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Among Donald Trump’s many campaign-trail promises was his threat to dismantle the Department of Education, which he has claimed without basis is filled with “radicals, zealots, and Marxists.” But the president-elect seems to want to have it both ways: In trying to hamstring the federal agency, Trump says he will give power back to the states. But he has also said he is prepared to use executive power to crack down on schools with policies that don’t align with his culture-war agenda.

Trump proposed dismantling or dramatically cutting the DOE during his 2016 run, but he didn’t follow through while in office. This time, even if he does stick with it, he’s not likely to succeed: Because the department was elevated to a Cabinet-level agency by an act of Congress under President Jimmy Carter, shutting it down would likewise require an act of Congress. Passing such a law is a probable nonstarter even though Republicans will soon control the House and Senate. It would require a 60 percent vote in the Senate (at least as long as the filibuster is in place), and some Republicans would likely not support cutting the DOE, because it could be unpopular with their constituents. Red, rural, low-income areas are among the parts of the country whose school districts receive the most Title I supplemental funding from the agency. Although the DOE has found its place in the crosshairs of the culture wars, its daily function largely involves distributing funds to K–12 schools and administering federal loan programs for college students—not getting involved in the curriculum issues that inflame the political right.

Whether he follows through on his DOE threat or not, Trump has other channels through which to alter America’s schools. Trump’s statements on the campaign trail suggest that he’s likely to use his executive power to roll back the changes President Joe Biden made to Title IX, which related in part to protections for LGBTQ students and rules for how colleges respond to allegations of sexual violence on campus (these changes are currently blocked in some states). Trump’s platform also states that he “will sign an executive order instructing every federal agency, including the Department of Education, to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition, at any age,” and he has signaled that he may threaten to withhold federal funds from schools that don’t fall in line. Trump and his team may also push to direct public money to parents with students in private and religious K–12 schools through a system known as “school choice” vouchers, which has gained political momentum after sustained attacks on public schools from Republican politicians (vouchers were a priority of Trump’s last education secretary, Betsy DeVos, too).

Conservative politicians have long been outwardly skeptical of the federal government playing a major role in schools—yet many are also inclined to push through policy priorities on education when they are in positions of national power, Jon Valant, an education policy expert at the Brookings Institution, told me. The Department of Education, in particular, has been an on-and-off boogeyman of Republicans. President Ronald Reagan talked about closing the agency as part of his effort to shrink the federal government (obviously, he did not succeed). But for all the talk about reducing the federal government’s power, eliminating the DOE would likely just mean moving things around—the Justice Department might handle civil-rights programs currently managed by the DOE; the Treasury Department might take over student-loan administration. It’s not clear that these changes “would actually shrink the federal role in education or the cost of administering those programs,” Valant told me.

Even as he claims that he will axe the department, Trump is moving forward with staffing it. He has put forth Linda McMahon, a major campaign donor with roots in the professional wrestling world, as his secretary of education. McMahon fits the description of some of Trump’s other recent Cabinet picks: a friend or loyalist who is unqualified for the role at hand. She has scant experience working in or with schools—she once claimed to have a degree in education because she had spent a semester student-teaching, The Washington Post and the Hartford Courant reported. But the choice of McMahon does not send as strong a signal as selecting a louder culture-war voice, such as Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, or the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo—all of whom policy experts speculated about as possible picks—might have.

In his first term as president, Trump spoke with bombast about his education plans but didn’t end up doing much. The national conversation on schools was in a different place then—before the culture wars further heated up and public trust in schools and other institutions declined. Trump and his allies have made schools a villain in many of the social issues he centered his campaign on. This time, he may have more incentive to take action, if he’s willing to do the work of transforming the system.

Related:

Donald Trump claims public schools offer sex-change surgeries. George Packer: When the culture war comes for the kids

Today’s News

Former Representative Matt Gaetz withdrew himself from consideration for the attorney-general role in Trump’s second administration. Trump announced that former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is his new pick for the position. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif—whom Israel claims to have killed—over allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Brazil’s federal police announced that former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other people have been indicted for allegedly plotting a coup after he lost in the 2022 elections.

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Time-Travel Thursdays: The bean—small, humble, protein-dense—has the potential to remake American diets, Lora Kelley writes. But it also has an image problem.

