Is Wokism as Big a Threat as Trumpism?

I have great respect for Andrew Sullivan as a writer and thinker, and I agree with many of his views. In particular, I agree with him that “the cult of Trump and the cult of Woke” are both an abomination—the former a manifestation of the far-right, the latter a manifestation of the far left. Where he’s lost me is by engaging in what looks like moral equivalence by suggesting, as he does in his latest Weekly Dish, that these twin cults are an equal danger to the republic.

I respectfully disagree, and his newsletter shows why the attempt at equivalency fails on the evidence. The first part of his argument—about the danger of Trumpism—is completely compelling. He cites some of the latest outrages: Trump’s demands to indict innocent people on bogus charges of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, which was messed up by Trump’s own contractors. Trump’s unjustified and unsuccessful war with Iran, which has led to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. “ICE brutality” and “unprecedented corruption.”

Also, Sullivan points out that Trump is obsessed with building monuments to himself in Washington, which he quite rightly describes as “cockamamie—and grotesquely kitsch—construction projects.” As Sullivan notes, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times estimates that such projects take up roughly 70 percent of the president’s attention, which is 70 percent too high.

Where Andrew loses me is in his segue from President Donald J. Trump to Professor Jason Arday. Jason who? Safe to say, this professor of sociology who just quit his job at Cambridge University is not remotely as well-known, or as menacing, as the president of the United States.

Arday’s case is sad and pathetic and riveting. Recent reporting, in The Atlantic among other outlets, suggests that he was a fabulist who came up with increasingly implausible life-challenges that he supposedly overcame—including learning to read and write only as an adult—before becoming the youngest Black professor to win tenure at Cambridge. Now the whole house of cards has come crashing down: Arday has been accused of plagiarism and dishonesty. The Atlantic’s Daniel Engber got his hands on a copy of Arday’s book proposal and discovered that its description of his life differed in significant respects from the version contained in his memoir, which is about to be published in both the UK and the US.

Andrew is surely right that it’s an indictment of Cambridge University that someone who was so markedly unqualified to be a professor was nevertheless granted a coveted professorship. “Like Ibram X Kendi,” Sullivan writes, “his ‘work’ is on its face embarrassing, identitarian drivel.” I agree with Sullivan on that score. He may even be right that Arday’s case, even though it occurred in the UK, not the US, shows that “our current academic establishment—which underpins the entire rancid edifice of wokeness—is as big a farce and massive a fraud as Trump is.”

But let’s keep a sense of proportion here. Even if there are more Ardays in academia—and he seems a pretty extreme case—all of them collectively do not represent one-tenth of one percent of the threat that the president of the United States poses to America and the world. The woke ideologues may have influence in academic settings, which is unfortunate, but their influence in the “real world” is decidedly more limited.

The Republican Party has been entirely taken over by what Andrew calls “the cult of Trump.” But the “cult of woke” has not taken over the Democratic Party. Certainly the last two Democratic presidents (Barack Obama, Joe Biden) or the current Democratic leaders in Congress (Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries) or the leading contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination (Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Jon Ossoff, Mark Kelly, Pete Buttigieg, Andy Beshear) cannot be accused of being “wokesters.” One partial exception is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and I will stand corrected if AOC is the Democratic nominee in 2028, but I very much doubt she will be.

It’s true that Democratic Socialists like Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York are having a moment in the Democratic Party. And not just in a handful of safe blue seats and cities. A very left-wing, very anti-Israel candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, who could plausibly be described as a manifestation of the Woke movement, has just narrowly won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat in Michigan. It’s also true that Kamala Harris lost a winnable race against Trump in 2024 in part because her ultra-woke statements from 2020—e.g., about paying for gender transitions for prison inmates—came back to haunt her despite her own background as a prosecutor.

But last year also saw the election of very centrist Democratic candidates for governor in Virginia (Abigail Spanberger) and New Jersey (Mikie Sherrill). Democrats are competitive in multiple Senate races this year not only because Trump is so unpopular but also because they have chosen moderate candidates in such states as North Carolina, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, and Texas.

There is no doubt that the far-left, “woke” faction of the Democratic Party is growing, and that it presents a threat to the centrist direction the party needs to follow if it is to win in 2026, 2028 and beyond. But the far-left is far from taking over the Democratic Party the way the far-right Trumpist cult has taken over the Republican Party, and, for all of the ideological blind spots of the far left, it has not evinced a MAGA-like hostility to American democracy. That doesn’t meant that centrist Democrats should ignore the challenge from the far left; they need to be careful to learn the lessons of mainstream Republicans who have been rendered irrelevant by the unexpected triumph of the MAGA movement.

But to say there is a battle for the future of the Democratic Party now underway is very different from saying that the “woke” movement has taken it over. It clearly hasn’t, and it would be a mistake to suggest that it has, because this has become the excuse for some people to support Trump on the specious grounds that he’s better than the alternative. It’s also became a fallacious justification for right-wing attacks on academic freedom, including the Trump administration’s funding cuts targeting leading research universities, which fall hardest on STEM programs that are the least “woke” and the most important for U.S. economic competitiveness. By all means, battle the twin cults of Trump and woke, but don’t suggest they present an equal danger to the republic.