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Progressive ideas around race, gender, and immigration are under scrutiny by both the Republican-controlled federal government and Democrats chastened by the loss of the 2024 election. In this modern context, it’s easy to forget how persuasive these ideas once were. In 1995, just 25 percent of Democrats identified as liberal, while 46 called themselves moderate. Twenty years later, a sea change in public opinion had happened: In 2015, 45 percent of Democrats called themselves liberals.

Two political scientists and a researcher found that from 2011 to 2020 the attitudes of Democrats and independents became notably more liberal on racial inequality and immigration. But even looking after the period of anti-“woke” backlash that has characterized much of the past few years, attitudes among all Americans (including Republicans) are noticeably more liberal than they were in 2011, according to their research.

That’s not to say that every part of what has been called “wokeness” was popular or even persuasive to the most liberal of poll respondents. But I think in the next few months and years, we’ll come to see the anti-woke glee that has permeated through the first month of the Trump administration to be out of step with public opinion.

Today’s episode is a conversation I had last August with The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg about a column she wrote, “Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It.” The words she wrote then ring truer even now:

“There are aspects of the New Progressivism—its clunky neologisms and disdain for free speech—that I’ll be glad to see go. But however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: A few weeks ago, Darren Beattie was appointed to a senior role at the State Department—acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.

Beattie is a known quantity. He was fired by the last Trump administration after it came out that he’d attended and spoken at a conference with white nationalists.

But this experience doesn’t seem to have rattled him, in the following years he made many controversial remarks on twitter including that “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

Just watching the first few weeks of the new President’s term indicates that curbing wokeness and cultural liberalism is top of mind for the administration. It’s remarkable to look back on polling that shows that the economy, not the war on wokeness, was the top issue for Trump voters.

But from directing removal of trans Americans in the military to rolling back DEI initiatives throughout the government, the Trump administration has made anti-wokeness a core focus.

[Music]

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at the Atlantic and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. These past few weeks have had me thinking back to a conversation I had with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg last year about whether Americans would miss wokeness when it was gone.

No one, including myself, will defend every part of a movement’s form. There were many ridiculous DEI trainings, offensive instances of language policing, and stupid and counterproductive overreactions. But, as Goldberg wrote last year: “however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities.”

I’m excited to revisit this episode with you all today.

Michelle, welcome to the show.

Michelle Goldberg: Thanks for having me.

Demsas: I read an article you wrote a few months ago, and it was called, “Wokeness is Dying. We Might Miss It.” And it’s been something I’ve been reflecting on myself because I think that there’s a conventional wisdom that’s been built up in traditional media—and then just a lot of our public discourse—that the backlash of the progressive tilt of the 2010s is a good thing, and that we’re seeing a good correction of a time period that went too far. And I thought that your article was a really interesting take on that idea.

But before we get into all that, I wanted to ground us in what we’re even talking about. When we talk about wokeness, what are we talking about when you use that term?

Goldberg: Well, it’s a hard term to define. I actually rarely use it except in quote marks because it’s one of those terms that was—obviously started out in Black vernacular and then was appropriated by people who are really hostile to it.

Basically, any time someone uses woke, you assume that they’re using it as an insult. Very few people actually identify their own politics that way. But how I often describe it, even if it’s a little clunky, is like a style of social-justice politics that is extremely focused on changing the world by changing the way we talk about the world.

Demsas: It’s funny because as I was preparing for this episode, I was just looking back at before the 2010s, and it feels like we had a version of this before then. People would complain about political correctness all the time. And I wonder how you distinguish the two eras. Is this just a piece that has always been in our politics—it just changes forms and maybe the specific issues it cares about?

Or is it actually something completely separate and different?

Goldberg: No. I think it’s basically a replay of the political correctness and the political-correctness backlash of the 1990s, which also came about at a time when you were seeing a lot more ethnic-studies, women’s-studies, area-studies programs in universities; some academic language starting to filter out into everyday life, a lot of people feeling really annoyed and alienated by that; and then a right-wing backlash, which was out of proportion and was so much more damaging to progressive politics than any gains that they might have made through the evolution and language that people were pushing at the time.

Demsas: So when you chart the beginning of this—I think it’s hard because it’s fuzzy. I was looking back to see when people really started talking about this. Matt Yglesias has this piece in 2019 in Vox where he coined the term the Great Awokening, and he charts it then as beginning with the 2014 protests in Ferguson after Michael Brown was shot by a police officer. He looks at the increase that you see in polls in concern for racial inequality and discrimination and the simultaneous divergence of the Democratic Party, where you see racially conservative Democrats leave the party.

And his story is very focused on race and immigration there. I think there are other people who would go even earlier, and then others who think it really takes off with Hillary Clinton. What time period are you really thinking about?

Goldberg: It’s interesting that Matt Yglesias says that. I felt that was also maybe the year that this style of politics became really dominant in certain circles, if not in the culture at large. And I wouldn’t just limit it to the debate about race and policing, because I think some of it comes out of Tumblr culture and just the perverse incentives of social media, the perverse incentives of left-wing politics.

I wrote a piece in 2014 for The Nation, where I was a writer at the time, called, “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars.” And it wasn’t about quote, unquote, “wokeness.” I don’t remember if people were actually using that word at the time. But it was about this really destructive style of competitive self-righteousness. And one of the texts that helped me make sense of what was going on was an essay by a feminist writer named Jo Freeman from the ’70s called, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” that was about how—when you have ostensibly horizontal, leaderless organizations—people do, in fact, fight for power and leaders emerge, but they do it through passive-aggressive and emotionally manipulative means. And so, this has always been an issue on the left; it’s just that social media supercharged it.

Demsas: Yeah. I’ve been thinking about how much of this is a story about technology, right? Social media, as you say—to unpack a bit, there’s obviously an incentive to move to the extremes. People often only think about this in terms of talking about politics, in terms of, Oh, people are saying radical things.

But if you scroll through TikTok or anything—and I’m sure you’ve seen this stuff, too—you see pretty shocking content in general: people doing weird things with food, really bizarre things with different toys and things in order to just get the viewer confused and really fixated. (Laughs.)

Goldberg: (Laughs.) Right. Social media does two things: On the one hand, it just incentivizes extremism because you need to catch people’s attention. And extremism can also serve as a form of novelty. But it also—and I’ve written about this, as well—there used to be this idea that the problem with social media was that it kept people siloed in quote, unquote, “filter bubbles,” and I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the problem is that it exposes you to some of the most obnoxious examples on the other side, so it ends up furthering this negative polarization.

Demsas: Let’s turn to the piece that you wrote. You titled it, “Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It.” Why is wokeness dying, and why do you miss it?