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Three Ways to Become a Deeper Thinker

By Arthur C. Brooks

You may have encountered this cryptic question at some point. It is a koan, or riddle, devised by the 18th-century Zen Buddhist master Hakuin Ekaku. Such paradoxical questions have been used for centuries to train young monks, who were instructed to meditate on and debate them. This was intended to be taxing work that could induce maddening frustration—but there was a method to it too. The novitiates were not meant to articulate tidy answers; they were supposed to acquire, through mental struggle, a deeper understanding of the question itself—for this was the path to enlightenment.

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In his 2023 Netflix comedy special, Selective Outrage, Chris Rock identified one of the core contradictions of the social-justice era: “Everybody’s full of shit,” Rock said, including in the category of “everybody” people who type “woke” tweets “on a phone made by child slaves.”

I was reminded of that acerbic routine while reading Musa al-Gharbi’s new book, We Have Never Been Woke. Al-Gharbi, a 41-year-old sociologist at Stony Brook University, opens with the political disillusionment he experienced when he moved from Arizona to New York. He was immediately struck by the “racialized caste system” that everyone in the big liberal city seems to take “as natural”: “You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you.” At the push of a button, people—mostly hugely underpaid immigrants and people of color—will do your shopping and drive you wherever you want to go.

He contrasts that with the “podunk” working-class environment he’d left behind, where “the person buying a pair of shoes and the person selling them are likely to be the same race—white—and the socioeconomic gaps between the buyer and the seller are likely to be much smaller.” He continues: “Even the most sexist or bigoted rich white person in many other contexts wouldn’t be able to exploit women and minorities at the level the typical liberal professional in a city like Seattle, San Francisco, or Chicago does in their day-to-day lives. The infrastructure simply isn’t there.” The Americans who take the most advantage of exploited workers, he argues, are the same Democratic-voting professionals in progressive bastions who most “conspicuously lament inequality.”

[Read: The blindness of elites]

Musa sees the reelection of Donald Trump as a reflection of Americans’ resentment toward elites and the “rapid shift in discourse and norms around ‘identity’ issues” that he refers to as the “Great Awokening.” To understand what’s happening to American politics, he told me, we shouldn’t look to the particulars of the election—“say, the attributes of Harris, how she ran her campaign, inflation worries, and so on,” but rather to this broader backlash. All of the signs were there for elites to see if only they’d bothered to look.

One question We Have Never Been Woke sets out to answer is why elites are so very blind, including to their own hypocrisy. The answer al-Gharbi proposes is at once devastatingly simple yet reaffirmed everywhere one turns: Fooled by superficial markers of their own identity differences—racial, sexual, and otherwise—elites fail to see themselves for what they truly are.

“When people say things about elites, they usually focus their attention on cisgender heterosexual white men” who are “able-bodied and neurotypical,” al-Gharbi told me, in one of our conversations this fall. Most elites are white, of course, but far from all. And elites today, he added, also “increasingly identify as something like disabled or neurodivergent, LGBTQ.” If you “exclude all of those people from analysis, then you’re just left with this really tiny and misleading picture of who the elites are, who benefits from the social order, how they benefit.”

Sociologists who have studied nonwhite elites in the past have tended to analyze them mainly in the contexts of the marginalized groups from which they came. E. Franklin Frazier’s 1955 classic, Black Bourgeoisie, for example, spotlighted the hypocrisy and alienation of relatively prosperous Black Americans who found themselves doubly estranged: from the white upper classes they emulated as well as from the Black communities they’d left behind. By analyzing nonwhites and other minorities as elites among their peers, al-Gharbi is doing something different. “Elites from other groups are often passed over in silence or are explicitly exempted from critique (and even celebrated!),” he writes. And yet, “behaviors, lifestyles, and relationships that are exploitative, condescending, or exclusionary do not somehow become morally noble or neutral when performed by members of historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups.”

When al-Gharbi uses the word elite, he is talking about the group to which he belongs: the “symbolic capitalists”—broadly speaking, the various winners of the knowledge economy who do not work with their hands and who produce and manipulate “data, rhetoric, social perceptions and relations, organizational structures and operations, art and entertainment, traditions and innovations.” These are the people who set the country’s norms through their dominance of the “symbolic economy,” which consists of media, academic, cultural, technological, legal, nonprofit, consulting, and financial institutions.  

