Pulling Down the Shades

The last gasps of the Age of Enlightenment.

A few days ago, podcaster Meghan Daum surveyed the election landscape and noticed the emboldened MAGA winners taunting the liberal losers. Who hasn’t noticed? The GOP bill to deny newly elected transgender candidate Sarah McBride access to the Capitol’s women’s bathrooms was not meant to protect the privacy of legislators; it was a simple act of triumphalism. “Your body, our choice,” a suddenly popular slogan fully embracing Handmaid’sTale misogyny, was less a policy position than pure gloating at the owning of the libs.

“The big election takeaway,” Daum wrote on her Substack, “boiled down to ‘All you rainbow-haired, gender-fluid, land-acknowledging TikTok car criers: your time is up. The problematic people are in charge now.’” That exquisitely accurate bit of hyperbole frames the question posed in her headline: “Is the Woke Era Really Over?”

Spoiler alert: Her answer is no. The self-proclaimed “nuance monger” — though famously adamant about not following doctrinaire justice warriors off the cliff of absolutism — advises also not to jump to conclusions. She says that backtracking by the likes of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who suddenly removed her from her X profile, probably doesn’t presage the end of hyper identity-politics. And that the momentary told-you-so-ism of people like me, who have paid dearly for our own nuance and principled skepticism of lefty orthodoxy, will fade as the Trump regime begins dismantling 80 years worth of civil-rights progress.

So, yeah, she says social consciousness will survive because empathy and equity are values to be protected, and bigotry and discrimination are just gross. Unfortunately, Daum has posed the wrong question. The point isn’t whether cartoonish “woke” zeal is over. The point is whether the rightwing culture warriors have won the war, and now are poised to burn the structures of civil and human rights to the ground.

And the answer to that question is yes.

It took eight centuries to get here. The Magna Carta, in 1215, first codified limitations on the English King in jailing, taxing, fining and otherwise arbitrarily oppressing feudal landowners. It didn’t free any serfs or permit transgender men to compete in sports, but it did establish inalienable rights at least for the rich. In the late 17th century, philosopher John Locke published his Two Treatises on Government, which refuted the divine right of kings and asserted natural human rights, separation of church and state, an inviolable social contract recognizing individual liberty and dignity and government’s responsibility to reflect the will of the people.

England’s parliament rapidly legislated Locke’s vision in the Bill of Rights of 1689, dramatically subordinating the crown’s power and conferring individual rights subject to the rule of law.

By the time the American colonies declared their independence, Thomas Jefferson borrowed from Locke and the British Bill of Rights to pen the indelible Preamble passage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Just as Locke’s ideas were quickly transformed into English law, it took but 15 years for Jefferson’s declaration to be enshrined in the Bill of Rights — written mainly by James Madison on a model of George Mason’s Virginia Declaration on Rights — delineating 10 explicit guarantees and protections for Americans from a potentially wayward government. It included the First Amendment’s foundational “four freedoms” and an overall framework for the rule of civil and criminal law. This was 233 years ago. The land of the free had a blueprint.

What it did not have was a body of statutes or case law to back up the grand ideas. The sentiments were obviously laudable, but also largely hollow. Think: police powers. Think: women’s suffrage. Think: slavery. Until the end of World War II, the law of the land did quite a good job protecting white, Christian men. Every other soul was subordinated to various degrees to the authority (and whims) of The Man. But the rise of Nazi Germany had made an impression on western democracies about the dangers of unchecked power. What followed was the explosion, here and in Western Europe, of what is now called liberal democracy. Civil rights. Voting rights. Ending school prayer. Desegregation. Miranda rights. Abortion rights. Disability rights. Marital rights. Whether through Supreme Court decisions or landmark legislation, the Bill of Rights was finally reflected in the actual laws of the land.

Meanwhile came Vatican II, the 1965 encyclical by Pope John XXIII, in which the world’s ultimate patriarchal organization allowed that every human, no matter how weak or humble, is endowed with “dignity, intelligence and free will ... and has rights flowing directly and simultaneously from their very nature.” It called for the end of discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, social status and religion (!) and especially advocated for the protection of the most vulnerable: the poor, needy, sick and handicapped; widows, orphans, the incarcerated and the incapacitated. This wasn’t the American Civil Liberties Union, mind you. It was the Catholic Church.

Then, perhaps the apotheosis of liberal democracy, 186 countries ratified the United Nations’ 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights on the bicentennial of the American Experiment in democracy. It had taken 751 years, but the individual rights first conferred by the Magna Carta found their fullest expression. Just a few years later, as discussed in this space last week, the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History and liberal democracy to be the standard of human events for all time.

This is what Trump is promising to tear down. His stated sympathies are with tycoons, dictators, denialists, brutal police, war criminals, a military sicced on the domestic population, Christian nationalists, voter suppression and a justice system that jails political rivals, journalists and other “enemies of the state.” His cabinet nominees are a skulk of foxes, poised to guard their hen houses mainly by devouring them.

I grant you that the ever finer slices of identity politics, so easily caricatured as woke, created the conditions for the identity-grievance backlash. And, so, sure, it may be amusing to look at the sociology of it all by asking if “the woke era” is really over. But, I reiterate: who cares?

Bigots, cynics, ignoramuses, zealots and vandals now control all the levers of power, here and increasingly around the world. What we face is not the end of history, but the end of the Age of Enlightenment.