If ‘Woke’ Puritanism Is the Disease, Trump’s Amoral Populism Isn’t the Cure

Valid critiques of progressive moralism have devolved into an embrace of anything-goes strongman rule.

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To what extent should a society demand adherence to moral norms? Three months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, it’s a question worth asking. Having rejected the puritanical “woke” moralism of the 2010s and early 2020s, Americans are now enduring the opposite problem: Trump and his chief corporate enabler, Elon Musk, have over-corrected, embracing a morality-free style of governance fuelled entirely by a drive to hoard power and punish their enemies.

History shows that some culturally encoded ethical narrative must inform any humane and functional society. Formal laws alone aren’t sufficient. And so the task for conservatives and moderate liberals is to imagine a public morality that absorbs the populist critique of progressive moralism, but which doesn’t simply devolve to the amoral principle, personified by Trump and Musk, that might makes right.