Although symbolic capitalists are not exactly the same as capitalist capitalists, or the rest of the upper class that does not rely on income, neither are they—as graduate students at Columbia and Yale can be so eager to suggest—“the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” The theorist Richard Florida has written about a group he calls the “creative class,” which represents 30 percent of the total U.S. workforce, and which overlaps significantly with al-Gharbi’s symbolic capitalists. Using survey data from 2017, Florida calculated that members of that creative class earned twice as much over the course of the year as members of the working class—an average of $82,333 versus $41,776, respectively.

Symbolic capitalists aren’t a monolith, but it is no secret that their ruling ideology is the constellation of views and attitudes that have come to be known as “wokeness,” which al-Gharbi defines as beliefs about social justice that “inform how mainstream symbolic capitalists understand and pursue their interests—creating highly novel forms of competition and legitimation.”

Al-Gharbi’s own path is emblematic of the randomness and possibility of membership in this class. The son of military families on both sides, one Black and one white, he attended community college for six years, “taking classes off and on while working,” he told me. There he was lucky to meet a talented professor, who “basically took me under his wing and helped me do something different,” al-Gharbi said. Together, they focused on private lessons in Latin, philosophy, and classics—subjects not always emphasized in community college.

Around that time he was also going on what he calls “this whole religious journey”: “I initially tried to be a Catholic priest, and then I became an atheist for a while, but I had this problem. I rationally convinced myself that religion was bullshit and there is no God, but I couldn’t make myself feel it.” Then he read the Quran and “became convinced that it was a prophetic work. And so I was like, Well, if I believe that Muhammad is a prophet and I believe in God, that’s the two big things. So maybe I am a Muslim.” Soon after, he changed his name. Then, just when he was getting ready to transfer out of community college, his twin brother, Christian, was killed on deployment in Afghanistan. He chose to go somewhere close to his grieving family, the University of Arizona, to finish his degree in Near-Eastern studies and philosophy.

The same dispassionate analysis that he applies to his own life’s progress he brings to bear on America’s trends, especially the Great Awokening. He traces that widespread and sudden movement in attitudes not to the death of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, nor to Black Lives Matter or the #MeToo movement, nor to the election of Donald Trump, but to September 2011 and the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged from the ashes of the financial crisis.

“In reality, Occupy was not class oriented,” he argues. By focusing its critique on the top 1 percent of households, which were overwhelmingly white, and ignoring the immense privilege of the more diverse symbolic capitalists just beneath them, the movement, “if anything, helped obscure important class differences and the actual causes of social stratification.” This paved the way for “elites who hail from historically underrepresented populations … to exempt themselves from responsibility for social problems and try to deflect blame onto others.”

[Read: The 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy]

Al-Gharbi is neither an adherent of wokeism nor an anti-woke scold. He would like to both stem the progressive excesses of the summer of 2020, a moment when white liberals “tended to perceive much more racism against minorities than most minorities, themselves, reported experiencing,” and see substantive social justice be achieved for everyone, irrespective of whether they hail from a historically disadvantaged identity group or not. The first step, he argues, is to dispel the notion that the Great Awokening was “some kind of unprecedented new thing.”

Awokenings, in al-Gharbi’s telling, are struggles for power and status in which symbolic capitalists, often instinctively and even subconsciously, leverage social-justice discourse not on behalf of the marginalized but in service of their own labor security, political influence, and social prestige. He does not see this as inherently nefarious—indeed, like Tocqueville and many others before him, he recognizes that motivated self-interest can be the most powerful engine for the common good. Al-Gharbi argues that our current Awokening, which peaked in 2021 and is now winding down, is really the fourth such movement in the history of the United States.

The first coincided with the Great Depression, when suddenly “many who had taken for granted a position among the elite, who had felt more or less entitled to a secure, respected, and well-paying professional job, found themselves facing deeply uncertain futures.”

