The Great Exchange

Trading Democracy for the death of DEI

Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

Eight months ago, those of us actually paying attention—not just scrolling outrage bait about Biden’s age or the latest campus controversy, but genuinely tracking the systematic preparation for authoritarian rule—warned that Trump represented an existential threat to democratic governance. We were diagnosed with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The reasonable people explained, with infinite patience, that we were being hysterical. That institutions would hold. That checks and balances would constrain him. That we were catastrophizing over mean tweets and rough rhetoric.

We weren’t sharing viral clips of Biden stumbling over words or getting worked up about some college kid’s pronoun demands. We were reading the actual plans—the Schedule F preparations, the Jeffrey Clark memos, the systematic identification of loyalists willing to ignore legal constraints. We were watching what the people planning Trump’s return to power were actually doing and saying, tracking the ideological pipelines from Yarvin to Vance, the tech oligarchs pre-positioning themselves for the collapse of democratic oversight.

While everyone else was debating whether Biden was too old or whether DEI had gone too far, we were documenting the actual infrastructure being built to dismantle democracy itself.

Now grand juries are being empaneled to criminally investigate Barack Obama. The Justice Department has become a revenge machine. American soldiers kneel on tarmac to prepare ceremonial welcomes for war criminals. Our financial system is being handed over to crypto fraudsters who’ve paid their protection money to the regime. Civil servants who object on constitutional grounds are being purged. Corporate power lines up to pay tribute in a now-gold adorned Oval Office, each CEO performing their submission in increasingly vulgar displays. And those same reasonable people who were so concerned about Biden’s cognitive decline are explaining why this is all perfectly normal, actually, and besides—at least we don’t have to deal with diversity training anymore.

The Moral Panic That Ate Democracy

Let’s be clear about what happened. Yes, different people voted for Trump for different reasons—some were angry about inflation, others about immigration. But there was a specific class of commentators and self-described “center-left” intellectuals who spent years constructing an elaborate moral panic about “wokeism” as an existential threat to Western civilization.

Bari Weiss built a media empire on the premise that wokeism was a five-alarm fire for democracy. They genuinely convinced themselves that diversity training represented a greater threat than oligarchic capture, that pronoun etiquette was more dangerous than judicial corruption, that land acknowledgments were harbingers of totalitarianism while actual authoritarians were purchasing the machinery of state.

These sophisticated intellectuals should have known better. They had platforms and influence, yet chose to spend years directing attention toward minor cultural irritants while systematic preparation for authoritarian rule proceeded in plain sight. They provided the intellectual framework that let millions of Americans convince themselves they weren’t voting for fascism—they were voting against the “woke mob.”

Was there political and cultural excess on the left? Of course. Some of it was genuinely stupid. But treating it as existential—that was the lie that made everything else possible.

The Reichstag Fire of Our Time

Woke ideology became the Reichstag Fire of the 21st century—a real but limited phenomenon catastrophically inflated to justify the seizure of power. Like the Bolshevik threat that haunted late Weimar Germany, “wokeism” became the all-purpose boogeyman that justified any authoritarian measure, any institutional capture, any suspension of democratic norms.

Yes, there was a fire—some DEI trainings were genuinely stupid, some campus activists genuinely illiberal. But the response was to burn down the entire democratic order to stop it. The anti-woke commentariat played the role of those German conservatives who thought they could use the Nazis to defeat the communists—sophisticated intellectuals who provided respectable cover for forces they claimed to oppose. They spent years building the intellectual framework that let authoritarians claim they weren’t seizing power, they were just defending Western civilization from the woke mob.

Just as anti-communism justified everything from McCarthyism to military coups throughout the 20th century, anti-wokeism became the universal solvent for democratic norms in the 21st. Criminal investigations of political opponents? Necessary to stop woke prosecutors. Purging civil servants? Essential to eliminate DEI bureaucrats. Oligarchic capture of government? Better than letting the gender ideologists win.

The Availability Trap

There’s a psychological phenomenon that explains how even brilliant people became so catastrophically wrong: the availability heuristic. Our brains assess risk based on how easily we can recall examples. The more time you spend thinking about something, the more dangerous it seems—regardless of its actual threat level.

If you spend all your time reading about campus cancellations, documenting every diversity training gone wrong, collecting examples of progressive excess, eventually your brain becomes convinced this is the existential threat. Not because the evidence supports that conclusion, but because these examples are the most cognitively available.

The anti-woke intellectuals weren’t lying when they said they felt democracy was under threat. They’d trained their brains to see danger in the wrong places by immersing themselves completely in left-wing excess. Every problematic DEI training became another data point in an imagined authoritarian takeover. Every campus controversy confirmed their priors about totalitarian drift.

Meanwhile, the actual authoritarian takeover—happening through judicial appointments, regulatory capture, and systematic preparation for ending democratic governance—didn’t feel as threatening because they weren’t immersed in those stories. The Federalist Society’s judge pipeline was boring. Schedule F preparations were technical. The neoreactionary movement’s manifestos were abstract. These things didn’t create the same visceral response as a video of college students shouting down a speaker.

This is how smart people become useful idiots: not through stupidity but through selective attention. They created information ecosystems where campus politics was the main character and everything else was background noise.

The Attention Wars We Lost

The real divide wasn’t between left and right. It was between those consuming political entertainment and those tracking actual power. While millions rage-watched videos of college students saying silly things about gender, we were watching what Trump’s movement was actually planning—reading their own words, their own manifestos, their own explicit declarations of intent to end democratic governance.

