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.

For one thing, despite the Trump administration’s aggressive attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and “wokeness,” plenty of powerful institutions are still openly invested in the same politics they practiced in 2020. Wealthy foundations that underwrite the nonprofit sector and various cultural initiatives, such as the Ford Foundation and the Marguerite Casey Foundation, have explicitly reaffirmed their commitments to racial justice and together continue to pour millions into race-focused projects. And while some corporations have rolled back or modified the DEI programs they adopted in 2020 (to much outcry from liberals), plenty of others have doubled down on theirs or simply renamed them to avoid unwanted scrutiny from the Trump administration. “The number one way that companies have responded to DEI scrutiny and backlash is adjusting language,” one industry insider told The Washington Post.⁶

Most notably, investors BlackRock and Vanguard — shareholders of some of the largest, most profitable companies in the United States — have publicly reiterated their support for DEI and voted to continue pursuing it at the companies they own, even despite the threats from the Trump administration. As one partner at the legal firm Vinson & Elkins put it, “Just because DEI is falling out of the political winds doesn’t mean the votes have changed.”⁷ The sociologist Frank Dobbin has shown that private sector diversity management (or what we now call DEI) is not only continually evolving, adapting, and rebranding but has steadfastly weathered attacks from conservative administrations since at least the 1980s.⁸ Whether a given president is or isn’t committed to diversity in the workplace appears to have little bearing on what businesses choose to do in this regard; for example, diversity programs at large corporations ballooned under Ronald Reagan, who was notoriously hostile to the idea of affirmative action. Another more recent study has similarly indicated that the main driver of DEI at a given corporation is not which political party is in power or whether the company in question is public-facing but simply whether its leadership likes DEI or not. All of this suggests that — contrary to some progressives’ claims that big business “co-opted” anti-racism or was pressured into adopting DEI measures by consumer activism in 2020 — plenty of those who run corporate America were and are quite comfortable with the idea of diverse workforces, C-suites, and boardrooms.

A more immediate problem than a possible return of wokeness in the future, however, is the ongoing repercussions of the last half decade of progressives’ race politics. For years, a cherished line on the Left has been that we must center both class and race, and that anti-racism and anti-capitalism are inseparable and mutually reinforcing. Though this sentiment is undoubtedly well-intentioned, a series of progressive policy blunders since 2020 have made clear that it’s also an increasingly useless abstraction that, in practice, leads to self-defeating and anti-majoritarian politics.

In the throes of the racial reckoning, the Democratic Party — with the blessing and encouragement of its progressive wing — launched a multiyear experiment in attempting to update New Deal–style universalist programs with twenty-first-century racial equity flourishes. Joe Biden took office not only with a pledge to be the most pro-labor president since FDR and to pass an ambitious infrastructure bill but also by forming an administration that held the explicit goal of pursuing racial equity.⁹ Biden, who was the first president to proudly use the phrase “systemic racism” in his inaugural address, appointed more than five hundred advisers with a mandate to “focus on race” and signed an executive order directing all federal agencies to commit to a “whole-of-government approach to equity” in his first year in office. This approach not only grew the ranks of the DEI bureaucracy within the federal government; it also generated several splashy initiatives, including a $1 billion pilot program overseen by Pete Buttigieg to “build racial equity into roads” and a race-targeted debt relief program for black farmers that at least one advocate characterized as “reparations.”¹⁰

Of course, just a few years later, Trump would run — and win — on a platform that was explicitly hostile to these aims. Upon taking office, he made the rollback of DEI a highly visible centerpiece of his presidency. Biden’s various racial equity initiatives soon became a convenient avenue by which the Trump administration moved to gut government programs and shrink the federal workforce. This type of attack should have come as little surprise, given that means-tested programs in the United States have always been unstable, subject to popular resentment, and politically vulnerable. Why would it have been any different when the means being tested was race?

For instance, in May 2025, the Trump administration announced the end of federal funding for the upgrade of septic tanks in Lowndes County, Alabama, citing the program as an example of “illegal DEI.” Lowndes County is a poor, rural area where residents have struggled for decades with inadequate or nonexistent wastewater infrastructure and septic tanks prone to flooding during heavy rains, along with all the attendant public health risks. In 2023, the Biden administration had dedicated funding to the construction of new flood-resistant septic tanks for the region, and Trump’s abrupt cutoff of this funding predictably (and rightfully) incensed the region’s lawmakers. “This agreement had nothing to do with DEI,” Alabama Representative Terri Sewell said in a statement condemning the administration’s decision.¹¹ “It was about addressing a public health crisis that has forced generations of children and families to endure the health hazards of living in proximity to raw sewage.”

