Donald Trump’s Loss and the Battle Against Wokeness

Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden; 306 electoral votes for Biden and 232 electoral votes for Trump; it will be Joe Biden as President and Kamala Harris as Vice-President starting January 20, 2021.  In the Senate Republicans hold 50 seats and Democrats hold 48 seats with 2 run-off elections scheduled for January 5, 2021 in Georgia that will ultimately determine which party controls the Senate; the Democrats have to win both run-off elections in order to gain the majority in the Senate with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote in favor of the Democrats.  In the House the Democrats hold 222 seats and the Republicans hold 206 seats with 7 seats yet to be decided; a majority being 218 seats so Democrats hold the majority in the House.

When Donald Trump won the election in 2016 the House of Representatives was 236 Republican and 197 Democrat, the Senate was 51 Republican and 49 Democrat.  After the 2018 mid-term elections the House went to 197 Republican and 232 Democrat, the Senate went to 53 Republican and 47 Democrat.

Biden will come into the Oval Office with a small Democratic majority in the House and likely a small Republican majority in the Senate and with a Supreme Court that is 6 to 3 conservative.

My hopes when Donald Trump was first elected is that he represented a turning point for the culture, the beginning of a conservative reversal against social liberalism in the political realm, the high water mark of official social liberalism being the Obergefell vs. Hodges Supreme Court ruling mandating homosexual pseudo-marriage nationwide on June 26, 2015.

However, in reality, an even more aggressive Supreme Court ruling advancing social liberalism came on June 15, 2020 with the Bostock vs. Clayton County ruling that the term “sex” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to sexual orientation and gender identity; not just what biological sex a person was born as as male or female; this outlawing discrimination in employment not only based on whether one is male or female but also for sex related characteristics such as whether one is attracted to males or females or whether one presents themselves as male or female; this going along with the more extreme gender abolishen ideology that is currently being promoted.  It should be remembered, Bostock vs. Clayton County was decided on a 6 to 3 vote.

The MeToo movement got started in October 2017 increasing the paranoia regarding sexual harassment; an escalation in feminist male bashing leading to the downfall of a number of high profile liberal men and leading to a more generalized “awareness” and sensitivity and fear related to sexual harassment in the workplace.

On May 23, 2018 Paige Patterson got fired from the Presidency of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary by a MeToo related feminist rebellion; Paige Patterson being a major leader in the Southern Baptist Convention conservative resurgence going back to 1979.

It looks to me in retrospect that Donald Trump did not stop the liberal momentum in mainstream culture or law and now Donald Trump is out after only one term in office and soon Democrats will take over the White House.  As far as forward aggression in the wider culture it was the feminists who made progress, the Supreme Court in spite of Trump’s first two nominations still moved towards the gender abolishen ideology in Bostock vs. Clayton County, feminists winning new victories in the governance of religious bodies such as the Southern Baptist Convention is worrisome.

Something big is going on in the culture right now, the biggest thing in 50 years since 1970s second wave gender equality feminism, and that is gender abolishen or “wokeness,” the extreme claim that gender doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t matter whether you are homosexual or heterosexual, that you are whatever sex you proclaim yourself to be regardless of your anatomy or chromosomes.  To some extent we are just seeing more aggressive feminist vilification of men and traditional gender roles and attacks on masculinity itself but we are also seeing something new and strange and unreal where gender itself is under attack; being non-binary, being transgender, claiming that heterosexuality has no intrinsic moral purpose or meaning or importance.

In 1870 there was the Married Women Property Acts ending coverture.  In 1920 there was women’s right to vote.  In 1970 there was gender equality feminism.  Now in 2020 there is “wokeness,” gender abolishen, being non-binary and transgenderism, normalization of homosexuality.  A progression, every 50 years the next cultural revolution, and so it is about time we see what comes next after gender equality, and it is before us, the brave new world of no gender at all or purely self-chosen gender, however you want to see it, whatever you choose to be.

I wonder what the meaning of Donald Trump and the Republican Party in general is regarding this issue of the current cultural revolution of wokeness; I hope wokeness never establishes itself as mainstream and dominant like gender equality did after the 1970s.  Wokeness is the new gender equality in the sense that it is the successor to gender equality and will try to make itself unquestionable and dominant like the idea of gender equality succeeded in doing in the 1970s.  You might say that the Democratic Party is the party of wokeness and the Republican Party is the party of anti-wokeness but I wonder if the Republican Party is really committed in that way, committed to opposing this latest cultural revolution that is underway.

Donald Trump definitely represented a rebellion against the status quo, most particularly the status quo of the Republican establishment, and the major criticism against the Republican establishment was that it didn’t fight back hard enough against the never ending “progressivism” from the Democratic side.  I would like to interpret this as opposition to the Democratic cultural agenda but I wonder how true that really is and more importantly how durable and how committed the Republican opposition to the Democratic cultural agenda is.  The social conservative side is still on defense and has not stopped socially liberal “progress” yet even with Trump in the White House.

The major good news is that broad social indicators have improved since 2010; from 2010 to 2018 the divorce rate went from 52.6% to 44.1%, the proportion of married women in the workforce went from 61.0% to 58.2%, and the out-of-wedlock birth ratio went from 40.8% to 39.6%; this indicating a turn towards social conservatism in people’s personal behaviors regarding the family not seen since 1870.  So there is a resistance against ever increasing social disorder and social chaos in how people are leading their personal lives even while social liberalism in the political sphere and in terms of mainstream culture continues to march on.

In terms of observation however I don’t see effective push back against wokeness and the abolishen of gender yet and soon Joe Biden will be entering into the Presidency with his Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Related articles:
Donald Trump and the End of the Growth of Social Liberalism in the Political Realm
Donald Trump Seems to Herald the Third Social Conservative Backlash