The Left Will Never Recover from Donald Trump

Trump has shifted the Overton window in the culture away from woke, and it’s hard to imagine it shifting all the way back.

After hubris comes nemesis, and after the frenzied excesses of the woke revolution came Donald Trump.

The left didn’t lose everything with Trump’s second victory in 2024, but it did lose something that will be impossible to recover — broad cultural acquiescence to a radical agenda that briefly appeared to be sweeping all before it.

After the death of George Floyd, it seemed unlikely that five years later media outlets would be running rueful retrospectives about how the sweeping, nearly irresistible changes catalyzed by that event sputtered out or backfired.