Goldberg: Obviously, I don’t miss all of it. As I write in the piece, there was tons of it that I have always found—I’m kind of a cranky Gen-X person. I didn’t like these clunky neologisms. I find some of the language, like the people-first language—I’m trying to think of even—

Demsas: Like saying person without housing, or saying unhoused instead of homeless?

Goldberg: Right. I do understand some of it. And that’s the problem, that all of this you can understand in certain instincts. I do understand that there’s certain language that can be really stigmatizing, and that there’s reason for language to evolve. I’m watching—my kids are super into 30 Rock right now, and they’re constantly saying things on 30 Rock that my kids are like, Oh, my God. You can’t say that!

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Goldberg: And that show—I don’t remember at the time feeling particularly provocative. And so the natural evolution of language is often a good thing. The forced evolution of language in a way that feels like it comes down from some really sanctimonious, prissy commissar is not a good thing. Although I just said that, we have to remember that there actually was no commissar.

People, I think—in reaction to stuff that really annoyed them, the kind of people who made their identity around opposition to wokeness—they almost had to inflate its danger to match the scale of their annoyance. Rather than something that, like, really bugged them or really seemed obnoxious, it had to be totalitarian. It had to be something that was remaking all of the systems of our society, which I just don’t think was ever really true.

But anyway, there was this very laudable attempt to correct systemic injustices in our society, systemic injustices that were really thrown into high relief for a lot of people by the election of Donald Trump. And one of the reasons I don’t like this approach to politics is that changing the way you talk about things is one of the easiest things to do, as opposed to making concrete, material change.

But nevertheless, it’s a step. It was a good thing that people felt less comfortable using certain kind of slurs. Let me put it this way: It was a good thing that when J. D. Vance was writing to one of his left-wing classmates, who I believe he had described as a lesbian, but they were trans, and wrote (these emails have now leaked) this sensitive email that, you know, I love you. I’m sorry if I misgendered you. I hope you know it was coming from a place of respect—I think it was good that conservative men, or all sorts of people, felt the need to be a little bit more thoughtful and sensitive.

Obviously, there was plenty of places where it veered into self-parody, and those places were exaggerated and amplified by a social-media panic, which has now led to a really ugly right-wing backlash.

Demsas: The definition you gave for wokeness, too—it really speaks to the idea that it’s about language and discourse policing in a way. And I wonder—because it seems almost like a definition that has been won by the opponents of it, right? Because I would imagine the people in the 2010s who are really parts of these movements—whether they’re part of #MeToo movement or they’re part of racial-justice movements—there were very specific policy ideas and things that they were upset about.

And many of them were very popular. Police brutality becomes—even amongst independents and, in some polls, even with Republicans, you see support for measures that would rein back police. Of course, the prosecution of people like Harvey Weinstein was very popular. And then, of course, something like abortion, which is seen as now the best issue for Democrats, is something that’s obviously an issue about women’s rights and feminism.

But there’s a way in which we’ve bifurcated these two things that I’m not really sure how to think about. Because, at one point, I totally agree with you: There is clearly an increased focus on what types of things people are saying, but that seems it was at least intended by some people to be a way to get people on board with a policy agenda.

But those two things seem difficult to also separate. If you’re looking for who your allies are and you’re like, Who’s misgendering trans people? That tells you who’s part of your political movement. And I wonder how you think about how we’ve bifurcated the policy goals of these movements from the discourse policing, and were those two things really necessary to be together?

Goldberg: It’s a complicated question. But I would agree with you that the intention of a lot of people was to make real-world change, not just to change the way people talk about things. Do you remember, at a certain point on the internet, there was this taboo against quote, unquote, “tone policing?”

Demsas: Yeah.

Goldberg: Which meant, in turn, that it was almost impossible for the left to either make or listen to any kind of critique of its rhetoric or the way it approached people who might be partially on board but not fully on board. And it ended up really alienating a lot of people outright and then creating this rumbling, subterranean resentment that was then able to be harnessed by really sinister forces. And I think it’s easy to say, Well, if you were attracted to fascism because you don’t like being told what to say or because you’re angry about some new terminology, then that’s on you. And that shows that you always had these inclinations.

But people have lots of different inclinations. And it’s the job of a social movement to, I think, meet people where they are and draw out the parts of them that you want to encourage.

Demsas: Well, it seems in your piece that you’re skeptical about the framing that wokeness has won in any way. And I wonder why you think that, because, from my perspective, I mean, it’s obviously hard. People can point to different areas in which different movements have been successful or not.

But when you look at attitudes amongst the general public on many progressive issues, they’ve shifted dramatically to the left. And, of course, a lot of that is being driven from people moving really far left within the Democratic Party. But even independents on these issues—they’ve moved people left on these things.

And I think there’s also material gains that have happened. People don’t talk about these a lot, but in the year after the murder of George Floyd, for instance, half of U.S. states passed legislation in at least one of the following categories: use of force; duty for officers to intervene, report, or render medical aid in instances of police misconduct; or policies relating to law-enforcement misconduct reporting.

Goldberg: Well, can I just say—I don’t think we should tar all. Again, I feel like this category of wokeness is so unstable and amorphous. But I definitely would not want to put criminal-justice reform under that auspice, right? When I’m saying that I think this style of politics is dead, I certainly don’t mean all left-wing politics, and I don’t mean all criminal-justice reform.

What’s dead is—not only is the Democratic Party trying to memory-hole calls to defund the police, but there was a social pressure to get on board with that language that is completely gone. And so I’m talking about something a little bit more hard to pin down, but something that a lot of people felt and responded to.

The reason I say it’s dead—and I wrote this piece in response to a book by Nellie Bowles called the Morning After the Revolution. It was sort of satirical, but it was also so exaggerated that it was kind of ridiculous. Like at one point she says, I heard people saying that roads were racist. And that didn’t come from some asshole teenager; that came from Robert Caro writing about Robert Moses. But I think that, in part, just to either justify her project or to inflate its importance, she said, This movement hasn’t calmed down because it lost; it’s calmed down because it won.

And I think that for some people that means they have to go to various HR workshops or whatever. But let’s just look at the evidence: You see company after company dismantling their DEI initiatives, states banning DEI in colleges. One of the examples I gave in that column was a school named after a Confederate general that had changed its name and then decided to change it back.

Target, for example, responding to these right-wing backlashes, taking Pride merchandise out of a lot of its stores—there was a sense, at one point, that corporate America wanted to ride the social-justice train. And it might have been hypocritical, but it also suggested that they saw these views as ascendant and something that they wanted to latch onto for their own purposes. I don’t think they see things like that anymore.

[Music]

Demsas: All right. We’re going to take a quick break. More with Michelle when we get back.

