The New York Times ran an editorial last week reminding us of the looming Medicaid cuts under Trump's big budget disaster that are set to take effect after the midterms, and which are likely to push millions more low-income Americans off of health insurance.
These changes come on top of the government's recent failure to extend ACA subsidies, as well as cuts to nutrition assistance that already went into effect last year.
One is reminded that these policies are likely to fall hardest on many of Trump's own most enthusiastic supporters: rural working class communities.
Indeed, if Trump had deliberately set out to make a targeted economic strike on his own base, he could hardly have done a better job. His tariffs and war of aggression in Iran are driving up the cost of living for those who can least afford to pay, while throttling the agricultural sector and thereby particularly harming rural voters (the war is pushing up the cost of fertilizer while Trump's trade wars threaten to provoke retaliatory measures against U.S. crop exports).
Why on earth, then, did so many people in these rural and working class communities vote for Trump in 2024? Why did Trump likewise even manage to increase his vote-share among women, young people, and minority voters, whose rights he seemed to openly pledge to curtail upon returning to office?
The lawyer Fulvius, in Arthur Koestler's historical novel The Gladiators, stands in, in many ways, for the modern left-wing intelligentsia. And he is constantly racking his brain in the novel over this same conundrum: why do so many people seem to vote in favor of their own disenfranchisement and oppression?
He even plans to pen a treatise on the subject. He gives it the working title: "On the causes which induce man to act [...] contrary to thesis own interests when associated in groups or crowds."
"How had it come about"—Fulvius wants to know—"their barring the gates and marching to man the walls in flaming enthusiasm—the serfs to defend their bondage, the wretched to guard their misery, the hungry to risk life and limb for the growling in their guts?"
That's essentially what we are asking again today—why did so many (not all, of course, but many) rural poor and working class Americans with a high school education vote for the elimination of their own welfare benefits and the evisceration of their own political rights?
Koestler in another book—his memoir Scum of the Earth—gives a real-world example of the same phenomenon. He describes an instance in France when Blum's left-wing government increased subsidies to the farmers. Perversely, this only seemed to make them hate Blum more; they ended up voting for the fascists instead, even though the latter opposed these increased payments.
Why did American farmers likewise vote in 2024 for a regime that is now squeezing their industry from all sides? Why did working class Americans vote for the party that wants to strip their public benefits? Why did many women vote for the party that had just been responsible for the Dobbs decision?
Why did many Black voters (not the majority, but more than in any previous recent election) back the GOP in an election year when the Republican candidate was running on the most frankly white nationalist and white identitarian agenda of any mainstream politician in modern history—and has gone on to impose that agenda, rolling back many of the most basic civil rights gains from the last fifty years?
Why did many Hispanic voters (again, more than in any other recent election) back the GOP precisely when the party had dropped its earlier moderate approach to immigration and civil rights issues and had instead started openly preaching "mass deportation" and "English-only" policies that seemed pointedly designed as an enormous middle finger to historically Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S.?
To understand these many paradoxes, we have to look back to what happened sociologically in the early 2020s—the era of "peak woke," as it has been called.
There has been a lot of discourse in the last few weeks about "woke 1." In some ways, this conversation has served to provide a permission structure for people on the left to admit to each other: "well, perhaps in that summer of 2020 we took things a bit far"—in much the same way that Khrushchev's secret speech allowed even good party members to admit publicly: "comrades, certain excesses may have been committed during the purges..."
To this extent, turning our backs on "woke 1" and admitting that no one wants to go back to cancel culture is probably a good thing (though I have concerns about "woke 2"—which I'm not sure is any better, and which seems to have preserved cancel culture only to direct it primarily against Jewish Americans suspected of what is now the only remaining and greatest thought crime on the left: "Zionism").
Plus, as I've expressed before, it's not like our society has solved any of the problems—police violence, prisons, racist immigration policies—that we were most worried about in the "woke 1" period. We were probably talking about many of these issues in unhelpful ways circa 2020—but the answer shouldn't be to now simply ignore them and pretend they don't exist either (or, still worse, to flip around and embrace a "tough on crime" politics of our own).
Regardless, it now seems clear to almost everyone—even on the progressive left—that "defund the police" (like other shibboleths of "woke 1") was a political and electoral loser (even though I really do think stripping police departments of military-grade equipment and cutting their budgets would probably still be a great idea—but what do I know!)
But if it was such an obvious mistake, why did the Left do it in the first place? Why did we embrace all the tenets of "wokeness" when it turns out they were never popular with more than 2% of the public at a time?
The answer is that we actually thought it was the default majority viewpoint of most Americans. We thought: add up all the marginalized and oppressed groups—women, LGBTQI+ people, Black and Hispanic people, people with disabilities—and that's very obviously the majority of the public!
And we were right about this. What we were wrong to assume is that all the members of these groups wanted to sign up for the full progressive cultural program.
To understand how we came to this mistaken conclusion, we have to remember that "wokeness" arose as a feature of American cultural life at a time when members of historically marginalized communities really were entering elite professions in larger numbers.
