Toward the end of the Biden administration, conservatives, fed up with the supposed imposition of liberal ideas by “woke capital,” tried to create what The Economist described as a “parallel economy” in which one could buy “anti-woke” versions of goods such as beer and razors. Those products might come at a premium, but if that was the price of your beliefs, you were free to pay it.
Now, in Donald Trump’s second administration, that parallel economy is just the economy. Trumpist culture wars have made almost everything more expensive, effectively forcing all Americans to pay an anti-woke tax. Although conservatives usually use woke to describe some form of egalitarianism they oppose, it’s proved such an effective epithet that they’re now applying the label to anything they need their constituents to dislike.
Tariffs are the most obvious example. An analysis by the Harvard Business School professor Alberto Cavallo noted that although inflation was trending downward before Trump’s tariffs took effect, “prices on both imported and domestic goods have climbed modestly but steadily since March.” Trump has an economic argument for his tariffs, if a rather unconvincing one. But the tariffs make more sense if you look at them as a kind of anti-woke tax. The administration has presented them as a temporary setback on the road to long-term prosperity, a corrective to the cooperative diplomacy of the past, and a promise—one impossible to fulfill—that America can return to some golden age of plentiful manufacturing jobs, the kind of manly work that soft-handed libs with email jobs took from you.
“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick declared in April while defending Trump’s tariffs. Caked in foundation, manly Fox News hosts have gushed that the tariffs, by supposedly making it possible for Americans to go back to work in mines and factories, could be the “ultimate testosterone boost.” No more desk jobs! Which are bad because “when you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman.”
[Adam Serwer: ‘Woke capital’ doesn’t exist]
Despite this, I’m not aware of any Fox News pundits lining up to get black lung in West Virginia coal mines. Nor are the tariffs bringing back those manly jobs; in fact, about 30,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since January. Macho construction gigs aren’t going to fill the gap—new tariffs on materials such as lumber and furniture are likely to drive up the cost of building homes, worsening an already serious housing-affordability crisis. Speaking of manly jobs: Trump’s tariffs are hitting truckers especially hard. Fewer imports means less stuff to truck. Also, it turns out, even American-manufactured trucks use foreign materials. Some blue-collar workers have seen some wage growth under Trump—but in the fields of retail, hospitality, and medical care, fields that conservatives don’t typically portray as bastions of traditional masculinity.
And, of course, the tariffs have driven up the price of food, because some food simply can’t be grown in the United States and must be imported. Maybe bananas and coffee are woke?
One thing that is definitely woke is racial diversity—see the administration’s whites-only refugee policy—something Trump officials hope to solve through the demographic-engineering project known as mass deportation. “The sharp increase in diversity has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity,” an administration document explains, which is rather like an arsonist noting that the fire they set raised the temperature in the house they burned down. “Diversity” doesn’t reduce social trust; bigotry and those who foment it do.
Making America whiter and therefore less woke is also driving food prices up and wages down, because the administration is terrorizing and deporting the immigrants who do most of the planting and picking of the American food supply. The Trump administration itself admits it: As David Dayen reports in The American Prospect, a new Department of Labor filing acknowledges that the mass-deportation agenda is “threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices” for consumers. The filing is about a new rule that will cut wages for immigrant farmworkers on H-2A visas, but Dayen writes that the wages of American agricultural workers are likely to come down too, resulting in a major labor shortage on farms. So food will cost more, but at least the workers getting that food to supermarket shelves will make less?
Energy prices are another example. Thanks in part to government investment in research, clean-energy sources such as wind and solar have become more efficient and less expensive than other forms of energy production. But Trump-administration officials have decided that green energy is woke, and so they’ve reversed this progress, cutting funding for renewable-energy projects and using government policy to encourage the use of fossil fuels instead. As a result, NPR reports, “electricity prices have jumped more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living in the last year.”
[Ellen Cushing: The drink that Americans won’t give up without a fight]
Americans seem to like the culture-war fixation on manliness in the abstract much more than they like the financial reality. Some 80 percent of Americans, according to one YouGov poll, think “America would be better off if more Americans works [sic] in manufacturing than they do today,” but only 25 percent agree with the statement “I would be better off if I worked in a factory instead of my current field of work.” Like the Fox News pundits, many people support the idea of “manly jobs” but prefer that someone else actually works them.
Conservative pundits’ fixation on condemning the “identity politics” of historically disfavored groups seeking equal rights seems to have kept them from noticing that U.S. economic policy is now justified by a particularly silly form of right-wing identity politics. Their nostalgia for the manly jobs of yesteryear ignores what made those jobs good in the first place, which was a higher rate of unionization that put pressure on employers to provide better wages and benefits.
There was nothing wrong with the idea of an anti-woke economy in which people could, if they chose to, shell out for Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right “100% woke-free” beer. People are allowed to vote with their wallets. The problem is that Trump-era conservatives don’t seem to believe in that kind of freedom. Instead, they are imposing their anti-woke tax on all of America, raising the cost of living for everyone.
Behind all of the culture-war nonsense, the administration’s political allies—the ultra-wealthy, the fossil-fuel industry, and many in the corporate elite—are making out quite well. Some politically connected companies have even managed to get convenient exemptions from the tariffs. It’s all of those regular Americans Trump promised to fight for who are seeing their dollars buy less because of a conscious, deliberate effort to make things anti-woke. One might almost suspect that was the idea all along.
But, hey, better broke than woke, right?