[Break]

Demsas: I just want to run my theory for you why there was such a focus on discourse policing and on language versus these policies. I think that often—and I found that it felt a little disingenuous sometimes—you’d ask people, Hey, it seems like your organization’s really focused on these language things. Why are you policing whether someone says they’re Latino or Latinx, or something like that. And they would say, Well, we’re actually focused on all of these issues that impact people on the material level. And it’s like, Yeah, but what are you tweeting about? What is it that you’re actually talking about in public constantly? What is your driving ethos?

And so, when I see this, I don’t think of it as disingenuous. I think a lot of people have read this as sort of a disingenuous thing, that people don’t actually care about changing the material reality of people that they’re working for. But I think it’s actually just that the structures of movement organizations have changed so dramatically, such that movement building is now both really easy and really hard.

Any individual person can put up a flyer or an Instagram graphic and say, Hey, we’re gonna do a protest here. And that doesn’t require an organizational capacity to really get someone out and be a part of a group. And that means that people are just showing up for something—or not showing up for something—and it’s completely unrelated to whether they’re being drawn into a broader group.

In the past, you had an NAACP that could speak credibly and say, We actually have organized the groups and the individuals who care a lot about racial justice in this country. And if you don’t vote X or Y way on a bill, that means that we’re going to turn up and we’re going to protest you. But now they can’t credibly say, No one will protest you if you do X or Y, because anyone can do it. And in many ways, that’s great.

Goldberg: Did you read this book—a great book by my colleague Zeynep Tufekci—called, Twitter and Tear Gas?

Demsas: I have not, but I’ve heard it’s a great book.

Goldberg: That’s what the book is about.

Demsas: Can you tell us about it?

Goldberg: So the book—I mean, she could obviously speak to it better than I could, but the book is basically about how before social media, your ability to muster a large protest was an outward sign of your organizational capacity, right?

It meant that you had members. It meant that you had people working on all the stuff that it takes to get people out, and that you were building relationships. And you also had to build an internal structure just in order to get this stuff done, and that structure would be there after the march was over.

Now you have these protests that come together very quickly and virally. But there’s nothing to buttress them. And then the issues that I mentioned earlier, with “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” come up. Because, especially in left-wing spaces, there’s often an aversion to hierarchy, which makes sense to a point, but you need some lines of organization in order to keep something going. When you don’t have that, you do still have people emerge as leaders, but the way that they emerge as leaders is either about cultivating celebrity or shivving other people for not being radical or committed enough.

Demsas: Yeah. I think the horizontal nature of a lot of social movements now, it leads to the point where it becomes actually quite difficult to be a credible partner to or credible bargaining-table member with politicians. Because if they say, We’ll do what you’re asking us, but that means you have to mobilize your people in support of it, and if you can’t credibly do that, then it becomes politically disadvantageous for any politician to work with you.

And that doesn’t mean I agree with that. I think they should just do what they think is right. But at the same time, what ends up happening then is the places where you can see a lot of pressure is just around virality and around these issues where you don’t actually need to work through the formal systems of political power or electoral power. You can work discursively.

Goldberg: I also should say: Somebody who’s deep into progressive organizing once told me that they saw this also as just a form of work avoidance. And maybe people don’t mean this, but it’s just the path of least resistance. The easiest thing to do is to complain about the word somebody is using.

Demsas: But the most cynical argument that I think has been advanced by, especially, a lot of people who are on the right or in the center is that a lot of the movement on liberalization on these views has come from white Democrats, a lot of whom are materially advantaged already. So you have, for instance, people who are maybe homeowners in, or live in, really high cost-of-living cities, and they make a lot of money. And maybe they don’t want to see material changes happen, because that would actually affect their lives.

For instance, I do a lot of reporting on the housing crisis. And it’s clear that a lot of people who consider themselves progressives, who fight for a lot of these causes and seem very genuine and caring about that sort of thing, often will revolt if you say, I think that you should allow for affordable housing to exist in your community.

And I think that there’s some people who take that dynamic and attribute it largely and say, Yeah, the reason they’re focusing on whether you’re saying the right words is because they don’t want to focus on the sorts of material changes that would require something actually being taken from them.

Goldberg: I don’t think it’s that intentional. I find it very hard to imagine that somebody is saying, I don’t want zoning reform in my suburban neighborhood, so I’m going to distract people with a fight over whether it’s ableist to say that we’re standing up for ourselves. I just don’t think that’s how people work.

I do think that people who both went to elite colleges, where these concepts are really prevalent, and are highly verbal and work in fields where communication is a central part of the work they do—it’s not that surprising that they default to questions of communication when they’re involved in politics. And so I think that people have blind spots.

But, again, I think the right-wing version of this is often that it’s a conspiracy to deflect from real challenges to the material privilege of rich, white liberals. And I don’t think it’s a conspiracy.

Demsas: Yeah. I think your previous frame is more likely correct—that it is more a path-of-least-resistance argument. But that also, I think, still implicates people in this, Why is it the path of least resistance for you not to want to allow people who make less money than you to live in your neighborhood? Why is that so difficult to mobilize people around? And maybe it’s not intentional, but that is just a harder thing to do.

And so you see organizers at the local level—they’re often like, Well, we can get people to sign onto an agreement to get the city to raise a Pride flag, but we can’t get people to change the school-boundary lines near them to make it more inclusive to lower-income kids where they go to school. So there is a reason why I think progressive activists get pushed in a direction. And I do think that there’s probably some truth to the idea that the material changes would be much less politically popular.

But I want to turn a little bit because a lot of your writing is about feminism that I’ve followed for years now. And you wrote an article called, “The Future Isn’t Female Anymore,” and that’s very much in line with what we’re talking about today, so I’m hoping you talk a little bit about that piece. In it, you cite a poll from the Southern Poverty Law Center that asks respondents whether they agree that “feminism has done more harm than good.” And you write that while only four percent of Democratic men over 50 thought feminism was harmful, 46 percent of Democratic men under 50 did. And nearly a quarter of Democratic women under 50 agreed that feminism has done more harm than good.

And so you see this split here, where you have older Democrats still towing the familiar line that feminism is, of course, on net, beneficial, and then younger folks increasingly feel that their feminism has done more harm than good.

And that’s among Democrats. What’s happening there, and why is this space really polarizing people?

Goldberg: I don’t think it’s younger folks. I mean, yeah, there is a section of women, but, in general, I think it’s younger men. I remember when I quoted that poll, a lot of people were suspicious of it, and you can always have one poll that’s an outlier, but there’s been a few polls since then that show that young men, specifically, are moving to the right. And there’s a growing political chasm between young women and young men that was really showing up a lot in the polling around the upcoming election. And I also just think there was a broader backlash.

