Bent Out of Shape

Even as we contend with this regime, there is already a battle over what kind of reckoning we will have for this age of injustice.

From the campaign trail, to the courts, to social media, to the words and topics chosen by our most vaunted media outlets, there is a fight over what will be considered within the bounds of reason when Democrats return to power and begin the essential work of cleaning up this disaster and reimagining American democracy.

A sentence in the second paragraph of a recent article in The Atlantic made me recoil in disbelief.

The piece was an otherwise fine work of journalism about Donald Trump’s desire to put his face, name, and gaudy imprint everywhere he can get his tiny hands. From banners on government buildings, to national park passports, to legal tender, to his ridiculous arch and ballroom. It noted fitting historical comparisons for this ego-driven narcissism: Hafez al-Assad, Mussolini, and Mao Zedong. What lovely company.

But it was this sentence, used to set up the argument, that had me, well, bent out of shape: “Donald Trump has bent many democratic traditions, but this one, he’s discarded altogether.”

Is “bent” really the verb we should use to describe the wanton destruction this vain, corrupt madman has inflicted on our democratic traditions? Perhaps some of the flagpoles rioters used to bash police officers guarding the Capitol were bent during the assault, which was itself the direct result of Trump bending that quaint democratic tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

I do understand the need to find new ways to describe what we are seeing. And I recognize that the outrages of this era can make writing about them feel like an act of hyperbole; I remember when the press was having a serious debate about whether to call Trump’s fabrications what they actually are: lies.

But words matter. And I worry that if we don’t describe these times, and this man’s actions, with the naked clarity they demand, even when the truth is disgusting to look at, we will be sanitizing it with false equivalence, normalization, and double standards.

I feel pretty confident that the MAGA era will go down in flames. Trump is a singularly unpopular person and is being repudiated by a growing number of voters. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it will be easy or that there won’t be a lot of pain and suffering in the process.

And if defeating Trump and his confederacy of corrupt autocrats is the immediate necessity, we can’t lose track of preparing for what comes next. This includes finding the language to defend the radical reckoning that must follow.

Because there will be a rush from those who appeased or conspired with Trump to distance themselves from the ashes of the dumpster fire they helped make possible. They will argue that he was an anomaly and that we need to get back to the America we had before. But that America was a big part of the problem, because it was the country that made Trump possible.

And yet there will be many voices saying this necessary process of calling MAGA and those who served or collaborated with the Trump regime to account is too radical, that it represents dangerous overreach.

We must recognize that the story America tells about itself has always favored the points of view of the privileged and the powerful. And the eras in which we, as a nation, became more just and democratic have necessarily been times of disruption and even violence. The forces that control and reap the benefits of the status quo almost never relinquish their position without a fight.

The Civil War is, of course, the obvious example. But the same pattern runs through the overturning of Jim Crow, the expansion of rights for labor, women, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and a wide variety of groups that have been dismissed, derided, and denigrated as “other.”

During eras of strain, there are always countervailing forces, acting as a stretched rubber band, trying to pull society back to what came before. We can see the groundwork already being laid by the segments of society that made Trump possible. It is like a test run for the arguments and tactics they will use against whatever comes in the wake of his power.

On social media and elsewhere online, there has been a lot of chatter recently about what is being called “Woke 1.0,” that relatively brief period of social activism in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. There is currently a lot of energy being expended by right-wing commentators and politicians to characterize that era as one of ideological excess that did lasting damage to American society. They harp on statements like “defund the police” and other sloganeering that was prevalent in progressive circles at the time.

Democrats can look back and see that some of this rhetoric feels discordant today. Even progressive stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have acknowledged that they wouldn’t use some of the same language now. This isn’t new. Kamala Harris was also forced to answer for statements that were widely characterized as extreme, often through a press frame shaped in no small part by conservative talking points.

The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recently wrote a column titled “Yes, Woke 1.0 Was Crazy. Now Where’s the Accountability?” In it, he lists a number of people he says were destroyed or permanently scarred by “a system of enforced ideological conformity, policed by social bullying and institutional coercion (or cravenness), which damaged and sometimes even ended reputations, careers, and at least one man’s life.”

