Donald Trump’s triumphant return to the White House — propelled by what can only be described as the multiracial working class — seemed to mark the end of the social justice fervor that had characterized the preceding half decade. By Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, wokeness was well on the decline, and liberal and left-wing politicians, to say nothing of corporations, had begun quietly scaling back much of the maximalist racial rhetoric they had embraced just a few years earlier as they attempted a retreat from the culture wars. In 2021, progressives such as New York City council member Chi Ossé were issuing missives like “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council”; by the spring of this year, when confronted about this past statement, Ossé glibly responded, “Woke 1 was crazyyyy.”¹

The so-called vibe shift has continued among the cultural institutions that once served as the eager vanguard of 2020’s racial reckoning. The 2026 Whitney Biennial, according to Art in America, traded “identity politics for infrastructural interventions.”² Around the same time, the New York Times’ The Opinions podcast ran an episode titled “Did Wokeness Leave Us Worse Off?” in which participants laughed off various social justice excesses as “cringe.”³ Just a few years prior, staffers at the same paper had demanded mandatory anti-racism training for all employees and upbraided a colleague in a meeting for saying he liked Chick-fil-A sandwiches (“We don’t do that here. They hate gay people”).⁴

In my book Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism, which was published in the spring of 2025, I covered the explosion of anti-racist sentiment in the United States between the George Floyd protests of 2020 and Trump’s reelection in 2024. Today we clearly inhabit a moment distinct from that period, which gave rise to phenomena such as dozens of liberal and left-leaning institutions earnestly insisting that “worship of the written word” constituted a feature of “white supremacy culture.”⁵ But it remains unclear whether progressives have indeed abandoned the counterproductive assumptions on race and racism that shaped the last decade of left-wing politics and reached an apogee in 2020. A vibe shift is just that: a largely unquantifiable change in feeling and public mood, not a change in the class composition of the Left or of the Democratic Party, and certainly not any meaningful reorganization of political economy. Even as we recognize that Woke 1 — to borrow Ossé’s designation — is behind us, there is no guarantee that the beliefs that undergirded the histrionics of that era have changed.