Authored by Thomas F. Powers via American Greatness,

It is too early to know with any precision what the long-term effects of the Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts will be.We might take our bearings on that score by considering the fate of essays written by prominent law professors in the1950sand1960stouting this or that discrete step in the unfolding of the civil rights revolution—the latest Supreme Court decision, and so on—as if each were an all-or-nothing earth-shattering decision.

What we can now say with certainty is thatwhat the Trump administration has done on the DEI front representsthe beginningof a general reorientation of our politics away from wokeness. One need only survey whatprominentleadersofthe Leftaresayingabout thepolitical pricethe Democratic Party has paid on that score. What they are saying indicates a large political change, even if the Dems prove incapable of unmooring themselves from woke politics for the near future.

The first sign of this reorientation is a generalshiftin thepopular mindset: the spell of woke politics has broken.This matters because it was always the way in which woke politics commanded assent in the citizens’ hearts and minds that was crucial. That assent has been questioned or denied now in a broad way, with the backing of public authority (Supreme Court decisions,executive orders,agency directives), and with widespread public support. Wokeness’s public hectoring, punitiveness, and censoriousness, and the extremism of many of its positions on the issues, is unpopular at the level of 70–30 or 80–20opinionpolldivides.

We ought to be confident, therefore, that the broken spell of wokeness augurs a permanent shift in our public life.What that means precisely, however, depends very much on how we understand wokeness andwhat is donegoing forwardto ensurethat woke excess does not return. Now, if, as many say, wokeness was the product of cultural Marxism (Christopher Rufoand a host of followers) or postmodernism (Jordan Petersonand another host of followers), then all that needs to be done is to combat bad ideas. On these interpretations, our universities in particular, and other cultural institutions where the influence of such ideas holds sway, need our attention.Certainly, cultural Marxism and postmodernism represent bad ideas, and the world would be a better place without their influence.

But if what wokeness represents above all is the explosive power of the civil rights revolution and the influence of an aggressive leftist interpretation of anti-discrimination politics, asanotherbandofinterpretersclaims(I among them),then the task ahead is much bigger and much more difficult.

Trump’s anti-DEI measures, on this view, would represent only the first step in a broader campaign of civil rights reform. One could look long and hard without seeing much in the way of evidence for any such thing so far. Are these current efforts against DEI an illusion, a brief moment of political opportunism that will recede as public hatred of wokeness recedes—only to return in a few years when the next wave of anti-discriminatory passion rises up?

I don’t think that worry is justified.The anti-DEI campaign to date will have enduring consequencesbecause even if it is not yet clear that what is at stake in DEI is civil rights politics, the current reorientation can only have the effect of raising our awareness of the role of anti-discrimination in our public life. This has begun on the all-importantmoralplane of civil rights politics. Precisely by breaking the spell of its puritanical commands, our anti-woke moment is reworking something essential to civil rights politics. Because public morality is the crucial filter of the human mind, a shift at this level will change what we see, what we think, and what we think we can say.Anti-woke sentiment, backed by changes in the law, is providing a moment of political, cultural, and mental freedom that will necessarily lead, after many decades during which this was not possible, to a general reappraisal of the moral power and the meaning of the civil rights revolution.

Morality, the Problematic Core of Anti-Discrimination Politics

The civil rights regime was always a collection of disparate, crucial elements. anti-discrimination politics began with the discrete groups who claim its protections (by now an overwhelming majority of the population), but it has been bolstered by laws and institutions and by a set of supporting “ideas” (critical race theory, postmodernist “difference” theory, critiques of “prejudice” by sociologists and anthropologists in the early twentieth century, e.g.). Its modes and orders have been advanced further in a hundred independent corollary efforts of cultural change throughout modern life (in the professions and in the domains of art, literature, and the like).

Source: ZeroHedge News