In June, I found myself in the Rocky Mountains, strolling from one panel to another as a media fellow at the Aspen Ideas Festival. For all the serene musings of think-tankers and entrepreneurs shared on stage, the most valuable lesson I took from the conference came from the other fellows.
But it had nothing to do with the sanguine message from the formal panels: that neoliberalism is vastly underrated and that our elites should be trusted to steer the country back on track. The real revelation was that my fellow professional-class 30-somethings haven’t been budged at all by the “vibe shift.” They remain as committed as ever to pronoun declarations, land acknowledgments, identity-based breakout groups, and other hallmarks of “peak woke.”
This puts my generation at odds with just about everyone else, from the populist Left to the tech Right to normie voters in both parties. For other cohorts, the woke pot boiled over and cooled down by circa 2022. But for educated Millennials, it stayed on simmer.
It isn’t remotely surprising, for instance, that Democrats opened their annual summer meeting with a land acknowledgment last month. As the clip went viral on social media, party strategist James Carville begged, “Please stop this, in the name of a just, merciful God.” Democrats — who were walloped in the swing states by President Trump last year, who alienated voters by pushing the culture war too far Left, and whose brand is crashing in opinion polls — seem practically suicidal in these moments.
When in 2024 the Trump campaign ran a swing-state ad blitz featuring the devastating line “Kamala is for they/them,” the leading Kamala Harris super PAC found that the spot “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” The ad targeted a Harris pledge in 2019 to publicly fund transgender medical care for detained illegal immigrants as the woke fever was rising ahead of the 2020 Democratic primary. It’s not unusual for primary stances to backfire in a general election, of course, but by 2024, the country’s mood had shifted dramatically.
An Economist survey published last fall added research to the Trump campaign’s instinct that peak woke had already been reached by general-election season. “The Economist has attempted to quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business,” the magazine wrote last September. “Almost everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021-22, and has been declining ever since.”
The authors went on: “We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (gss), Pew, and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021.”
Why, then, would Democrats smarting from a loss with some very obvious causes still allow the party to be branded by causes that are partially responsible for tanking the brand? The reason will haunt Democrats long into the future, and it’s why the problem cropped up in the first place. Affluent Millennials, whose early adulthood was rocked by the Great Recession, got addicted to cheap virtue-signal opium as their source of meaning and purpose. Their worldviews are built on this foundation of sand, which is why “woke” isn’t quite sticking with Gen Z, and why it never dominated among older Americans.
“It isn’t remotely surprising … that Democrats opened their annual summer meeting with a land acknowledgment.”
Trump’s rise accelerated the realignment of educated, affluent voters away from Republicans and toward Democrats. This happened just a few years after Charles Murray, in his book Coming Apart, documented how socioeconomic sorting into “superzip” bubbles was creating vast cultural divides between the rich and the poor. The more people who went to college filtered into high-earning careers, the more they settled in the same neighborhoods, the more they watched the same shows, read the same books, and ate at the same restaurants.
The sticky cultural progressivism from Ivory Towers carried over from classrooms into board rooms and newsrooms. But that’s the thing about an ideology that insists one comply with an ever more radical set of rules: dissenters are purged to the point where it becomes impossible to assess the political climate because disagreement is dismissed as bigotry. Before you know it, Trump is back in the Oval Office.
At a panel on school choice in Aspen, Tommy Schultz of the American Federation for Children, asked audience members how many went to private school or sent their kids to private school. Most of the festivalgoers in the crowd raised their hands. This, Schultz noted, set them dramatically at odds with the rest of the country.
Throughout the week, well-meaning, ambitious fellows broke themselves into identity-based chats, posted their pronouns, and cheered for invocations of privilege. I jumped off a shuttle having chatted with the driver about Aspen’s hollowed-out middle class to see a Pride flag on a taco truck and a woman pairing her cowboy hat with Louis Vuitton. The vibe was cowboy chic and, between the Balmain and Goyard, Birkenstocks and Broncos, started to feel like elites wearing the skin suits of the people they’d conquered. In fairness, one panelist in a trade discussion seemed almost ashamed to admit, “I’m part of the neoliberal order!”
All that is to say, it’s clearly true whatever postmodern fever gripped the culture five years ago has broken. Gen Z is diffuse, with no monoculture. Boomers are drowning in Facebook-slop-fueled anger. Affluent millennials, though, are clinging to the ideas that soothed them through the tumult of the Great Recession, the post-9/11 wars, and the fragmenting of their youth by the advent of smartphones. And the problem for Democrats, who face the prospect of infuriating their colleagues and activist class, is that it’s really hard to tell an interest group or employee you’ve indulged for years that they can’t do a land acknowledgment anymore.