The next would take place in the 1960s, once the radicals of the ’30s were firmly ensconced within the bourgeoisie. “The driver was not the Vietnam War itself,” al-Gharbi stresses. That had been going on for years without protest. Nor was the impetus the civil-rights movement, gay liberation, women’s liberation, or any such cause. “Instead, middle-class students became radical precisely when their plans to leave the fighting to minorities and the poor by enrolling in college and waiting things out began to fall through,” he argues. “It was at that point that college students suddenly embraced anti-war activism, the Black Power movement, feminism, postcolonial struggles, gay rights, and environmentalism in immense numbers,” appropriating those causes for their own gain.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The third Awokening was smaller and shorter than the others, stretching from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, and repurposing and popularizing the Marxist term political correctness. Its main legacy was to set the stage for the fourth—and present—Awokening, which has been fueled by what the scholar Peter Turchin has termed “elite overproduction”: Quite simply, America creates too many highly educated, highly aspirational young people, and not enough high-status, well-paid jobs for them to do. The result, al-Gharbi writes, is that “frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants [seek] to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” It is one of the better and more concise descriptions of the so-called cancel culture that has defined and bedeviled the past decade of American institutional life. (As Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, political purges often serve as jobs programs.)  

The book is a necessary corrective to the hackneyed discourse around wealth and privilege that has obtained since 2008. At the same time, al-Gharbi’s focus on symbolic capitalists leaves many levers of power unexamined. Whenever I’m in the company of capitalist capitalists, I’m reminded of the stark limitations of the symbolic variety. Think of how easily Elon Musk purchased and then destroyed that vanity fair of knowledge workers formerly known as Twitter. While some self-important clusters of them disbanded to Threads or Bluesky to post their complaints, Musk helped Trump win the election. His PAC donated $200 million to the campaign, while Musk served as Trump’s hype man at rallies and on X. Trump has since announced that Musk will be part of the administration itself, co-leading the ominously named Department of Government Efficiency.

Al-Gharbi’s four Great Awokenings framework can sometimes feel too neat. In a review of We Have Never Been Woke in The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Marks points out a small error in the book. Al-Gharbi relies on research by Richard Freeman to prove that a bust in the labor market for college graduates ignited the second Awokening. But al-Gharbi gets the date wrong: “Freeman’s comparison isn’t between 1958 and 1974. It’s between 1968 and 1974”—too late, Marks argued, to explain what al-Gharbi wants it to explain. (When I asked al-Gharbi about this, he acknowledged the mistake on the date but insisted the point still held: “The thing that precipitated the massive unrest in the 1960s was the changing of draft laws in 1965,” he said. “A subsequent financial crisis made it tough for elites to get jobs, ramping things up further.” He argued it was all the same crisis: an expanding elite “growing concerned that the lives and livelihoods they’d taken for granted are threatened and may, in fact, be out of reach.”)

Despite such quibbles, al-Gharbi’s framework remains a powerful one. By contrasting these periods, al-Gharbi stressed to me, we can not only understand what is happening now but also get a sense of the shape of wokenesses to come. As he sees it, “the way the conversation often unfolds is just basically saying wokeness is puritanism or religion,” he explained. “They think Puritanism sucks, or religion sucks,” he continued. But just saying that “wokeness is bad” is not “super useful.”

Indeed, one of the primary reasons such anti-woke reactions feel so unsatisfactory is that wokeness, not always but consistently, stems from the basic recognition of large-scale problems that really do exist. Occupy Wall Street addressed the staggering rise of inequality in 21st-century American life; Black Lives Matter emerged in response to a spate of reprehensible police and vigilante killings that rightfully shocked the nation’s conscience; #MeToo articulated an ambient sexism that degraded women’s professional lives and made us consider subtler forms of exploitation and abuse. The self-dealing, overreach, and folly that each of these movements begat does not absolve the injustices they emerged to address. On the contrary, they make it that much more urgent to deal effectively with these ills.

[Musa al-Gharbi: Police punish the ‘good apples’]

Any critique of progressive illiberalism that positions the latter as unprecedented or monocausal—downstream of the Civil Rights Act, as some conservatives like to argue—is bound not only to misdiagnose the problem but to produce ineffective or actively counterproductive solutions to it as well. Wokeness is, for al-Gharbi, simply the way in which a specific substratum of elites “engage in power struggles and struggles for status,” he said. “Repealing the Civil Rights Act or dismantling DEI or rolling back Title IX and all of that will not really eliminate wokeness.”

