Religion & Liberty Online

Trump II, a New Majority, and the End of Identity Politics

How 45 became 47, and what it means for the future of our nation.

Read More…

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was undoubtably a referendum on the current political trajectory of the United States. He won both the popular vote, the first Republican since 2004 to do so, and a significant Electoral College majority, securing the largest electoral margin for a Republican since George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign.

Trump heads into a second, non-consecutive term buoyed by a new coalition of voters who saw him as more adept in handling many of their top issues, which included increasing border security, curbing inflation, and tackling the myriad foreign policy challenges, such as the war of attrition and continued aid to Ukraine, a spillover effect of the war in Gaza, and rising Chinese military and economic influence.

But a deeper dive into this year’s electoral realignment reveals that Americans were looking to reverse the country’s perceived social and cultural decay, a challenge represented vis-à-vis the extremes of identity politics and the “woke” agenda.

Wokeism, with its deep philosophical roots, is a grievance-based movement that seeks to shift the public’s social and political consciousness by addressing systemic injustices and oppression as seen through the prism of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. The result is that individual agency is subordinated to the collective and placed within the rigid framework of oppressor vs. victim hierarchies.

While by some estimates woke language and ideas in the popular discourse may have peaked around 2022, they featured substantially in this election cycle, as they were perceived by voters as being antithetical to the American spirit of merit, individual responsibility, and freedom of expression. In fact, one of the most successful political ads of this campaign cycle highlighted Kamala Harris’ support for gender-reassignment surgery and the broader controversy of transgender sports participation.

Given the confluence of these factors, political commentators have likened Donald Trump to Ronald Reagan, who coined the “Make America Great Again” slogan in his 1980 campaign. It might, however, be more apt to draw parallels between Trump’s 2024 campaign and Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential bid, another year when massive social and economic challenges paved the way for a dramatic reconfiguration of the political landscape.

By the end of the 1960s, the nation was reflecting on a decade marked by a growing disillusionment with the Vietnam War, waning economic influence, a generational shift in values expressed in countercultural movements and the sexual revolution, tense race relations, and several high-profile political assassinations. This domestic crisis was set against the backdrop of a world divided into rigid ideological spheres: one championing individualism, freedom, and prosperity; the other, totalitarianism, collectivism, and atheistic materialism.

A new generation of conservative public intellectuals seized the moment to highlight how the dominant institutions were shaping a new set of cultural norms and public discourse. William F. Buckley Jr., in his seminal work God and Man at Yale, offered prescient insights into these shifting narratives about culture and individualism, arguing that the university was promoting secularism and collectivism over traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and free-market capitalism. Nixon, building on this burgeoning conservative alternative, adapted religious and moral rhetoric and promised “law and order,” all the while harnessing the enthusiasm of groups like Buckley’s Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) to build a “new right.”

The social challenges of the ’60s and the prospects of forming a new conservative conscious are not dissimilar from today’s world. Trump has created a new coalition of voters in part by his populist overtures and by tapping into economic anxiety but also by posturing as the candidate uniquely qualified to reverse the loss of traditional values and the erosion of national identity, and in correcting the overreach of “political correctness.”

But Trump’s campaign also eschewed traditional, legacy media (which have long held a monopoly on information and acted as a filter for the prevailing ideas coming out of the dominant academic institutions), opting for more dynamic modes of mass communication via social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. This was perhaps most evident in his decision to go on the Joe Rogan Experience for a three-hour, unscripted interview.

These pivots in campaign strategy and voter outreach yielded an improved electoral performance, enabling Trump to build upon his 2016 and 2020 margins with nearly every demographic, which included a massive swing among young voters, especially young men, who are also showing greater religiosity. This shift among youth could perhaps be understood as a rejection of “cancel culture,” where the fear of social stigmatization of espousing erroneous views—ideas that depart from tacitly accepted dogmas—leads to self-censorship. The free exchange of ideas is inevitably discouraged as it promotes the repetition of socially engineered mantras rather than nuanced critical thought.

The needle, however, is moving not only with respect to the prevailing cultural attitudes but also in concrete terms. Trump and many of his top allies have pushed against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. Individuals such as the incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk, who has been outspoken in calling DEI policies “discriminatory,” will no doubt help accelerate the administration’s plan to ban these initiatives in federal agencies and public universities.

Musk, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, will give greater clout to this cause via his position in the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory commission. In a way, the president-elect is giving institutional support to a shift in policy that is already in motion. Recently, several companies—including John Deere, Harley-Davidson, and Ford—have scaled back or restructured their DEI initiatives. This trend parallels the broader one measured by The Economist where woke language and opinions are also in decline.

Recentering merit and opportunity, as opposed to equality of outcome, in governmental institutions and cultural and intellectual spaces is neither an insular vision nor a partisan issue but one of fundamental importance for the long-term health of the American experiment. After all, merit-based achievement and equal opportunity are among the foundational principles—along with individual rights, creativity, innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, and the free-exchange of ideas—that have sustained the growth of the country, setting it apart from the rest of the world as an enduring democratic model of prosperity.

This aspiration, which was in part encapsulated in the mantra “Make America Great Again,” is hardwired into the American psyche. And the success or failure of this project will have grave implications not only for the country but for the rest of the world, as the United States continues to be, for now, a hegemonic power, shaping the global order in its image.

Matthew Santucci

Matthew Santucci is public relations manager with Istituto Acton in Rome. A native of Connecticut, Matthew has a B.A. from Fordham University and an M.A. in international relations from Luiss Guido Carli in Rome.