In 2023, I published The Origins of Woke. The book has been credited for inspiring Trump administration actions on DEI. Despite this attention, I think people don’t appreciate the more subtle ways in which the book was prescient on a wide range of issues related to the culture war. Since whenever I’m wrong about something, people like to bring it up on social media, and nobody ever pops up to remind people of things I’ve gotten right, I’ll have to do it myself.

Nicholas Decker has a series of posts expressing his appreciation for various economists, which I enjoy reading. There’s not enough praise out there for those who have contributed to the advancement of human knowledge, and often their methods are quite remarkable. Sometimes people write articles that are tributes to me, and I like to reward such behavior by sharing their work. I haven’t seen this particular tribute though. And for those who haven’t read The Origins of Woke, publishing it now can hopefully encourage you to do so.

It may seem that the book worked so well that it made itself irrelevant. Yet it would be a mistake to think of it as a political polemic. The Origins of Woke is more a socio-political deep dive that covers an important era of American history, and gets into profound questions regarding the nature of democracy, how the law changes, political salience, and the interactions between legal structures and social phenomena.

Below, I’ll quote extensively from the book to highlight three major things I’ve gotten right. I’ll then go on to explain what broader lessons we might draw now that we have experienced the first seven months of the Trump administration.

The Time Was Ripe for a Republican Administration to Roll Back DEI

I wrote:

Mass opinion is overwhelmingly against racial quotas, disparate impact, and the results-oriented approach to seeking group equality that has been the hallmark of civil rights law for half a century now….

Now, in addition to having public opinion on their side, conservatives have three new reasons to act that are the result of relatively recent changes in the political environment. The first involves already mentioned shifts within the Republican Party. The moderates who thwarted Ronald Reagan’s effort to repeal affirmative action and who made sure that the Civil Rights Act of 1991 passed with large bipartisan majorities are no longer there. The rise of populism means that, at least on the issues involved here, there is a growing faction within the Republican Party that is aligned with libertarianism rather than hostile to it. When a party is internally divided on an issue, decisive action can be impossible. Republicans after taking the House in 1994 found that abolishing affirmative action split their own caucus while uniting Democrats, tilting the playing field in favor of the latter despite there being majority support for the conservative position in the country as a whole. A unified right is very important here because of the tendency of the left to misrepresent their own positions in order to make them more palatable to the public. When they get help in such efforts from prominent Republicans, what starts as a political advantage for the right can quickly become a liability. Fortunately, there are few Republicans left willing to side with Democrats on these issues.

Second, Republicans have not only become more conservative and less subject to left-wing pressure campaigns, but they and their base are more obsessed with wokeness than at any point in the past. The idea that conservatives prioritize “owning the libs” over all else has become a running joke among liberals and other critics of the right, including those within the movement…

Finally, not only are Republican officeholders more likely to be committed conservatives than they were in decades past, but the political pressures operating on them are different. In a 2001 essay, John Skrentny found that, when he asked Republican congressional staff and think tank operatives why the party did not end affirmative action, the first thing they usually mentioned was fear that they would be called racist as their views were criticized and misrepresented in the media. In the last two decades, however, conservatives have grown increasingly immune to such concerns, as can be seen perhaps most notably in the rise of Trump and in the kinds of culture war legislation being adopted at the state level. Fox News, along with the growing importance of the internet and social networking sites, has helped create a conservative media ecosystem that has gained influence over Republican policymakers, drowning out traditional media and left-leaning civil rights organizations.

Alright, this one isn’t that impressive. I think people knew that the Republican Party was swinging to the right, and that a Trump second term, or even a DeSantis presidency, would lean in hard on the culture war. The next two, however, were things people would actually argue with me about.

The Backlash to Fighting Woke Would Be Extremely Limited

People used to tell me that if Republicans went after civil rights law, there would be mass resistance and a freak out like we have rarely seen before. I did not think so. Leftists have historically benefited from an obscure set of legal decisions and bureaucratic rules that meant they could misrepresent the issues involved. By turning DEI into a policy debate, conservatives would bring to the forefront partisan differences in an area where they have an advantage.

Looking back at the 1970s and 1980s, it is striking the degree to which these activists were able to frame the issues under debate. The Reagan administration took positions on civil rights law that would have sounded reasonable to most Americans if they could have gotten an accurate picture of what those positions were. Color-blindness, and requiring direct evidence of intent to infer discrimination rather than simply relying on statistical differences in outcomes between groups, in and of themselves made sense. Yet in an era before cable news, talk radio, and the internet, debates about civil rights law were filtered down to the public in the form of “liberals are more anti-racist than conservatives.”…

Yet the hyperpolarization of media and society can also allow for a fairer debate than in the past, particularly on issues where left-wing biases are particularly extreme. In few areas is the mainstream press less trustworthy than on issues of identity, as can be seen in recent years in various supposed hate crimes that journalists have championed being exposed as hoaxes, and the narratives about police shootings that they credulously reported on that turned out to unravel over the course of time. On the question of civil rights law, if there is anything resembling a fair debate, conservatives can win. The way that the left understands identity issues—namely their acceptance of a results-based approach to justice and theories such as institutional racism—is simply unpalatable to most Americans. It may be unacceptable to any people anywhere, as it is so illogical and full of contradictions that the whole system may require constant lying in order to survive. Hence the battle over teaching critical race theory, in which conservatives have been winning a series of political and legal victories ever since Chris Rufo brought the issue to the attention of the public.

Without public opinion on their side, leftists would be unlikely to push back hard on these issues. The expansion of civil rights law has flown under the radar of public opinion. This has operated to the advantage of the left on identity issues, but can now benefit conservatives.

The backlash will be limited for the same reason that the creation of woke policies drew so little attention in the first place. Concepts like whether anti-discrimination laws authorize class action lawsuits, who is entitled to attorney’s fees, the existence of punitive damages, and whether corporations must engage in extensive record keeping have never inspired much passion among the general public or even drawn its attention. This demonstrates that there is not always a strong correlation between how much energy surrounds a public policy debate and how important it ends up being. Just as how civil rights law, in terms of reach and scope, expanded in executive agencies and the courts without much public pressure, it can contract in the same way. Of course, the analogy is not perfect. When civil rights law expanded, it did so with the support of a well-organized lobby, a bipartisan consensus in Washington, and the sympathy of the media. This may make rolling it back more difficult, but in a world where conservatives recognize the importance of the issues involved, they will form their own lobbies that seek to influence the government and help level the playing field. Greater polarization in the media and the general public relative to decades past ensures that the backlash to any changes to civil rights law is muted.

Leftist activists never explicitly came out and argued for race-based governance. They dressed their goals up in euphemisms about diversity and commissioned fake studies about unconscious bias and how having more women of color around was good for business productivity. They all but mandated quotas and preferences while saying they were