It’ll be interesting because we’re at a different inflection point now. When I wrote that, there was a backlash to the idea of the girl boss. It had suddenly become really embarrassing to a lot of people, which, on the one hand—a backlash against unfettered ambition and burnout-inducing devotion to your career—I get that. But it came along with the rise of tradwives and stay-at-home girlfriends and these old forms of female subservience in hip, new clothing.

And you see this again and again in the history of feminism, right? Because it’s hard to work. It’s hard to work and be a parent and fulfill all the expectations of ideal womanhood. People will look at being a kept woman of various guises and think that that’s an out. You saw this with Susan Faludi’s Backlash, and then you saw it with a whole bunch of articles about women stepping back from the workplace.

Demsas: And who is Susan Faludi?

Goldberg: Susan Faludi wrote one of the classics of modern feminism in a book called Backlash, which came out in the early 1990s and was about basically a decade of backlash propaganda telling women that feminism had made them miserable and that women wanted to return to cocooning and wanted to return to domesticity.

And what you see when you actually look at the people who are pushing this message is either that they’re not doing it themselves—you know, Martha Stewart was certainly never a homemaker, but neither was Phyllis Schlafly, right? These are professional women with high-powered careers. Or else you see women who do do that and then find themselves in really precarious situations if it falls apart. And so, again, there was this moment where, We don’t need girl-boss feminism. We want a soft life. You know, don’t we all? (Laughs.)

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Goldberg: But there was a refusal to see the traps that generations of feminists have identified in that life. Now we’re at a different moment because you’re starting to see women get really, really excited about the prospect of a female president again and getting really, really angry about patriarchy. Obviously, the Dobbs decision that ended Roe v. Wade was a big turning point for that. The Kamala Harris campaign is a big turning point.

It was interesting because when Hillary Clinton ran for president, there was always a dearth of organic enthusiasm compared to, say, Barack Obama. But there were people who were really, really excited about Hillary Clinton and were really, really excited about having a woman president. But a lot of them felt really embarrassed and afraid to admit that publicly.

I remember going to some of the places after Donald Trump was elected, going to some of the suburban communities where these women who hadn’t been very political before had suddenly gotten really political because they were so outraged and disgusted. And often they were like, I didn’t even realize there were other Democrats on my street. And so there was this sheepishness. And now that sheepishness is totally gone. It’s pretty new, but this is the first female campaign for president that is being really carried aloft on a tide of very vocal popular excitement.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, when I think about the wokeness message, the presidential candidate that tried to do this the most was Ron DeSantis, and it didn’t really work out for him. He obviously is not the presidential nominee for the Republican Party, but he also flamed out in a way that I think people were not expecting.

There was a ton of enthusiasm after he won his race by around 20 electoral points in Florida, when he ran for re-election for governor. And he was very clear on the national, at the local, at the state level that he was fighting a war on woke. But then you saw this message falter. You saw it falter in the Republican Party. People were much less interested in polls for voting for someone who’s fighting wokeness than they were for people who were following traditional economic messaging. And obviously he himself did not do well there.

Goldberg: Although, let’s remember—let’s look at who the Republicans chose as their vice president. J. D. Vance—he gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021 that was called, “The Universities Are the Enemy,” and it was all about—I don’t know how much he used the word wokeness, but that’s basically what it was about. And he is obsessed with this stuff. It’s part of what makes him weird.

Demsas: I agree with you. I think it’s interesting because it seemed like, at the end, Trump was between the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, who’s a much more traditional Republican, and he ends up picking J. D. Vance, who I think is part of this wing of the party that’s defined themselves by wokeness.

During the Olympics, Imane Khelif, who is an Algerian boxer, beat an Italian boxer Angela Carini at the Paris Olympics, and it sparks this conservative outcry. Khelif is a cis woman; she was assigned female at birth and continues to identify as such. But people have really turned on her as being a man. J. D. Vance literally tweeted that Khelif was “a grown man pummeling a woman.” He called it “disgusting” and blamed Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender.

This is obviously a very small vignette in a bunch of different areas in which you’ve seen the right radicalize in this space. But, to me, while of course Trump did pick Vance, it doesn’t seem like this is actually a message that’s a winning message for voters. I think a lot of people feel that this is actually going in the same way that maybe wokeness harmed the Democratic Party in some ways—that this version is actually not palatable to even Republican voters, but definitely not to independents or swing voters.

There’s polling—this is when Biden was the presumptive nominee, from May—by Data for Progress that asked 1,200 voters whether they think Joe Biden’s woke. And 21 percent said they didn’t know what that meant. Twenty-seven percent said they didn’t care. And 22 percent were the only people that said he was woke and that was a bad thing. So how much of this is just a fight that’s really happening but is not actually electorally relevant or even electorally desirable?

Goldberg: Well, I don’t think it’s super electorally relevant in that, yes, vanishingly few people, if you ask them, What are the issues that are important to you? are going to say any version of wokeness. Where I think it’s relevant is around the edges.

I think that people really underestimate just how much of politics is about emotion and how much of it is about how candidates make you feel. And so whether the language that candidates use resonates with you or is alienating to you really matters. Again, this is where I say that a lot of these linguistic changes, I feel like, are irritating and alienating, but that’s very different from saying that they’re part of some totalitarian conspiracy, which is often how the anti-woke side comes off. And so I think it’s why even voters, again, to the extent that they’re even aware of these arguments over linguistic conventions—and I think they are in a vague way.

Demsas: Especially at the office, if you have DEI training or something like that.

Goldberg: Right, or even just when I would go to Trump rallies, the thing I would hear over and over again—I remember in 2016, I would try to draw them out. You know, Did a factory close around here? Are you having trouble getting a job? But mostly it was like, No. But you just can’t say anything anymore. There was just so much anger. And then sometimes you would ask them what they wanted to say, and you’d be like, Oh yeah. You definitely can’t say that. (Laughs.) And you shouldn’t be able to say that. But I do think that it grates on people. But there’s a difference between it grating on people and it being an all-consuming fixation.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, how do we then understand the nascent Kamala Harris campaign? Because you’ve been doing some reporting about her campaign. And her candidacy, as you said, it’s a historic candidacy. She’s the first Black woman and South Asian woman presumptive nominee for a major party ticket. She will be only the second woman to achieve that, after Clinton.

One thing I think that’s interesting is Clinton really leaned into her identity as a woman. And there’s some reporting that indicates she was trying to follow the mold of Obama, who clearly made that a part of his historic rise and tapped into that “first” energy to build momentum.

