Trumps all-out assault on woke is tearing down the lefts cultural sway

The right just experienced its best three weeks in the culture war in 50 years.A blitz of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump have taken dead aim at left-wing cultural priorities and pillars of the left’s cultural influence.Fashionable progressive ideas that have long been ascendant, including DEI and gender ideology, have received hammer blows since Trump’s inauguration, and there’s more to come.Never before has control of the executive branch of the federal government had such potentially momentous cultural significance.The Trump administration is determined to use every tool at its command — chiefly federal funding but also the enforcement of civil rights laws — to push back against decades-long trends that have long felt inexorable.For quite some time, conservatives have focused on the notion of a “long march through the institutions” to understand how the left came to dominate elite culture.The phrase is attributed to the 1960s-era left-wing German activist Rudi Dutschke, who wanted, in the words of a progressive analyst, “to create radical change from within government and society by becoming an integral part of the machinery.”The left’s insight was that by taking over faculty lounges, Hollywood studios, HR departments and the like it could bring about revolutionary change in a way that it couldn’t through the ballot box or a frontal assault on such institutions.Now, Trump is bringing to bear a real counter-force via federal power.This represents a new way of thinking about cultural change for the right, and a strange reversal — to wit, it’s the progressives who effectively used civil society to their ends, and now conservatives are attempting to use government to theirs.Government played a role in the tide of left-wing cultural change, but it wasn’t necessarily the dominant one.The takeover of elite culture was largely driven by private actors: the hiring policies of university administrators, the funding decisions of...