The algorithm fed you what made you angry. The anti-woke intellectuals gave you sophisticated reasons to stay angry about the wrong things. And those of us warning about actual fascism? We were dismissed as hysterical by the very people who claimed to be defending liberal democracy.

Every hour spent debating whether “Latinx” was destroying language was an hour not spent noticing that Thiel’s network was placing judges who believe democracy is obsolete. Every essay about the authoritarian dangers of DEI was attention not paid to the actual authoritarians building parallel power structures. Every podcast about cancel culture was time not spent understanding that the real cancellation would be of democracy itself.

The Useful Idiots of Our Time

These anti-woke reactionaries became exactly what Lenin would have recognized: useful idiots. Not idiots in the sense of lacking intelligence—many are brilliant. But idiots in the sense of being useful to forces whose ultimate goals they would claim to find abhorrent.

Their sophisticated critiques of progressive excess provided intellectual cover for authoritarian movements that care nothing for liberal pluralism. They spent years training audiences to see university administrators as the primary threat to freedom rather than presidents who suspend constitutional rights or oligarchs who purchase Supreme Court justices.

The fascists didn’t need these intellectuals to actively support their program. They just needed them to keep everyone focused on the wrong threat while the real coup proceeded.

What Those Paying Attention Saw Coming

We saw it because we weren’t watching the circus—we were watching the crew dismantling the tent poles. While Bari Weiss was building The Free Press to combat the civilizational threat of diversity training. While others wrote books about the dangers of identity politics, we watched the Federalist Society systematically place judges who believe the unitary executive theory supersedes the Constitution.

We weren’t smarter. We just looked at what the actual authoritarians were saying and doing rather than obsessing over cultural annoyances. We read the actual words of people gaining power rather than fixating on some graduate student’s problematic tweet.

And now it’s here. Everything we warned about. The criminal investigations of political opponents. The military being deployed against citizens. The systematic replacement of democratic governance with algorithmic control. Corporate CEOs genuflecting in a gold-plated Oval Office, paying tribute to maintain their market positions. All of it, exactly as those diagnosed with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” warned it would be.

The Historical Verdict

History will see this exactly as it was: a society that fell for its own Reichstag Fire. Where the intellectual class was so obsessed with the manufactured threat of “woke totalitarianism” that they provided cover for actual totalitarianism. Where supposedly serious thinkers spent years constructing elaborate arguments about the danger of pronouns while oligarchs constructed the actual infrastructure of authoritarian rule.

The reality? The “woke excess” was just democracy being messy—requiring us to negotiate with people different from ourselves. The backlash was already happening through normal civil society channels. The notion that “woke ideology” was on the precipice of seizing total control was always nonsense.

But like the Bolshevik threat before it, the specter of wokeism justified everything. It became the perfect foil for authoritarians to weaponize the performance of liberal values like free speech—values they had no intention of upholding once in power. They didn’t need wokeism to actually threaten civilization; they just needed enough people to believe it did.

Now we’re heading toward a society where your political opposition gets criminally investigated. Where the military deploys against citizens. Where billionaires prostrate themselves before a gold-throne president to maintain their fortunes. Where democracy itself becomes a luxury we can no longer afford.

And the intellectuals who should have been warning us? Too busy warning about the totalitarian implications of inclusive language.

The Resistance That Remains

Democracy can still be saved. But not by taking these people seriously as legitimate political actors. Not by treating transparent power grabs as normal policy disagreements. Not by pretending criminal investigations of political opponents are just “hardball politics.”

And definitely not by listening to the same intellectuals who spent the last decade missing the actual threat because they were chasing phantoms. They had their chance to defend democracy and spent it providing intellectual cover for its destroyers.

The first step in resistance is refusing to normalize what’s happening. Stop looking for reasonable interpretations of unreasonable actions. Stop pretending there’s legitimate debate with people openly dismantling democratic governance. Stop treating the vulgar displays of corporate submission in the Oval Office as normal business relations.

Resistance remains possible. Not through violent revolution—that’s what they want, an excuse for harsher crackdowns. But through the simple, difficult act of refusing to pretend this is normal. Through maintaining the capacity for moral recognition. Through remembering that two plus two equals four, no matter what the algorithm says.

The Joke’s On All of Us

Eight months ago, it was “derangement” to predict exactly what’s happening now. Today, it’s “hyperbole” to notice it’s happening. Tomorrow, it will be illegal to mention it happened.

But we don’t have to accept tomorrow. We can refuse normalization today. We can stop taking seriously the people who traded democracy for the death of diversity initiatives. The bitter irony—that those who complained most about “cancel culture” enabled the cancellation of democracy itself—doesn’t have to be the story’s end.

Those of us who saw it coming aren’t geniuses. We just looked at what the people planning authoritarian capture were actually saying and doing, rather than obsessing over campus controversies. We read their words, their plans, their explicit intentions—while others constructed elaborate theories about why campus activists were the real threat.

Welcome to the future the anti-woke commentariat helped create while fighting their imaginary war against their imaginary Bolsheviks.

But we don’t have to accept it. Resistance starts with refusing to be gaslit. With insisting what we’re seeing is what we’re seeing. With remembering those of us who predicted this weren’t deranged—we were right.

And if we were right about what was coming, maybe we’re right about how to stop it.

But please, tell us more about how the real problem was woke college students.