Harris seems to be tackling that quite differently. I know you said that you’re seeing this energy finally out in the open, of women getting to be excited publicly for the first female potential president. But, at the same time, it seems like there’s not as much attempt on the part of her and her team—at least so far—to really lean into that. Are you seeing that?

Goldberg: Right. And she doesn’t need to. Well, no, she doesn’t need to. And I don’t see any reason why she should. The people who are excited about it are getting excited about it.

Demsas: But why not? Why not lean into it?

Goldberg: First of all, because most people I think who are really, really excited to vote for the first woman candidate for president, the first Black woman candidate for president, the first Asian American woman candidate for president—those people are mostly voting for Harris. She doesn’t really need to remind them of the historic nature of her candidacy.

And she does in some ways, right? She speaks to the AKAs, the other members of her Black sorority. But I just think that, for the people that she needs to win over, she needs to convince them that she’s going to make their lives better in some tangible, material way, rather than achieving a symbolic victory for certain identity groups.

Look, obviously the identity component is there. You see people self-organizing these huge Zoom calls. But I guess the difference is that it would have been a big mistake for the Harris campaign to take the lead on doing that kind of stuff. People want to do it themselves. You can see that that’s really powerful.

Demsas: I also think that because she avoided a primary, it was much less important to base mobilization that that rhetoric would sometimes be used. You’d encourage it in that case, right? I think Warren and Harris both leaned into this during the 2020 presidential primaries—their historic nature of their candidacy. There were lots of references to Shirley Chisholm in Harris’s 2020 primary.

Goldberg: Oh, yeah. And I saw people wearing Shirley Chisholm shirts at the Harris rally in Atlanta. People are obviously really aware of it. I think you’re right about the primary. She didn’t need to distinguish herself in that way in a primary.

And the fact that there was (a) no primary and (b) that so many Democrats feel like they were saved from near-certain doom means that the fissures that are usually left over after a really bruising primary just aren’t there.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much, Michelle. I’ve been reading your work for years, and I’m so glad to have you come on the show.

Goldberg: Oh, thanks for having me.

Demsas: I want to ask you our last question, which is: What’s an idea that seemed good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Goldberg: I’m going to say communism.

Demsas: Oh, okay. Tell me more.

Goldberg: I mean, I’m honestly surprised that anybody answers anything else. (Laughs.) It just seems so obvious—it just seems obvious to me that, at a time when industrial capitalism was so brutal and exploitative, along comes this utopian theory promising human equality, gender equality, the brotherhood of man, the end of poverty, right? I don’t know if you have kids, but my kids—and I think a lot of people have this experience—when they first learn about communism, they’re like, Yeah, that sounds great. It does sound great. It just has not worked.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, that is the most one-word-only-needed “good on paper” we’ve heard so far. (Laughs.)

Goldberg: (Laughs.)

Demsas: Usually it does require a lot more explanation. Communism—good on paper. Thank you again for coming on the show. We’re so excited to have you on and continue following your work as you write about this issue on the campaign trail.

[Music]

Goldberg: Thank you so much.

Demsas: This episode of Good on Paper was produced by Jinae West and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Erica Huang and Rob Smierciak engineered this episode. Rob Smerciak also composed our theme music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

For all the norms Donald Trump flouted in his first term, his approach to filling out his administration was familiar. He rooted around the same sets of professions as his predecessors, hiring lawyers, CEOs, academics, and military leaders, among others. Liberals may not have liked his picks—Jeff Sessions for attorney general, say, or Michael Flynn for national security adviser—but regardless of ideology, most of his top advisers had recognizable credentials. In his second term, Trump has found a new talent pool to draw from: podcasters.

In the past week, Trump has tapped two podcasters, Dan Bongino and Graham Allen, for high-ranking jobs in his administration. Bongino, who hosts one of the most popular right-wing podcasts in the country, will become the deputy director of the FBI. Allen, of the Dear America Podcast, will serve as a top communications official at the Defense Department. Even accounting for their unconventional backgrounds, their appointments are surprising. Each has used his platform to trade in extreme conspiracist beliefs. On his show, Bongino has claimed that the pipe bombs found near the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were actually an “inside job,” that the results of the 2020 presidential election were false, and that checks and balances in the government matter less than “power.” (Though a former Secret Service agent, Bongino has no previous experience at the FBI—a departure from those who have held the role in past administrations.) Allen has reportedly claimed that climate change is part of a liberal plot to control people and has called Taylor Swift “a witch and a devil.”

Bongino and Allen, neither of whom responded to requests for comment, are part of a cohort of right-wing media figures who have been assigned top roles within the administration. That includes Darren Beattie, the founder of the conspiracist website Revolver News, who joined the State Department, and Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who is now secretary of defense. Many, if not most, of these figures earned Trump’s loyalty by using their platforms to be obsequious stewards of MAGA—in effect, creating a quasi–state media. But as these figures make the move to government, the Trump administration is also now becoming a media-run state.

[Read: The white nationalist now in charge of Trump’s public diplomacy]

It’s hardly unprecedented for media journalists to make the jump into politics—especially in communication roles. In his first term, Trump picked Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, as his chief strategist, and then–CNBC host Larry Kudlow as the head of the National Economic Council. In 2008, Jay Carney left Time to join Barack Obama’s administration, eventually becoming the president’s press secretary. But something odder is going on now within the Trump administration: a breakdown of the barriers between media and government.

Trump’s recent appointments are only part of the melding. Consider the likes of Charlie Kirk, who doesn’t have an official government position but still seems to hold influence. In November, Politico reported that Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder and right-wing media figure, advised Trump on whom he should select for significant roles in his then-forthcoming administration. Jack Posobiec, a right-wing influencer who rose to prominence by pushing conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, was invited by Pentagon officials to travel on Hegseth’s first trip overseas. He then claimed to have joined Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on a trip to Ukraine, meeting with the country’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky.

The right-wing media’s formal and informal roles in the administration mark a new kind of singularity. The podcasters now do policy and dabble in politics. And some right-wing politicians, including Ted Cruz and Dan Crenshaw, have their own podcasts. So do some politicians on the left, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, who announced a new show this week. But on the right, politicians and media figures more explicitly mingle and work toward the same goals.

That is especially the case now that the Trump administration has barred media outlets including the Associated Press from covering many White House events, while welcoming in right-wing media figures such as Lara Logan. Although Fox News and Newsmax have cut ties with Logan for her extremist views, she was recently included in a State Department listening session. Similarly, yesterday, the Department of Justice chose to first give documents regarding the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein to right-wing influencers—including Posobiec and Chaya Raichik, who runs Libs of TikTok, a high-profile right-wing account on X—instead of actual journalists. (The documents reportedly contain little new information.)

