Prof. Timothy J. Lynch
Professor of American Politics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His books include In the Shadow of the Cold War: American Foreign Policy from George Bush Sr. to Donald Trump (Cambridge, 2020), After Bush: the Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2008), and the two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History (2013).
Email: tlynch@unimelb.edu.au
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-j-lynch-05b798121/
X: @tim_lynchphd
U.S. Election 2024
1. Trump’s imagined reality is America’s new reality (Prof Sarah Oates)
2. Trump’s threat to American democracy (Prof Pippa Norris)
3. Why does Donald Trump tell so many lies? (Prof Geoff Beattie)
4. Strategic (in)civility in the campaign and beyond (Dr Emily Sydnor)
5. Can America’s democratic institutions hold? (Prof Rita Kirk)
6. How broad is presidential immunity in the United States? (Dr Jennifer L. Selin)
7. Election fraud myths require activation: Evidence from a natural experiment (Dr David E. Silva)
8. What ever happened to baby Q? (Harrison J. LeJeune)
9. We’re all playing Elon Musk’s game now (Dr Adrienne L. Massanari)
10. Peak woke? The end of identity politics? (Prof Timothy J. Lynch)
11. Teaching the 2024 election (Dr Whitney Phillips)
Did the depth of Democratic defeat suggest the end of progressive identity politics? Or did Trump’s victory confirm the ascendancy of a new conservative form? So soon after Election Day, it is difficult to be sure. But let me suggest some arguments that will be tested as both sides reflect on their performance.
Was identity politics a drag on Democratic performance?
A different way of asking this question might be: did the Harris campaign bet too much on the ascendancy of their cultural assumptions? There is some evidence that they did. Walter Russell Mead (2024) captured the poor terrain on which so many Democratic candidates stood or were unable to move away from:
“Spending political capital on affirming trans students by making tampons available in boys’ bathrooms in public schools while the opioid epidemic kills more Americans every year than the Vietnam War killed in nearly a decade strikes many sensible people as a sign of derangement. Are they wrong?“
This caricature of progressive priorities may have made selling their economic record harder than the economic record itself. Democrats were unable to do with culture what they could not achieve on questions of economic competence. Several GOP ads featured Kamala Harris in supportive dialogue with left-wing LGBTQI+ people. This issue was ranked low on the list of voter priorities. If it did not cost Harris votes, it is not clear it won her many either.
While Harris herself did not campaign on her race and gender, she led a movement that has made these identities central to its ideology. That seems not to have paid off in electoral terms. The Democrats lost votes among people of color and women did not desert the Roe v Wade repealing Trump in the droves progressives expected.
Native Americans, one of the groups progressives have attempted to sacralize, moved back towards the GOP (by 10pts). Trump increased his support in Hispanic-majority counties by 13.3pts (compared to 2020). More Hispanic women voted for Biden in 2020 than for Harris this year. The coattails of her race and gender were short – if not actually non-existent.
As the New York Times (2024) acknowledged, “Donald J. Trump’s swift victory was driven by red shifts across the country, with gains among seemingly every possible grouping of Americans.” These included the identity groups Democrats have long assumed belonged to them. Turns out, they did not.
Did Trump win using conservative identity politics?
If Democratic identity politics failed, did a new Republican form succeed? This is a fascinating question which should seize the imagination of social scientists in the coming years. A good start has been made by Drolet and Williams (2022) and Abrahamsen et al (2024).
Perhaps left-wing efforts to prosper using identity politics have inevitably encouraged the right to do the same thing? Progressive attempts to restructure the family, to make masculinity suspect, to chide church and faith, to make abortion great again, have been met by a doubling down by conservatives who value what progressives wish to sweep away.
More intriguingly, Trump has initiated a New Right intellectual movement that owes much of its critique to critical theorists of the New Left. Abrahamsen et al (2024) show:
“how radical conservative thinkers have developed long-term counter-hegemonic strategies that challenge prevailing social and political orders both nationally and internationally. At the heart of this ideological project is a critique of liberal globalisation that seeks to mobilise transversal alliances against a common enemy: the ‘New Class’ of global managerial elites who are accused of undermining national sovereignty, traditional values, and cultures.“
The success of this New Right was reflected in Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. J.D. Vance represents, possibly, a turn toward a more technocratic conservatism, prepared and trained to march back through the institutions.
Was this election evidence of ‘peak woke’?
Those hoping for a change in the cultural focus of progressive activists will find some reassurance in Harris’s defeat. The cultural hegemony Democrats have enjoyed in government departments and especially on university campuses (where conservative academics essentially do not exist) has not translated into electoral gains.
If politics is about winning, we can predict how Democrats will (and should) turn from a vocabulary of race and gender back to one of class (and of working-class) interests. Trump has stolen a march on this. His party spoke to an alienated and disaffected blue-collar America with greater efficiency, even authenticity, than Kamala Harris was able to match. A Democratic party meant to be the champion of American workers needs to relearn how to speak to and for them.
If Election Day 2024 was ‘peak woke’, and progressives acknowledge this, their path back to national power is more certain – though that path could well be a long one.