There is a bit of truth in what Stephens says. Every mass movement, even one driven by a desire for social justice, has its excesses and unwarranted victims. But the litany of damage he attributes to “woke” excesses pales in comparison to what MAGA has unleashed, and what we see by the hour.

Stephens anticipates that response, writing that Trump and his allies may be “just as bad as Woke 1.0 or far worse,” before adding, “I’ve denounced them, too, but that’s pure whataboutism.” But you can see what he is doing. He treats the two as parallel forms of ideological excess while declaring any comparison of their actual severity illegitimate. That framing is itself the epitome of false equivalence. And the goal is clear: attack the left and try to defang the far more consequential reckoning that will be necessary for what MAGA has done before that reckoning even begins.

So why is there so much heat around this topic in August 2026? Because the reactionary forces in America are already trying to set the terms of the debate for when Democrats return to power. They want any serious effort to clean up this mess and hold people accountable to carry the stigma of Woke 2.0. You can already imagine the coverage on Fox News, and how that framing might seep into even mainstream publications inclined to use verbs like “bent” to describe Trump’s attack on democratic norms.

Because let’s be very clear: if Stephens wants to talk about the damage caused by a movement that is crazy and out of control, and if he is really interested in accountability for those who have been harmed, then there is a list that is a lot longer and graver than the handful of academics and journalists he says lost jobs, careers, or reputations.

What about the American citizens killed by ICE? Or the immigrants who have died in detention?

What about the hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children, researchers estimate have died because of the destruction of USAID?

What about the Black officers and women officers removed from military promotion lists by a Defense Secretary determined to purge anything he considers DEI?

What about the people who will get sick or die because protections for clean air, clean water, food, medicine, and workplace safety have been stripped away?

What about the scientists who have lost their funding? The journalists who have been attacked? The career public servants fired en masse? The universities, law firms, nonprofits, and other institutions threatened with the power of the federal government if they refuse to bend the knee?

What about immigrants denied due process, families torn apart by deportation, transgender Americans whose basic rights have been targeted, and citizens whose ability to vote is being deliberately made more difficult?

And if we are really going to start keeping a ledger of injustice, why begin in 2020? So-called Woke 1.0, at its best, was an attempt to reckon with the foundational sins of the republic and the injustices that followed: slavery and Jim Crow, the dispossession of Native peoples, the exclusion of women, the exploitation of workers, the persecution of LGBTQ Americans, and generations of discrimination whose consequences still shape millions of lives.

My younger daughter Helena started high school last week, and one of her required courses is ethnic studies. In 2021, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to make the course a graduation requirement, beginning with the class of 2028. There has been plenty of controversy over the requirement, much of it echoing the argument that Woke 1.0 went too far. Shouldn’t students take something more useful?

After the first day of school, my daughter wanted to talk about the course’s first reading. It was an essay by the noted political scientist Francis Fukuyama, written in response to a statement JD Vance made in his acceptance speech for the vice presidential nomination. Fukuyama homed in on this line: “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms,” and used it to trace a nuanced history of how the boundaries of American citizenship and belonging have changed. He discussed the Civil War amendments, including the principle of birthright citizenship, and wrote movingly about the questions of belonging he faced growing up half-Japanese American in a nearly all-white neighborhood.

I majored in American history and literature in college, and this is exactly the kind of essay we would have read in a seminar. It is also the type of nuanced reframing of American mythology that MAGA forces rail against as dangerous ideological indoctrination.

Watching my daughter wrestle with the cross-currents that define America’s past, present, and future, I see how much of what is now derided as “woke” was essential. And the forces trying to stifle an honest accounting of our history are making a deliberate and cynical play to control the future by eliminating the truth from the past.

In some superficial ways, Woke 1.0 might have gone too far, but in the most important ways it didn’t go far enough. The fact that we now have ascendant white Christian nationalism running the government, rapacious corporations controlling so much of our economy, and right-wing tech billionaires controlling the platforms and algorithms that increasingly shape what we see and hear is proof enough that the deeper reckoning was never complete.

This is a fight for our future, and we need language equal to the stakes. Authoritarians will demonize whatever we call a mass movement to make the United States more fair and just. They have attacked liberal, progressive, and woke. Call it whatever we want. Fighting back and holding these people accountable is not crazy. It is exactly what our democracy needs if we are going to continue to keep it.

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