Neither will insisting that its adherents must necessarily operate from a place of bad faith. In fact, al-Gharbi believes it is the very sincerity of their belief in social justice that keeps symbolic capitalists from understanding their own behavior, and the counterproductive social role they often play. “It’s absolutely possible for someone to sincerely believe something,” al-Gharbi stressed, “but also use it in this instrumental way.”

Having been born into one minority group and converted to another as an adult, al-Gharbi has himself accrued academic pedigree and risen to prominence, in no small part, by critiquing his contemporaries who flourished during the last Great Awokening. He is attempting to outflank them, too, aligning himself even more fully with the have-nots. Yet his work is permeated by a refreshing awareness of these facts. “A core argument of this book is that wokeness has become a key source of cultural capital among contemporary elites—especially among symbolic capitalists,” he concedes. “I am, myself, a symbolic capitalist.”

The educated knowledge workers who populate the Democratic Party need more of this kind of clarity and introspection. Consider recent reports that the Harris campaign declined to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast in part out of concerns that it would upset progressive staffers, who fussed over language and minuscule infractions while the country lurched toward authoritarianism.

Al-Gharbi’s book’s title is drawn from Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, which famously argued for a “symmetrical anthropology” that would allow researchers to turn the lens of inquiry upon themselves, subjecting modern man to the same level of analytical rigor that his “primitive” and premodern counterparts received. What is crucial, al-Gharbi insists, “is not what’s in people’s hearts and minds.” Rather the question must always be: “How is society arranged?” To understand the inequality that plagues us—and then to actually do something about it—we are going to have to factor in ourselves, our allies, and our preferred narratives too. Until that day, as the saying about communism goes, real wokeness has never even been tried.

One of the mysteries of this election is how the Democrats approached polling day with a set of policies on gender identity that they were neither proud to champion—nor prepared to disown.

Although most Americans agree that transgender people should not face discrimination in housing and employment, there is nowhere near the same level of support for allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports—which is why Donald Trump kept bringing up the issue. His campaign also barraged swing-state voters and sports fans with ads reminding them that Kamala Harris had previously supported taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgery for prisoners. The commercials were effective: The New York Times reported that Future Forward, a pro-Harris super PAC, found that one ad “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” The Harris campaign mostly avoided the subject.

Since the election, reports of dissent from this strategy have begun to trickle out. Bill Clinton reportedly raised the alarm about letting the attacks go unanswered, but was ignored. After Harris’s loss, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts went on the record with his concerns. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” he told the Times. The recriminations go as far as the White House, where allies of Joe Biden told my colleague Franklin Foer that the current president would have countered Trump’s ads more aggressively, and “clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports.”

One problem: Biden’s administration has long pushed the new orthodoxy on gender, without ever really explaining to the American people why it matters—or, more crucially, what it actually involves. His officials have advocated for removing lower age limits for gender surgeries for minors, and in January 2022, his nominee for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, refused to define the word woman, telling Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, “I’m not a biologist.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

On sports—an issue seized on by the Trump campaign—Biden’s White House has consistently prioritized gender identity over sex. Last year, the Department of Education proposed regulations establishing “that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.” Schools were, however, allowed to limit participation in specific situations. (In April, with the election looming, this part of the Title IX revision was put on hold.) Harris went into the campaign tied to the Biden administration’s positions, and did not have the courage, or strategic sense, to reject them publicly. Nor did she defend them.  

The fundamental issue is that athletes who have gone through male puberty are typically stronger and faster than biological females. Rather than contend with that fact, many on the left have retreated to a comfort zone of claiming that opposition to trans women in women’s sports is driven principally by transphobia. But it isn’t: When trans men or nonbinary people who were born female have competed in women’s sports against other biological females, no one has objected. The same season that Lia Thomas, a trans woman, caused controversy by swimming in the women’s division, a trans man named Iszac Henig did so without any protests. (He was not taking testosterone and so did not have an unfair advantage.) Yet even talking about this issue in language that regular Americans can understand is difficult: On CNN Friday, when the conservative political strategist Shermichael Singleton said that “there are a lot of families out there who don’t believe that boys should play girls’ sports,” he was immediately shouted down by another panelist, Jay Michaelson, who said that the word boy was a “slur,” and he “was not going to listen to transphobia at this table.” The moderator, Abby Phillips, also rebuked Singleton, telling him to “talk about this in a way that is respectful.”

