The election of 2016, both Donald Trump’s shocking victory and Bernie Sanders’s socialist insurgency, created a sudden swell of ideological ambition. Conservative thinkers rushed to fill in the outlines of Trumpian populism, building various intellectual frameworks for an incipient “post-liberal” age. Meanwhile among progressives there were two big projects: a cultural revolution in the name of antiracism and social justice that gathered force throughout Trump’s presidency, and a Sanders-inspired revival of big-spending social democratic blueprints.
These efforts seemed to promise that a great clash of visions would define the 2020s, pitting some version of a “new right” against some kind of post-neoliberal left.
But whatever the current election season is delivering, it isn’t a grand ideological debate. Instead, there is a flight from ideological ambition on both sides, with the Democratic candidate offering a mix of poll-tested incrementalism and nonspecific pabulum and the Republican candidate closing out his campaign with inconsistent pandering — tax cuts for some, legal pot for others, mass deportations but also free I.V.F.
So where do the ideologies that took shape between 2016 and 2020 actually stand in 2024?
Start with the Great Awokening that swept through American institutions in the summer following the murder of George Floyd. Social justice progressivism’s position at the moment might be characterized as a mixture of retreat and consolidation. The retreat is most obvious in national politics, where Kamala Harris would clearly like everyone to forget some of the more outré positions she staked out four years ago. But it’s apparent elsewhere in the culture as well: The reputations of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo have fallen on hard times, corporate America is cutting D.E.I. jobs and university leaders are trying to tiptoe back toward political neutrality.
At the same time the Awokening is hardly giving up all the territory it claimed. When The Economist produced a special report this week on wokeness’s supposed eclipse, the trends in various indicators — the use of ideological buzzwords in media and academia, say — were more likely to show a leveling-off or modest diminishment than a real decline. This suggests that wokeness is more in abeyance than full retreat, still potent despite being held at arm’s length by leading Democrats.
The same can’t be said of its fellow traveler, the neo-socialism that crested either with Sanders’s 2020 campaign or with the initial Biden administration spending spree. The Sanders left notched some policy victories in the latter period, but as a forward-looking movement it looks rudderless, its grand ambitions frustrated by divided government and by the left’s ancient enemy, inflation.
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