Sewell was correct that the program to fund septic tank upgrades in Lowndes County should have had nothing to do with DEI. Unfortunately, when the Biden administration approved the funding, it had also taken pains to conceive of and publicize the program not as a straightforward public health project but instead as a civil rights and racial justice initiative meant to address “environmental racism,” based on the fact the population of Lowndes County was majority black. “The agreement we are announcing today marks a new day for Black people in Lowndes County,” a spokesperson for Biden’s Department of Justice said in an announcement of the funding that year.¹² “The fight for environmental justice is also a fight for racial justice.” This framing was applauded by activist groups and commentators, including one environmental journalist who called the program “a shining example of what a whole-government approach can look like in practice” in The New York Times.¹³

In their eagerness to transmute an otherwise uncontroversial infrastructure program into a racial justice issue, in other words, Democrats rendered their own program much more vulnerable to Republican attacks. The racialized framing of the Lowndes County sewage crisis moreover artificially and needlessly siloed its residents from rural Americans of all races who suffer near-identical problems in disinvested areas across the country. Far from being a dilemma confined to Alabama’s Black Belt, inadequate wastewater infrastructure shamefully plagues many Native American reservations as well as large swaths of Appalachia, including parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. In McDowell County, West Virginia, for example, an estimated 67 percent of households lack a working sewage system and are instead forced to rely on straight piping, the practice of running PVC pipes from drains inside homes into ditches or creeks to dispose of unprocessed waste.¹⁴ McDowell County is desperately poor — in fact, its median income is even lower than Lowndes County’s — but, with a population that’s 83 percent white, it is all but invisible in the racial equity schematic championed by Democrats and so many progressives.

The weaknesses of the Biden administration’s short-lived racial equity approach to the Lowndes County crisis are even more striking when you consider that the last truly comprehensive set of federal investments in rural America occurred nearly a century ago during the New Deal. Through a combination of mass employment and public works programs, the New Deal succeeded in electrifying rural America and building roads, public buildings, and water and sewage lines that still form the backbone of so much rural infrastructure today. The wastewater crises in Lowndes County, McDowell County, and elsewhere are proof of how badly the United States needs another program of this scale to reverse decades of rural disinvestment. It’s a bitter irony that so many progressive commentators over the last decade or so have perpetuated the myth that the New Deal was racially exclusionary in order to call for explicitly race-targeted measures like the ones advanced under Biden.¹⁵

Lingering attachments to the racial equity paradigm have also threatened to undermine the efficacy of progressive politics in major metropolitan areas. The Zohran Mamdani mayoral administration in New York City is currently the most prominent and successful example of left-wing governance in the country and is, by all accounts, working to foreground and address the cost-of-living crisis that affects working people of all races. This universalist orientation has recently come under fire, not only from centrist Democrats but from prominent progressives who have accused the mayor of an insufficient focus on race. This spring, political strategist and reparations advocate Tyrik Washington told The New York Times that the “conversation has moved away from race, and has now, because of Mamdani, been replaced by a class analysis. . . .  That has never been beneficial for Black people.” Jumaane Williams — a self-described democratic socialist who has been supported in the past by the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — likewise said, “I have found that the left has often had a problem with prioritizing what race means and usually just goes to class.”¹⁶

Complicating matters further is that several of Mamdani’s staffers and allies — and in fact Mamdani himself — have a history of espousing similar views on race; one staffer, for instance, was raked over the coals by the right-wing press for having once called homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy.”¹⁷ The point is not to pillory these people for past statements but rather to note that they reveal the extent to which race-first ideology dominated the way progressives talked and thought about inequality for a very long time. And even if Mamdani and other left-wing lawmakers now sincerely wish to trade this kind of divisive particularism for a more universalist approach, they may find it difficult to extricate themselves from the deeply entrenched progressive NGO networks that continue to boost such ideas.

Among other challenges, Mamdani remains at least partially beholden to an existing racial equity bureaucracy launched by former mayor Bill de Blasio, who appointed the NYC Commission on Racial Equity (CORE) to develop citywide racial justice initiatives in the wake of 2020’s reckoning. CORE devised a ballot measure to form “an Office of Racial Equity, with a Chief Equity Officer; establish a Commission on Racial Equity; and require the city government and city agencies to produce Racial Equity Plans every two years,” which passed in 2022. To comply with these requirements, in April of this year, the Mamdani administration released the city’s first official racial equity plan, a massive 375-page document that proposed a variety of measures ranging from mandatory anti-racism training for all city employees to reserving a percentage of city contracts for minority-owned businesses. Using the same rhetoric as the Biden administration, Mamdani called the plan “the first step in developing a whole-of-government approach” to racial equity.¹⁸