Many of these professionals were people who had had to spend their entire lives resisting stereotypes against their identity groups and pushing against the grain of society's expectations.
Elite liberal institutions eventually started to get the memo that people in this position really really did not like the default stereotypes about their groups, because their own professional success had been won in the teeth of these narratives.
And so, many elite, largely white liberal–dominated institutions—Hollywood, the press, e.g.—decided that the way to appeal to "diverse" audiences was to elevate the stories of people who defied group stereotypes.
But it's a fact of human nature that, just as there are many people who spend their whole lives battling against society's expectations and stereotypes about them—there are also many other people who conform.
There are people, indeed, whose whole sense of worth and identity comes precisely from feeling like they are doing a good job of living up to their expected social role.
And when these people saw all the Hollywood counter-stereotypical depictions of their group, they then felt left out and erased.
Hence all those Gen Z women who are joining Erika Kirk's movement and saying things like: "I felt like elites and feminists were judging me for wanting to get married and have babies and be a Christian. It was like they were saying that wasn't good enough."
They missed the subtle two-step that the rest of liberal culture thought we were doing. We were all like: of course the social default already wants you to do those things, that's a given; we were just trying to make the point that it's also okay to do other stuff too!
The Trump 2024 election was a revolt of many things, then—but one of the things it was was a Revolt of the Stereotypes. White women who took pride in being blonde, thin, married, and prolific; Latino men who actually do like muscle cars and don't see why that should be denounced as toxic masculinity; frat bros who actually are jocks who want to make money and don't have a secret sensitive side that they wish the world would appreciate—they all flocked to Trump's banner.
And it was precisely because it was a counter-revolution of conformists-to-type that made the Trump reaction seem so smooth and natural and easy. That's why so many people—even on the progressive left—are admitting now that they feel a certain sense of relief from exiting the stage of "woke 1" and entering a period of cultural Thermidor instead.
Constantly going against the grain of stereotypes and expectations was a strain. Whereas all the political right asks of us is to do the typical and expected thing.
"You tried to go against your class and traditions, while I am conforming to mine," as a reactionary character says in Koestler's novel Arrival and Departure. This, he says, is the right-wing cultural project's hidden strength. "I don't need any special psychological considerations for my conduct, whereas you did," he says.
The right is a coalition of the normies who are doing what society has long deemed "natural"—whereas we on the left are the weirdos constantly trying to push a boulder uphill.
Koestler explores this theme in The Gladiators as well: the power of every counter-revolution is that it asks people to do nothing harder than to simply stop struggling—don't resist the current of habit and history and societal preconceptions; just go with it.
What could be easier than simply giving in—than saying, oh well, what the hell, we too love Big Brother? "There we are, rid of a prejudice that used to cost us dear, too dear, that used to cost us too many scruples, too many rebellions, too many battles, and too much solitude"—to quote Roland Barthes (Howard trans.)
That's why Koestler speaks of cultural reaction, of counterrevolution (of the type we are now experiencing under Trump) as a "downhill journey." It has gravity working in its favor. As he writes in The Gladiators: "[H]e who languishes for Yesterday has an easier road before him than he who travels towards Tomorrow, just as it is invariably easier, merrier and more natural to walk downhill than to struggle pantingly over rock, rubble and glacier frost."
This, Koestler suggests, is the true explanation for why people vote against their own interests—why the hungry rush to defend their own hunger, the poor their own poverty, the oppressed their own disenfranchisement, etc. It's just easier that way, and the desire not to have to struggle; to just leave things the way they are; is powerful.
Whereas to back the progressive left—to dream of equality and liberty and other ideals that have never yet been fully realized on earth—has always required a certain willingness to be quixotic and anti-natural, in the spirit of Vachel Lindsay's poem "Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket." As he bid us there, in that great work (one of my favorite poems ever): "Come, let us vote against our human nature!"
This doesn't mean, though, that the struggle for such unrealizable ideals is always completely doomed and futile and pointless. The boulder may always eventually roll back down the hill each time—but that doesn't mean it comes to rest at the same depth each time. Probably, with each iteration, it lands somewhat higher up the mountain than where it started.
As Koestler points out in the same novel, the longing for justice and equality is every bit as ancient and natural as the desire to conform to the default norms of an unequal class society and racially stratified hierarchy. As much as the "desire to remain"—the gravitational pull of the "downhill journal" of conformism may be eternal, then—the "desire to go," he writes—the desire for freedom—is no less eternal.
Ours is a "century of abortive revolutions," the characters in Koestler's novel observe. So is ours, even though it's barely a quarter-century old.
And as we look back on our own abortive revolution of 2020—the era of "peak woke" and "woke 1" that seems now to have issued into its own polar opposite—to have yielded nothing but cultural counter-revolution that is not only undoing all the gains of the last few years, but reaching even further back to cut at the throat of voting rights, anti-discrimination protections, and the other civil rights gains even of the 1960s—
Even in the face of all that, then—still, we say, with A.H. Clough:
Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
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