” The state’s 2023 ban on “gender-affirming care” for minors was one of many passed that year, but Florida stood out for its stiff penalties for doctors performing banned procedures on children—threatening third-degree felony prosecution—and its vigorous legal defense in federal court.
DeSantis and the state legislature next turned their firepower against professionals in higher education. In 2023 the legislature demanded review of the state university system’s general-education requirements, prompting its Board of Governors to reduce the number of courses allowed to satisfy such requirements by 75 percent. In 2024 the same board struck all courses in sociology off the gen-ed list; the state’s Commissioner of Education justified the move by saying: “Sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists.”
DeSantis’s most significant move, however, was the orchestration of what can best be described as a hostile takeover of New College of Florida. The small public liberal-arts college in Sarasota had long embraced “alternative pedagogies” such as individualized curricula and written evaluations in lieu of grades. It also attracted an especially progressive faculty and student body, even for higher education. These features, combined with the school’s shrinking student body, made it an attractive target in DeSantis’s widening campaign against wokeness. In January 2023, he created a new majority within the College’s Board of Trustees. That majority then set about firing the president and the chief diversity officer, eliminating the DEI office, and forcing out the provost—all within a semester. DeSantis’s board also went on a hiring spree to replace more than one-third of the faculty, many of whom resigned in the wake of the school’s transformation. The student body likewise began a makeover, turning from quirky alternative toward “a Hillsdale [College] of the South.” That included the creation of an athletics department and the admission of larger numbers of new student-athletes, who more than replaced the one-quarter of students who left the school after the takeover. Over the objections of small-government Republicans, DeSantis won spending commitments from the legislature that put New College’s short-term cost per student at nine times the state university system average.
As the failure of Florida’s Stop WOKE Act showed, corporate wokeness remained out of reach of direct state power. DeSantis was forced to settle for a victory in the battle for public opinion. He easily won re-election in 2022, and his efforts certainly contributed to Disney firing its CEO two weeks later as well as backtracking on its most extreme DEI commitments. But a different hostile takeover was instrumental in turning back wokeness in its private-sector stronghold.
In October 2022, Elon Musk completed his purchase of the social media platform Twitter. Having pioneered the suppression of wokeness within his workforce at Tesla, Musk took to the much larger and more difficult project at his new company with vigor. Within hours of closing the deal, he fired the CEO, the CFO, the company’s top legal and policy executive, and its general counsel. Whereas Disney’s Chapek was desperate to ingratiate himself to his workforce, Musk was combative. While Chapek respected the legitimacy of corporate affinity groups, Musk eliminated them. When the Disney workforce staged walkouts, Chapek sought dialogue; Musk fired his rebellious employees. In fact, he proceeded to fire or force out more than three-quarters of the Twitter workforce in only a few months on the grounds that “a lot of people [were] doing things that didn’t seem to have a lot of value.” Former Twitter employees eagerly predicted a platform collapse as a result, but it kept functioning.
Media coverage of the purge at Twitter emphasized its apparent return to old-style capital-labor conflict. But the labor force under duress was not working-class but professional-class. Musk’s management style clearly endeared him to Donald Trump, which helped bring Musk all the way to the White House. Through the Department of Government Efficiency, he is applying the Twitter/X model to the entire federal government: slash and burn personnel techniques; demands of employees to justify their positions; firings by email. USAID, the government agency at the center of a globe-spanning network of NGOs, has felt the full force of these efforts.
DeSantis’s example shouldn’t be forgotten, however. One day after his inauguration, Trump canceled all DEI training and service contracts with the federal government, revoked three Obama-era executive actions related to DEI, warned the higher education sector of its anti-DEI intentions, and instructed the attorney general to craft policies to “deter” private corporations from DEI work. In February the Department of Education made good on Trump’s promise, releasing its own “Dear Colleague” letter warning that it “will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this nation’s educational institutions.” The Trump administration clearly intends to ban DEI programs and policies throughout the entire national education system, from preschool through higher ed. Simply renaming DEI offices as offices of “opportunity” or using non-racial information as a proxy for race are clearly proscribed. Measures to “assess compliance” will begin almost immediately.
In 2003, the United States military carried out a textbook shock and awe campaign against Iraq. In a mere five weeks American forces had defeated the Iraqi military, overthrown the Iraqi government, and turned the country into an American protectorate. Yet eight years later, the US military departed Iraq having accomplished little of lasting value through a war most observers came to believe the United States ultimately lost.
“Depending on the definition of victory, it may not be winnable at all.”
The Trump administration is currently basking in the initial glow of its own shock and awe campaign against the professional class, led by chainsaw-wielding small-government libertarians like Musk and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. But this campaign cannot be won in a matter of weeks or even months. Depending on the definition of victory, it may not be winnable at all.
No occupational group has grown faster since World War II than have professionals. They now constitute more than a quarter of all jobs in the United States and around one-third of all households have a professional class worker in them. Sheer numbers alone mean political power, and professionals use it to dominate the Democratic Party. The vibe shift associated with Trump’s election has caused many of his supporters to forget that Trump won less than half the popular vote in 2024, and that Republicans currently hold just 218 seats in the House of Representatives, the slimmest majority that is mathematically possible. The professional class and its political vehicle are not defeated.
Simply reforming the American professional class is a daunting task. It has had a left-liberal orientation for half a century, and wokeness, the contemporary expression of left-wing social justice ideology, is far more than a passing intellectual fad or a subaltern political faith. On the contrary, it is tied to this class’s deep cultural commitments. The fundamental social justification for the professions is effective public service. Society is asked to subsidize professional services, to grant professional organizations autonomy and self-government, and to provide professionals higher-than-average security of employment and income due to the centrality of the professions—from medicine to science to education to social services—in generating social benefits for all. Social service is baked into the cake of the professional class. Sheer administrative force cannot—and indeed, should not—destroy that.
The American corporate sector embraced its own version of wokeness for its own ends, rooted in its own ideology. From a managerial perspective, a diversity of identities within a labor force or a consumer base is both a social fact and a cultural, economic, and political project. The American managerial class believes in its ability to enhance efficiency, creativity, and productivity—and ultimately profitability—by taking social disorder (such as racial inequality, social decay, environmental crisis) and squandered human capital (due to discrimination, unequal opportunity) and transforming them into both individual and social benefit through managerial technique. This is the basis of the significant “leftward shift” within the American managerial class over the past generation. It helps explain the American management consulting industry’s enthusiasm for both DEI and ESG investing, as well as its success in selling them. While corporate wokeness is certainly retreating, firms will not wholly abandon their ideological commitments to diversity and stakeholder capitalism. They persisted through the Reagan administration’s assault on affirmative action in the 1980s and will do the same today. Management’s own self-conception and political legitimacy depend on it.
The example of New College of Florida shows that the American right can take a constructive attitude toward professional-class institutions. However, that attitude needs to be held by a strong leader willing to resist the destructive libertarian tendencies that dominate conservative social circles. Robert Conquest’s famous Second Law states that “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.” This should cause the right to be simultaneously prudent and brazen in relation to the professional class: prudent in paring back the power of woke institutions; brazen in reconstructing or building an inevitably small number of counter-institutions that will be asked to punch far above their weight. Chainsaws are meant for cutting things down. If the American right fails to move beyond them, it will have failed in its historic opportunity to build.