Nobody's More Woke Than Trump

For a century, the term 'woke' has meant 'aware of how values and prejudices are built into public and private institutions.' DOGE is all about consciously changing those

If you’ve been reading me, you know that I think it’s critically important how we frame our narratives about the world. In a recent post, the always-insightful Michael Ignatief perfectly describes the narrative driving the choices of the MAGA mind:

For liberals, the Sixties are remembered as a time of liberation. For millions of Americans, this was when paradise was lost: a President was assassinated, American boys were dragged into the first endless war in Vietnam—and ‘liberal elites’ welcomed that devastating trio of transformational movements, black civil rights, feminism and gay rights. These movements shook up the American family, challenged white majority rule and imposed a new culture of inclusion that felt to so many like coercive political correctness.

Please read Ignatief’s entire post, “Donald Trump and the Angel of History.” He made me understand why MAGA feels that Reaganism and neoliberal economics were heroic—because they pushed back against the undermining of everything that had made the USA great in the 1950s and 60s. Where liberals see inclusion, MAGA see coercion. Where liberals see the current tarrif regime as ending an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity for most of the world, MAGA loyalists see the return of American jobs and ingenuity that had been dispersed throughout countries that never earned them—client states, for the most part, who owe their stability to the US but have never returned the investment America made in them.

To the extent that the shining past MAGA hopes to return to ever existed, it did so due to very different economic forces and policies than we have today. Corporate taxes were higher in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and unions were stronger. Progressives see these as important checks and balances on the unhindered accumulation of power and wealth by a tiny elite. They see them as directly contributing to the rise of a middle class that could buy all the goods and services the country was producing. MAGA sees them as the very cause of the malaise that gripped the country in the 1970s, because they diffused decision-making and financial power into increasingly impotent institutions.

You Gotta Be Woke to Be Bad

If Trump is attacking the core institutions of the United States and the international order, it’s because he knows that institutions embody values. He is “woke” according to the definition that the term has had for the past century. I like Gordana Lazić’s definition of it, as referring to "a heightened awareness of social inequalities and injustices." The thing is, both the American Left (if there is such a thing anymore) and MAGA share this exact kind of heightened awareness—they just differ on what the injustices are.

As a woke politician, Trump knows that institutions such as the Supreme Court, and companies such as Google or Tesla, always build values into their policies, for instance in their hiring practices. The Left feels that current American institutions are rigged in favour of a certain constituency (white male billionaires). MAGA also believes that the system is rigged, but in precisely the opposite direction—against the ideal self-made American. Like the Left, it feels that current American institutions don’t incorporate traditional American values; the desire to remake them in its image means it’s woke too. Both Trump and his base see reversing the nation’s institutionalized values as vitally important, but reform has proven an uphill climb in the face of sixty years of liberalism. If reform won’t work, then the institutions have to be replaced.

This is where DOGE comes in. Elon Musk is also woke, hence his plan to remove the systems with the greatest liberal social inertia, embodied in schools and government departments nationally and internationally. His solution seemed elegant: replace the systems with the highest inertia, instantiating the values of MAGA and Project 2025 as software. So far, this has been a complete failure, not just because you can’t swap out 50-year-old systems written in COBOL without a massive, Millennium-bug level of effort; it’s also that the inefficiency of these systems is often a feature, not a bug.

Stafford Beer talked about “the system eating itself.” A company calls in an efficiency expert, who determines that 20% of the workers are doing 80% of the work. The company fires 60% of its workforce, giving raises to the precious 20%. Three years later, the company brings in another efficiency expert to audit their systems because they’re not performing well. This expert finds that 80% of the work is being done by 20% of the people. The company fires… you get the picture. This cycle goes on, with performance deteriorating until the company goes bankrupt. Beer’s point was that the “inefficient” 80% of the workforce are tremendously valuable as a kind of reserve or battery. Even if they’re slackers at the jobs they were hired for, they make the organization resilient and hence, keep it afloat.

Whenever a conservative runs for election, part of the platform always seems to be ‘cutting government waste.’ When they get in, independent agencies are merged, masses of people are fired (in the case of DOGE, whether they’re essential to running the country or not), and miraculously, quality of service goes down, but the waste does not.

If DOGE is allowed to continue, the US government will eat itself—but not in the way Trump and Musk intend. Removing ‘inefficiency’ will only make the system less resilient. Therein lies the paradox at the heart of management science.

The Woke vs. the Woke

Framed this way, the present moment in American history can be seen as a conflict over the design of institutions. The country is already in a civil war, it’s just that it’s not being fought with assault rifles and Molotov cocktails. It’s being fought at the level of legislation, in management practices and in design, and the front-line soldiers are lawyers and computer programmers. It’s playing out this way because both sides of the conflict are acutely woke and are trying to build their own value systems into whatever institutions, or software, rise phoenix-like from the ashes of DOGE and the country’s debt crisis.

This war won’t be won by insurrectionists seizing a public building, but by legislators changing laws and by the tech bros building MAGA values into the computing platforms we all have to use. The problem is that only MAGA seems to understand this. If the Left continues to half-heartedly fight spot fires rather than the whole conflagration, Trump will destroy the current set of American institutions and weaken the values they embody.

While fighting the legalistic agenda is good, progressives should remember that it’s not just our traditional bureaucracies and laws that embody values and prejudices. It’s also true that technology is legislation. We should fight like hell to ensure that justice and fairness are built into the new institutions of the 21st century—as the foundational morality of AI, for example, and in the moderation policies and practices of social media.

If we don’t do this but Trump and the DOGE initiative do, then all the AIs you interact with from now on may share MAGA’s values, with Project 2025 as their rulebook. And it’ll happen because MAGA was more woke than you are.

—K