But a group of policymakers soon objected. CORE issued a response charging that the plan had failed to sufficiently disaggregate data by race or provide a racial equity agenda for every city agency (there are more than one hundred). This rebuke was cosigned by the New York City Council Progressive Caucus, a body that includes DSA-endorsed councilmembers Tiffany Cabán and Alexa Avilés. Speaking with Forbes, CORE executive director Linda Tigani stated, “As a country, as a city, government has managed to create equity programs that will exclude African Americans but include all other communities of color.”¹⁹ Though she cited no examples of these supposedly exclusionary programs, the message that the mayor’s policies were somehow shortchanging black residents was clear, echoing the criticisms lobbed by Williams, Washington, and others. These combined attacks appear to have had some effect: in a recent interview, Mamdani indicated that he would consider supporting cash reparations for black New Yorkers pending the recommendations of a forthcoming CORE report on reparations.²⁰

On the national level, as Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted and liberals have regained confidence, they too have shown themselves willing to entertain the kind of zero-sum racial brokerage politics that have trailed the Mamdani administration. This was on full display in July of this year when Democratic Party leaders convened to debate which state should hold the first Democratic primary in the 2028 presidential nomination process. One top contender was Nevada, a swing state home to the kind of diverse, union-dense, and heavily working-class electorate that the party needs to attract to win national races. But Christale Spain, the chair of the Democratic Party in South Carolina, argued that selecting Nevada to lead the primary season would constitute a serious racial offense. “If Nevada gets elevated over South Carolina, it would be because of their Latino vote,” Spain said. “So you would then be telling Black voters that you matter less than brown voters. And I refuse to believe that our party wants to send any type of message like that.”²¹ Though South Carolina has voted Republican in every presidential election since the 1970s, Spain’s veiled threat worked. The Democratic National Committee opted for racial symbolism, choosing South Carolina to lead the primaries to “prioritize Black voters,” as NPR reported.²²

Such incidents demonstrate the stickiness of anti-racism among elites, even as the social justice fervor that characterized 2020 has died down among the broader public. Progressive activists have been likewise trapped in their own kind of holding pattern: while many have quietly backtracked from the worst excesses of racial essentialism, fewer have been willing to say in plain language exactly what was wrong with a sentiment like Ibram X. Kendi’s infamous assertion that “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”²³ And others have doubled down. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s inauguration, several commentators insisted that any left-wing criticism of 2020’s racial reckoning and of “wokeness” was tantamount to accommodating the Right, if not an outright endorsement of fascism. New York magazine columnist Rebecca Traister, for example, accused leftists critical of identity politics of shortsightedness. “The anti-woke diagnosis of what’s ailing Democrats is not only factually flawed and morally vacuous but also strategically enfeebling,” she wrote.²⁴ In an essay for Jacobin Latin America, the political theorist Jodi Dean similarly claimed that “anti-woke politics” on the Left functioned as a “message force multiplier for the right.”²⁵

But the left-wing critics of the race frenzy that consumed politics for the first half of this decade have advanced such arguments precisely because we’ve feared the political consequences of a vacuum in which the only criticisms of unpopular and counterproductive racial equity measures come from a Right that offers vibes of transgression but no meaningful answers to runaway inequality. The reelection of Trump in 2024 is an unfortunate testament to the hard limits of the progressive effort to center race and anti-racism in all policy discussions. Despite more than a decade of Democrats’ constant attempts to brand him as a racist and a white nationalist, Trump was able to significantly improve his vote share with every racial minority group in a high-turnout election. In poll after poll, working-class voters said they viewed the Democrats as overly focused on social issues such as racial and gender identity at the expense of economic concerns like jobs and inflation.²⁶

The politically muddled outcomes of the racial equity craze have suggested that particularism, no matter how radical or morally righteous it may seem, does little to advance the interests of most working people. Over fifty years ago, Bayard Rustin and Norman Hill had cautioned that race-first politics was a strategic mistake, particularly in the context of a contracting economy. “It seems painfully obvious that an affirmative action program cannot achieve its objectives peacefully and democratically if it must function within the context of scarcity,” they argued.²⁷ Today, with economic scarcity even more pronounced than it was at the time of Rustin and Hill’s writing, their warning carries considerable weight. Racial reckonings may wax and wane, but the slow, arduous work of forging a majoritarian coalition that can demand and win a government and an economy run by and for working people remains the same as it was before, during, and after 2020. The point, in other words, is to build something more durable than a shift in vibes.