Trump As A Woke Radical

Trumpism as radical extremism

1 Trump as a woke radical

Donald Trump is a Republican. The people who vote for him are very rarely left-wing. Almost the entire conservative establishment rallied behind him. While he’s not quite a traditional Republican, and not exactly a conservative, he’s seen as broadly in the right-wing intellectual traditional. At least, insofar as Trump is seen in any intellectual tradition—a rather doubtful proposition.

Now, it’s true that Trump is right-wing in the modern sense. He has remade the Republican party in his image. Trump is right-wing in the same sense that Kafka is Kafkaesque—the term gets its meaning from its resemblance to him. The Republican party has become a cult of personality built around Trump and is thus no longer distinct from him.

But despite being right-wing, Trump ideologically has little in common with the great conservative minds. Trumpism and Reaganism are as different as two ideologies can be. Trump’s ideology has much more in common with the woke radicalism of Kendi than traditional conservatism.

This may seem like a rather extreme claim, a bit like declaring Hillary Clinton to be the ideological twin of Steve Bannon. However, despite its initial surprisingness, it happens to be true. While there are, of course, differences between Trump and the typical left-wing radical, there are a shocking and disturbing number of similarities. The features that are most alarming about wokism are shared by Trumpism.