20 January 2025, 17:28

By Lewis Goodall

Hello from an increasingly frigid Washington. There is much talk here of the imminent arrival of the “polar vortex”, which in a neat twist sounds quite similar to what Donald Trump is threatening to do to Greenland.

Either way the city is full of rather forlorn looking groups of middle-aged men in scarlet MAGA caps wondering quite what they’re going to do with themselves now Trump has announced his inauguration will be taking place inside the Capitol building, owing to the Nuuk-like temperatures in the city.

Many have shelled out thousands of dollars to be here.

The last time DC saw this many pissed off MAGA types Congress ended up on fire.

But I’m sure they’ll take some comfort from the fact that Suella Braverman and Laurence Fox will be available to talk to instead.

In all seriousness, the atmosphere in the city is deeply weird.

Many locals have left town for the weekend, wishing to avoid the Trump jamboree at its most ebullient.

They’ve been replaced by an invasion of alt-right grifters and attention seekers from around the world, desperate to show their followers that they too are part of the conservative revolution- that they’re players. They intend to enjoy the next few days and they will.

It’s rare that an election victory feels like it has changed so much, so quickly, before a candidate has even taken office.

But that’s because it feels like the final battle in a very long conflict - a moment where progressivism firmly stopped advancing in the discourse and culture.

In other words, the election seemed to mark the passing of an era of liberal cultural dominance - one that arguably began with the election of Obama in 2008 and was fortified and developed at pace partly in response to Trump’s own victory in 2016, to the MeToo movement of 2017 and of the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd in the early part of this decade.

With it came the advent of equal marriage, the strengthening of transgender rights, discourses on structural racism, privilege, “cancel culture”, fierce debates on the policing of language, DEI policies in corporates, extremely liberal ideas about the border - what came to be known collectively as wokeism.

As I say, Trump’s victory in 2016, widely regarded as illegitimate or accidental by many American liberals but also US power brokers, intensified these trends, as the “resistance” grew.

Locked out of political power, liberalism reinforced itself in the redoubts of cultural power.

Meanwhile and partly because of this, cultural, economic, media and technological elites kept Trump at arms length and actively embraced progressive causes.

Liberals comforted themselves that while the Republicans might win elections, the arc of cultural history firmly bent in their direction.

2024 bent the arc back. This time Trump’s victory (whilst still narrow) felt totalising and as a result the cordon sanitaire around him from many American elites has all but collapsed.

Corporate, media and tech aristocrats have signalled that they intend to move their businesses in Trump’s ideological direction.

Trumpism’s sharpest edges have been normalised and Elon Musk has subverted an entire information ecosystem to disseminate its ideas and theories.

As the FT reported recently, Walmart has stopped considering race and gender in granting its supplier contracts, has ceased staff racial equity training and will not renew funding for the Center for Racial equity, something it started funding after George Floyd.

© LBC