This blurring is indicative of a substantive shift in how the contemporary right operates. The conservative media ecosystem has long functioned as the id of the right wing. But in the media-state singularity, there is not even the pretense of space between the two worlds. President George H. W. Bush hosted Rush Limbaugh overnight in the White House, in a likely attempt to ingratiate himself with the radio host. Trump doesn’t need to do such a thing, because the modern equivalents of Limbaugh are inside his administration as high-ranking staff members. (After Limbaugh’s death, in 2021, Bongino took over his slot on many radio stations.)

The practical effect of this union is an ongoing rightward lurch. That the conservative media has infiltrated the White House explains some of the current administration’s policies—proposed mass deportations, vindictive tariffs, attempts to gut entire federal agencies. The new direction of the executive branch is a far-right podcaster’s fever dream. As Bongino posted in November: “We are the media now.” Since the election, the phrase has become popular among an online right distrustful of legacy news outlets. It’s only partially correct. Right-wing influencers such as Bongino are the media to swaths of America. They are also now the government itself.

The nostalgia behind the slogan “Make America great again” has always provoked the obvious questions of just when America was great, and for whom. Early in the second Trump administration, we are getting the answer.

In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”  

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”

Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms. During her confirmation hearing, Trump’s education-secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, said she did not know if schools could lose funding for teaching Black-history classes under the order. The legality of the order over K–12 curricula is unclear, but the chilling effects are real nonetheless.

Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.

An OMB memo ordering a federal-funding freeze illustrates the ideological vision behind these decisions. The memo states that the administration seeks to prevent the use of “federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” Acting Director Matthew Vaeth wrote. Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.

The battles of the Great Resegregation are now taking place in at least three overlapping arenas. The first is politics, where right-wing legal organizations have succeeded in rolling back many civil-rights-era voting protections; they want to now fully destroy the remaining shreds. The second is education and employment, particularly at elite institutions, such as the media and academia; right-wing legal strategies have been similarly fruitful here in attacking diversity, thanks to the conservative capture of the Supreme Court. The third is popular culture, where conservatives have sought to leverage anger and nostalgia against movies, television, books, and other creative media brought to life by artists of color.

The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.

“This is really taking us back to a kind of pre-civil-rights-movement vision of America,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the former head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told me in an interview last year, before Trump won the 2024 election. “A backlash is a pushback. This is really much more of a demolition effort.”

As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” This analysis is perceptive in the sense that the exact reverse is true—we are now in the second decade of a years-long temper tantrum sparked by the election of Barack Obama—not to mention the failed attempts to elect a woman to succeed him—and the effect it had on the fragile self-esteem of people like Beattie.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

Other MAGA figureheads have promoted similar ideas. In 2020, the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell published a book arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had revoked “the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it.” Because of the Civil Rights Act, white people had fallen “asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

Caldwell’s assessment has grown in popularity among prominent conservatives. The right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has described the Civil Rights Act as having “created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon,” and he has attacked Martin Luther King Jr., Wired reported, as part of a “broader strategy to discredit” King and “the Civil Rights Act.” On his social network, X, the South African–born Musk, who is playing a key role in the Trump administration, regularly promotes scientific racism, the pseudoscientific ideology that holds that race determines individual potential. Some of the staffers Musk has hired to dismantle the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws seem to share those ideological predilections. One DOGE staffer resigned after the Wall Street Journal revealed he maintained a pro-eugenics social media account where “he appeared to have a special dislike for Indian software engineers.” He was reinstated after receiving public support from Trump and Vance.  The problem conservatives trying to undermine anti-discrimination law seem to have with an “official hierarchy of races” is not that one exists but that, in their warped conception, white people are not on top, as they should be.

This ideology is apparent in the rote blaming of diversity by some conservatives for every catastrophic event—as they did following a midair collision over the Potomac River. Or a freighter crashing into a bridge in Baltimore. Or doors flying off Boeing planes.The contention, overt or implied, is always that unlike white men, whose competence can be assumed, the non-white people with desirable jobs are undeserving. The irony, of course, is that many of the white men making these assumptions are themselves unqualified. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is best-known for being a reality-television star.  

Even so, the Great Resegregation seeks not a return to the explicit racial separation of Jim Crow, but rather an embrace of ostensibly “color-blind” policies intended to sustain a de facto segregation that is more durable and less overt, one in which Black access to the middle and elite strata of American life will be ever more rare and fleeting. The numbers of Black doctors, lawyers, scientists, architects, showrunners, and generals would no longer rise. And there would be no more Black presidents. The real but fragile advancement of the Black poor into the Black middle class would be stalled or reversed. Most Black people would be confined to, as Trump memorably put it, the menial “Black jobs” they were meant for, save for those willing to sustain the self-serving fiction that they are among the good ones.

The demolition of multiracial democracy began a dozen years ago, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rolled back voting-rights protections adopted in the 1960s to enforce the rights enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment. Those protections made America, for the first time, a democracy for all its citizens. They diversified Congress, and led to the election of the first Black president. The Roberts Court has steadily eroded those protections, insisting that they are no longer necessary, even as racist ideas once considered beyond the pale return to the mainstream. These changes have had the predictable outcome of increasing racial disparities in voting.

The Roberts Court has treated policies meant to rectify racial discrimination as themselves racist. The Court shut down what remained of public-school integration efforts. It overturned affirmative action in higher education. These decisions have eroded diversity in the classroom. But they’re just the beginning for the resegregators, who intend to ensure that America’s traditional racial hierarchies are persistent and stable.

One clear example comes in the world of higher education. Because giving all Americans equal access to elite higher education is a step toward broader societal integration, such efforts must be shut down. To this end, conservative groups are suing colleges even in states such as California, where affirmative action in public universities has long been banned, claiming that the fact that their incoming classes have become more diverse rather than less is evidence of reverse discrimination. At least two conservative justices have objected to color-blind, class-based affirmative-action programs. This approach suggests a topsy-turvy understanding of racial discrimination, in which a diverse classroom is one in which white men have been discriminated against, based on the conviction that white men are by definition the most competent possible candidates.

[Read: Donald Trump is very busy]

When Trump officials speak of a society that is color-blind and merit-based, they do not appear to mean meritocracy or color-blindness in the traditional sense. Instead of individual meritocracy, they seem to be advocating a racial meritocracy, in which the merit of an individual hire or admission can be assessed not by their individual accomplishments but by how well the group they are associated with fits a particular role. In this way, the Great Resegregation seeks firmer moral ground than the racial apartheid of the past. Racial disparities can be framed not as the result of discrimination, but as a fact: that white people are just better and more qualified. And by withholding federal funding from places that engage in scientific inquiry on social inequalities or offer historical instruction that could be seen as portraying America as “fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory,” the Trump administration can make the causes of those inequalities illegible.

