Win or Lose, Trump Has Turned the Tide of the Culture Wars

When Donald Trump won his surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election, he brought with him what political scientists call a "thermostatic backlash" in the culture, a phenomenon in which public opinion shifts in the opposite direction following significant policy changes or other seismic political events.

Before the pandemic accelerated things, Trump's first term in office was defined by cultural backlashes like the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, and a renewed focus within elite institutions on social justice, racial and gender issues.

In his last year in office, spurred by the arrival of Covid-19 and the murder of George Floyd weeks later, the country convulsed under intersecting debates about personal freedoms, racism and public health. In cities across the country, there were demands to "defund the police," yards signs proclaiming "no human is illegal" and "science is real."