Australian Opposition Leader Peter Dutton speaks during the second leaders' debate of the 2025 federal election campaign at the ABC Studios in Parramatta, Sydney, on April 16.ABC POOL/Reuters
If there is one small bright side to the maximalist demagoguery of the second Trump presidency, it is that voters around the world have been so repelled that an entire category of culture-war politics, built on online concepts such as “woke,” “gender ideology” and “DEI,” has lost its currency.
Witness Peter Dutton, the leader of Australia’s right-wing Liberal Party. As recently as January, he appeared sure to defeat incumbent Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s centre-left Labour Party in the May 3 election, leading by a wide margin in both voting intentions and personal popularity.
His campaign, inspired by Mr. Trump’s culture-war messages, denounced diversity, equity and inclusion policies and “woke advocates.” He said he would ditch indigenous symbols, spoke darkly of “agendas” in schools, promised to recognize biological sex rather than gender, and vowed to eliminate 28 per cent of government jobs in an apparently culturally driven purge.
“I think there is going to be a new revolution that comes with the Trump administration in relation to a lot of the woke issues that might be fashionable in universities,” Mr. Dutton told a TV interviewer after Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. “They just aren’t cutting it around kitchen tables at the moment.”
From that day onward, as Australian viewers watched the White House turn those words into institution-destroying reality, Mr. Dutton and his Liberals plunged in the polls, to the point that Mr. Albanese now has a chance of winning a second majority.
In recent weeks Mr. Dutton has abandoned his culture-war language and replaced it with traditionally conservative promises of lower taxes and a more open economy. His party may still manage to pull off a win. If it does, it will be not thanks to his “anti-woke” talk, but because it has been forgotten.
Canadians know this story: A conservative opposition leader who gave his party a huge lead in 2024 by going all in on culture-war memes – as recently as late March pledging to end “the imposition of woke ideology in the federal public service and in the allocation of federal funds for university research” – and then watching that lead plunge into a double-digit deficit as his MPs begged him to switch to conventionally conservative concepts. Pierre Poilievre’s narrow path to victory now depends on dropping the anti-woke stuff.
It is not that voters changed their views. Many find the language around identity-politics issues off-putting. Corporate diversity-awareness campaigns tend to be cringey and doctrinaire. The use of pronouns other than “he” and “she” grates on some ears. The promotion and inclusion of ethnic and sexual minorities sounds to some people like their own majoritarian identity has become a liability.
But those are symbolic issues, largely rooted in language. “Woke” arose as a term of derision after the internal language of activist movements started to become the public-facing language of some socially liberal individuals, thanks to the internet. Liberal politicians such as Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris all studiously avoided using this doctrinaire language, lest it divide their country against actual policies of equality and inclusion, which were (and remain) popular with voters.
An outspoken minority, however, became convinced that this stuff threatened them materially, even though it had never touched on their own lives in any way. This is the politics of “somewhere else.” The widespread circulation of isolated anecdotes and memes online – typically involving kids with gender issues or academics getting censured by over-zealous administrations – created a popular sense that some larger agenda is at play - that somebody, somewhere else, must be getting hurt.
“There’s something about screens that contributes to a catastrophizing mind-set” among “most of my Trump-supporting friends,” says the U.S. conservative writer David Brooks, one of many figures on the right who’s been horrified to see where Mr. Trump has taken these ideas.
It was one thing to run for office as a straight-talking traditionalist who eschews such language and speaks to the interests of “normal” people. There is definitely a strong constituency for that type of conservative in many countries, and both the Australian and Canadian opposition leaders drew on it.
It is quite another to ban people from the military based on their genitals, to seize control of universities, to order that Maya Angelou books be banned but Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and works by white supremacists be included in a military library, to deport people based on nothing but their appearance. The U.S. writer Jerusalem Demsas calls this “anti-woke overreach.”
Many don’t like DEI talk. But she notes that a majority, even of conservative Americans, are in favour of actual diversity, equity and inclusion. Mr. Trump has made us all aware of the distinction.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated President Donald Trump's inauguration took place Jan. 21. It took place Jan. 20, 2025.