A few Democrats, such as Colin Allred, a Senate candidate in Texas, attempted to counter Republicans’ ads by forcefully supporting women’s right to compete in single-sex sports—and not only lost their races anyway, but were attacked from the left for doing so. In states such as Texas and Missouri, the political right is surveilling and threatening to prosecute parents whose children seek medical treatments for gender dysphoria, or restricting transgender adults’ access to Medicaid. In this climate, activists believe, the Democrats should not further jeopardize the rights of a vulnerable minority by legitimizing voters’ concerns. “Please do not blame trans issues or trans people for why we lost,” Sam Alleman, the Harris campaign’s LBGTQ-engagement director, wrote on X. “Trans folks have been and are going to be a primary target of Project 2025 and need us to have their backs now more than ever.”

During the race, many journalists wrote about the ubiquity—and the grimness—of the Trump ads on trans issues, notably Semafor’s David Weigel. But at the time, I was surprised how dismissive many commentators were about their potential effect, given the enormous sums of money involved. My theory was that these ads tapped into a larger concern about Democrats: that they were elitists who ruled by fiat, declined to defend their unpopular positions, and treated skeptics as bigots. Gender might not have been high on voters’ list of concerns, but immigration and the border were—and all the same criticisms of Democratic messaging apply to those subjects, too.

Not wishing to engage in a losing issue, Harris eventually noted blandly that the Democrats were following the law on providing medical care to inmates, as Trump had done during his own time in office. On the integrity of women’s sports, she said nothing.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

How did we get here? At the end of Barack Obama’s second term, gay marriage was extended to all 50 states, an achievement for which LGBTQ groups had spent decades campaigning. In 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County found that, in the words of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.” Those advances meant that activist organizations, with large staffs and existing donor networks, had to go looking for the next big progressive cause. Since Trump came to power, they have stayed relevant and well funded by taking maximalist positions on gender—partly in reaction to divisive red-state laws, such as complete bans on gender medicine for minors. The ACLU, GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and other similar groups have done so safe in the knowledge that they answer to their (mostly wealthy, well-educated) donors, rather than a more diverse and skeptical electorate. “The fundamental lesson I hope Dem politicians take from this election is that they should not adopt positions unless they can defend them, honestly, in a one-on-one conversation with the median American voter, who is a white, non-college 50-yr-old living in a small-city suburb,” the author (and Atlantic contributing writer) James Surowiecki argued last week on X.

Even now, though, many Democrats are reluctant to discuss the party’s positions on trans issues. The day after Moulton made his comments, his campaign manager resigned in protest, and the Massachusetts state-party chair weighed in to say that they “do not represent the broad view of our party.” But Moulton did not back down, saying in a statement that although he had been accused of failing “the unspoken Democratic Party purity test,” he was committed to defending the rights of all Americans. “We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue. We lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters and that needs to stop.”

Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democrats, faced a similar backlash. He initially told reporters, “There’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support,” but he quickly walked back the comments. “I extend my sincerest apologies to those I hurt with my comments today,” Hinojosa said. “In frustration over the GOP’s lies to incite hate for trans communities, I failed to communicate my thoughts with care and clarity.” (On Friday, he resigned, citing the party’s “devastating” election results in the state.)

The tragedy of this subject is that compromise positions are available that would please most voters, and would stop a wider backlash against gender nonconformity that manifests as punitive laws in red states. America is a more open-minded country than its toughest critics believe—the latest research shows that about as many people believe that society has not gone far enough in accepting trans people as think that it has gone too far. Delaware has just elected the first transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride. But most voters think that biological sex is real, and that it matters in law and policy. Instructing them to believe otherwise, and not to ask any questions, is a doomed strategy. By shedding their most extreme positions, the Democrats will be better placed to defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.