What the proponents of the Great Resegregation seek is a counterrevolution not merely in law, but also in culture. The civil-rights revolution of the 1960s changed hearts and minds as well as laws, and one of those changes was that racially exclusive institutions became morally suspect. Notably, Trump officials are not willing to state their aims explicitly; they feel obligated to pay lip service to ideals of color-blind meritocracy and mislead about their intentions.

“My view is that the diversity ethos has really sunk deep roots,” the Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy told me. “There are a lot of people across a wide variety of ideological positions who would not like a racially homogeneous, all-white outfit. Even people who say they’re against affirmative action, they would feel somewhat nervous or somewhat embarrassed or somewhat guilty about that.” Trumpists seek to not just repeal protections against discrimination, but reverse the “diversity ethos” that has enabled America’s tenuous strides toward equality.

And that progress is not only fragile but remarkably incomplete. Neither schools nor workplaces have ever been particularly integrated. Public-school integration stalled long ago. Even prior to the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing affirmative action in admissions, enrollment of Black and Hispanic students at elite universities had stalled at percentages far below their share of the student-age population. Occupational segregation has remained stagnant since the ’90s. Black workers with or without college degrees are concentrated in professions that pay less than those of their white counterparts, despite a rise in Black people obtaining college degrees. Corporate DEI efforts never made much progress on integration to begin with, in part because many of these efforts were more about branding and limiting liability than equal opportunity, and now the federal government will be dead set on reversing whatever headway was made.

“The segregation we see in the labor market right now is three to five times worse than we would expect if race wasn’t a core factor,” Justin Heck of Opportunity@Work, an organization that advocates for workers without college degrees, told me. “We’ve seen it go down a little bit in the years leading up to 1990. But the current world looks the same as it did in 1990. It’s been stagnant or worse, or slightly worse today.” Heck is one of the authors of a 2023 study on occupational segregation published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

There are perhaps two exceptions. One is the federal government, where until now, anti-discrimination laws have been strictly enforced. Trump’s cronies have tried to discredit the federal workforce precisely because it is often more meritocratic, and therefore more integrated than the private sector. “It’s harder in a federal-government job to get a position simply through an informal network,” the political scientist Ashley Jardina, who also worked on the NBER study, told me. “Whereas in the private sector, especially in building trades, for example, a lot of people are getting their jobs through their social networks, which are incredibly segregated.”

That is why Trumpists are so focused on “ending DEI” in the federal workforce. They see anti-discrimination and inclusion as a ladder of upward mobility for people they do not believe should have one. Under Trump, a workplace or college that is perceived as too diverse might come under legal scrutiny, effectively enforcing racial quotas. For example, Andrew Bailey, the attorney general of Missouri, is suing the coffee chain Starbucks on the basis that after adopting DEI programs its workforce has become “more female and less white.”

The second place where America has grown more integrated is media and entertainment, arenas highly visible to the public. This has depreciated the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “psychological wage” of white racial identity—making those who once held an unquestioned hegemony over American culture feel like something has been stolen from them. And this shift helped fuel the nationwide backlash to diversity efforts that Trump rode to office.

[W. E. B. Du Bois: Strivings of the Negro people]

The slight but substantive integration of characters in film, television, and other forms of entertainment has itself led to a visible backlash, subjecting actors, writers, and other creative workers of color to harassment whenever they participate in a high-profile project, especially in the genres of science fiction or fantasy. An integrated cast, writers’ room, or development team is deemed “woke,” by which critics simply mean integrated, and therefore suspect. A woman, LGBTQ person, or person of color in a leading role is deemed unqualified, or worthy of rejection just because of who they are. What may seem like silly internet controversies are in fact demands for a resegregation of creative workplaces.

“I think probably part of why we observe more integration in some spaces and others also just has a lot to do with the demands that capitalism places on having a market,” Jardina told me. “It earns money for media organizations and studios to diversify their shows and their casts, because there’s a market for that, in the same way that there isn’t in a lot of industries.”

In other words, the exceptions to America’s persistent segregation have taken place in America’s most public-facing professions, among those assigned to interpret the world around them. What people consuming American media see, for the most part, is a mirage of a more integrated America that has yet to come into being. In virtually every other arena—the private-sector workplace, housing, schooling—America remains profoundly segregated, with opportunities limited by class and race.

This is why Trump’s funding freeze has targeted DEI despite no evidence that the government has lowered its standards on behalf of women and minorities. Asked to provide a real example of lowered standards in the military during his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was unable to. The U.S. military has long led the way in demonstrating how a diverse workforce yields American excellence—one reason some conservatives are fixated on its relative egalitarianism, which they deride as “wokeness.” Hegseth recently said he believed that “the single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength." The Nazis and Confederates learned otherwise.

Of course he himself is an illustration of lowered standards—Hegseth has no demonstrable expertise for the job he was given—but because he is a white man, his qualifications for the job are assumed, as a result of the Trumpist concept of racial meritocracy. This is why the funding freeze is targeting research on inequality. It is why private companies are threatened with government lawsuits and prosecutions if they seek a broader pool of applicants. It is why the Trump administration’s deportations do not target merely undocumented criminals but also immigrants on Temporary Protective Status. It is why Trump’s loyalists are dismantling any and all government programs that might conceivably even the playing field between those born with plenty and those born with little.

For all the big talk about putting an end to “social engineering,” the Great Resegregation is itself a radical attempt to socially engineer America to be poorer, whiter, less equal, and less democratic. Much as the old Jim Crow measures kept many southern white people impoverished and disenfranchised alongside the Black southerners they targeted, the Great Resegregation will leave wealthy white elites with a firmer grip on power and the working classes with fewer opportunities and a weakened social safety net. The only people left with more will be those who already had more than they needed to begin with.

Paul Ingrassia is just your average right-wing edgelord with a law degree and a high-level position at the Justice Department. In the past several years, on X, he has likened Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer, to the “ancient ideal of excellence”; he has written a Substack post titled “Free Nick Fuentes” in support of reinstating the white nationalist’s X account (when it was still banned); and he has called Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former United Nations ambassador who ran against Trump in the Republican primary, an “insufferable bitch” who might be an “anchor baby” too. On Inauguration Day, Ingrassia was sworn in as the new White House liaison for the DOJ.

