Trump’s war against wokeness has a long history

When Donald Trump took office for the second time he had a big agenda, although it’s never been entirely clear if he knew it. He wanted to enact his precious tariffs and get revenge on his perceived political enemies, but his commitment to anything else was always debatable. Certainly, at the time of his election, nobody knew they were actually voting for Elon Musk to gather a handful of young technology bros to rampage through every government agency and fire as many people as they could under spurious rationales. 

Employees at the Department of Government Efficiency were tasked with shutting down programs and even entire agencies to meet Musk’s pledge to save the country $2 trillion, a promise that was revised down to $1 trillion and later determined to have not even met the final goal of $150 billion. While the tech billionaire is long gone after a brief falling out with the president, the consequences of DOGE’s cuts are still being felt. 

Some lower courts ruled against DOGE in lawsuits brought by various parties, but the Supreme Court stepped in with their “rocket docket” reversing decades of normal procedure and allowing the administration to work its will with the agencies while the cases made their way through the system. By the time they get to the Court, there will likely be nothing left of them to restore.

The conservative majority could also have to decide whether to similarly reverse U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon’s May 7 ruling, which held that DOGE did not have the authority to cancel National Endowment for the Humanities grants. The judge found that DOGE violated the First Amendment and the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment, calling the case “a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination” for the method and criteria they used to cancel grants. 

According to depositions by two of the tech bros who did the work, their orders were to cut anything that could be considered as falling under diversity, equity and inclusion, or that might increase the debt. So they instructed ChatGPT to make those determinations — but they didn’t tell it how they defined the term.

The evidence showed that DOGE — actually ChatGPT — was making all the decisions about what to cut, and the staffers just gave the list to the acting head of the NEH, who dutifully followed their orders as all good little Trumpers do. McMahon pointed out that DOGE had exceeded its authority and ordered the government to reinstate the canceled grants. 

This sounds like a very modern problem; DEI, ChatGPT and DOGE are all terms that didn’t exist just a few years ago. But this is just the latest battle in the longer culture war that’s been going on since the 1980s. Only the acronyms and slogans have changed. 

What we now call “woke” was “PC” — political correctness — back in the day. DEI was “affirmative action” and “multiculturalism.” ChatGPT didn’t exist then, but we did have two big know-it-alls by the names of Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan who helped define all these terms for the right in ways that made it sound like Democrats were destroying the fabric of all Americans hold dear. 

The NEH, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, have been in the thick of it the whole time. The NEA was the subject of numerous controversies starting in the 1980s as conservatives, led by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., targeted its funding of art work such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photography and Andres Serrano’s photograph “Piss Christ,” which featured a plastic crucifix submerged in a jar of urine. A group of performance artists known as the “NEA Four” — Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck and Tim Miller — had their grants rescinded in the late 1980s and early 1990s over work that explored LGBTQ+ themes, a controversy that resulted in a new policy of only awarding grants to organizations instead of individuals. 

The NEH was also at the center of many culture-war controversies. Lynne Cheney, the wife of future Vice President Dick Cheney, led the organization from 1986 to 1993 and devoted her tenure to fighting changes to what she and her fellow conservatives believed were the proper academic standards. Adamant in her insistence that America’s students from kindergarten through university be immersed only in the Western canon, she advocated teaching about the greatness of America as seen through the stories of its traditional white patriots. 

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After she left her post at the NEH, Cheney continued her crusade. In 1994 she penned a famous op-ed in the Wall Street Journal called “The End of History,” attacking the National History Standards she had commissioned as head of the NEH as a “grim and gloomy” monument to political correctness. She claimed they were biased against such great Americans as Robert E. Lee while exalting marginal figures like Harriet Tubman, and obsessing over what she apparently considered relatively unimportant historical episodes such as the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism. Limbaugh took up the cause on his increasingly popular radio show, railing that America’s children were being indoctrinated in political correctness and portraying college campuses as cesspools of forced liberal conformity at the expense of conservative professors and students. 

Cheney’s husband and eldest daughter Liz, the former GOP congresswoman from Wyoming, are both famous Never Trumpers who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. While Lynne never made her preference known, the Cheney family has typically operated in lockstep, and one would presume that she also opposed Trump’s campaign. So the irony that the groundwork she helped lay in the 1980s and 1990s became a core tenet of the president’s grievances against Democrats is rich. And the fact that the Trump administration used it to dismantle the very institution she once led is thick.

One of the issues the president and his MAGA movement has embraced most fervently is the belief that Americans must revere the country’s history as one of unadulterated greatness and progress. Trump has bullied the Smithsonian into changing its exhibits, and the administration has directed what’s left of the Department of Education to cease all “woke” and “DEI” curricula — the courts have since ruled the latter action unconstitutional. To accompany this change, Trump is preparing to install a “Garden of Heroes” in Washington, D.C.’s West Potomac Park featuring statues of historical figures handpicked by himself. (He’s allowed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King to be among them, but I’m sure there will be a plaque claiming that King’s crowds were much smaller than Trump’s.)

In “anti-woke” Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ government has led the way in completely overhauling the state’s education curriculum to more accurately reflect this reactionary worldview. Books have been banned by the hundreds. New College of Florida, a liberal arts school, was taken over by right-wing forces; conservative faculty and staff were hired as the college’s board of trustees and president, a Republican activist, began the process of de-wokeifying the campus. The New York Times reported that the state has also created an alternative to the Advanced Placement History course that focuses “on the Protestant faith of the founders, argues that the U.S. Constitution is an antislavery document and recommends a textbook written explicitly to build patriotism.”

Considering the Cheney family’s break with the GOP over Donald Trump, one can’t help but wonder if Lynne Cheney might be the perfect example of the old cliché “be careful what you wish for.” The years she and many others spent railing against Americans coming to grips with their country’s past — whether it’s called “woke” or “PC” —  were instrumental in the transformation of the Republican Party into an authoritarian movement led by a man who reveres Robert E. Lee and thinks Harriet Tubman is overrated.

Where do you suppose he got such daft and dangerous ideas?