In his new job, Ingrassia—who did not respond to a request for comment—is responsible for managing other White House appointments within the DOJ, and for identifying and recommending people to potentially be hired or promoted within the agency, according to a department memo. As such, Ingrassia is part of a small but growing class of important Trump officials with a history of posting things (and doing things) that might have been disqualifying for any other administration in recent memory, up to and including Trump’s own four years ago. This group includes Darren Beattie, appointed to a top post at the State Department despite having been dismissed from his job as a Trump speechwriter in 2018 after reportedly appearing at an event alongside white nationalists, and having claimed online that January 6 was orchestrated by the FBI. And also Gavin Kliger, an employee of Elon Musk’s DOGE, who appears to have shared a Fuentes post that disparages white people who adopt Black children and uses the pejorative slang term for women, “huzz.” (Kliger did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Read: A speechwriter gets a second shot at the State Department]

Not every such indiscretion has been completely ignored by the Trump administration and its allies. Another DOGE employee, Marko Elez, resigned on Thursday, reportedly over having made racist posts including “Normalize Indian hate” and “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Within 24 hours, however, Vice President J. D. Vance was lobbying to rehire him under the justification that “stupid social media activity” shouldn’t “ruin a kid’s life.” Later that afternoon, Musk announced that Elez would be brought back.

Ingrassia’s appointment represents another win for young, online reactionaries in Washington. He praised and reposted an article from the fitness enthusiast and proponent of “race science” Raw Egg Nationalist. He has worked for the Gateway Pundit—a conservative news site that frequently publishes lies and conspiracy theories. And he has extensive ties to Tate, having worked on his legal team; he even posted a picture of himself with Tate and Tate’s brother. Tate is currently being investigated by Romanian authorities for alleged rape and human trafficking, and he has been separately accused of rape and assault in the United Kingdom. He has denied all of the allegations against him.

Ingrassia’s “Free Nick Fuentes” post called for Musk to end a ban on Fuentes’s account that dated to 2021. (Fuentes was banned after what a Twitter spokesperson described as “repeated violations” of the company’s rules.) Such a move was necessary, Ingrassia argued, to “shift the Overton Window” on social media. People who argue against content moderation on social platforms often do so by arguing that more speech is always better. (In Fuentes’s case, that meant more Holocaust denial, more praise of Adolf Hitler, and more denigration of women and Black people.) But Ingrassia also appears to be drawn to at least some of the substance of what Fuentes posted.

And although there were almost certainly members of the first Trump administration who shared Ingrassia’s views, few if any publicly said so, or discussed their ideas online under their own name. They seemed to understand that there were stakes and consequences for airing such beliefs in public.

Ingrassia’s presence in the new administration reflects a departure from that era. It also shows that not all young, online reactionaries are the same. Ingrassia appears to represent the populist, nationalist wing of the MAGA coalition, which stands in opposition, in certain ways, to the tech-right faction including Kliger and led by Musk. The two groups were aligned through the election and still have many shared goals: Witness Ingrassia and Kliger’s shared interest in Nick Fuentes. But they have also aggressively diverged on some issues. The tech industry generally supports the use of H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants, whereas MAGA nationalists tend to oppose them. Ingrassia, in the latter camp, has written that the United States should end the H-1B-visa program as well as birthright citizenship, and institute a “20 year moratorium on legal immigration.”

That this internal disagreement has been spilling out into public view may be the flip side of the no-longer-need-to-hide-it administration. The H-1B fight, which took off at the end of December, was very visible online. People like Ingrassia, Kliger, and Beattie, with their freewheeling and unapologetic social-media personas, have helped make these internal tensions very clear. They’re just posting through it.

Darren Beattie may not be a household name, but you are almost certainly familiar with his long-standing ideas and preoccupations. Beattie, a speechwriter whom Trump fired in 2018 and appointed to a top State Department job this week, is a fixture in far-right conspiracist circles.

Over the years, Beattie has reportedly spoken alongside white nationalists, alleged that the FBI orchestrated January 6—his preferred term is Fedsurrection—and repeatedly posted online that various Black personalities and politicians should “take a KNEE to MAGA.” In his new role as under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, he will help shape the tone of America’s public messaging abroad, oversee “the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Global Public Affairs,” and participate “in foreign policy development,” according to the State Department’s website.

Beattie’s ascent is another sign that the new administration has no interest in catering to norms established by its critics or perceived political foes. What was a scandal in Trump’s first term is grounds for a promotion in his second. Beattie’s 2018 firing came after CNN reported that he had spoken at the 2016 H. L. Mencken Club, an event whose attendees have included prominent white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Peter Brimelow. Beattie then launched Revolver News, a right-wing website that trumpeted his appointment and described him as “a relentless force in exposing the left’s DEI agenda, their censorship schemes, and the J6 entrapment operation.”

Many of the site’s articles are standard conservative fare: attacks on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats alongside criticism of powerful technology companies that purportedly censor the right, including Revolver itself. Other content on the site veers sharply into conspiracism: It often posts external links to content from the likes of Bronze Age Pervert, a pseudonym of the pro-authoritarianism writer Costin Alamariu, who has posited that “Black Africans” are so genetically ”divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries,” and Steve Sailer, another prominent booster of pseudoscientific racism. Beattie has also used Revolver as a platform to advance his nationalist views, including pushing for mass deportation and “America-first trade policy.”

[From the September 2023 issue: How Bronze Age Pervert charmed the far right]

Beattie is a “well-regarded” and “beloved” figure in Trump world, as Semafor and Politico describe him, respectively. (Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson both praised Beattie in text messages to Semafor’s Ben Smith.) His appointment will likely be seen as a win for the nationalist wing of the Republican Party, which has been fighting against tech-right figures including Elon Musk and the venture capitalist David Sacks for influence in the Trump administration. While the tech-right and nationalists have been aligned in many areas, they vocally diverged on H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants in a very public internet fight in December. More recently, as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer reported, Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE, the team he leads within the Trump administration. Bannon, who sits squarely in the populist-nationalist camp and is friends with Beattie, has aggressively criticized Musk and other tech elites and said publicly that he wants to impede their influence.

True adherents to the nationalist-populist wing of MAGA are almost nonexistent in Trump’s Cabinet. For as long as he is in his acting role in the State Department, however, Beattie joins a small but powerful group of nationalist Trump appointees. The immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller, who is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, and his fellow conservative intellectual Michael Anton, who is also at the State Department, are among this cohort.

The ascendant intellectual wing of the nationalist right will be particularly pleased with Beattie’s appointment. Prior to his time in the Trump administration, Beattie received a Ph.D. in political theory from Duke University, where he wrote his dissertation on the prominent German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and he has contributed to The New Atlantis, a publication with a reputation among the right for its rigorous critiques of technology.

If nothing else, Beattie’s eccentricities—buttoned-up intellectualism on one hand, crude and offensive polemic on the other—demonstrate one underlying truth of Trump world: It’s a big tent. Kiss the ring, and you may just be welcomed back.