How the Right Became What It Once Condemned

Eduardo A. Gamarra

When Donald Trump first rose to political prominence, his message was clear: America needed to be “free” again—from political correctness, from cancel culture, from the “woke” left that supposedly sought to police speech, rewrite history, and impose conformity in the name of inclusion.

That promise of liberation from “woke tyranny” helped fuel a populist revolt that reshaped the Republican Party and brought Trump to the White House twice. Millions of Americans, many feeling culturally alienated, rallied behind a message that said: you can say Merry Christmas again, you don’t have to apologize for who you are, you can reject liberal orthodoxy without shame.

But nearly a decade later, the promise of freedom has curdled into its opposite. Trump’s “anti-woke revolution” has produced what can only be called right-wing wokeism—a mirror image of the very excesses it once condemned. The new culture warriors are not liberating Americans from dogma; they are simply replacing one form of dogma with another.

Defining the Wokeisms

“Left-wing wokeism” emerged from a legitimate moral impulse—to recognize racial injustice, gender inequality, and the lingering effects of historical exclusion. Its core idea was to stay awake to social inequities too often ignored by the mainstream. But in its most militant forms, wokeism hardened into a rigid orthodoxy: policing language, shaming dissenters, and reducing complex realities to identity checklists. The movement’s original empathy sometimes devolved into performative outrage and institutional overreach.

“Right-wing wokeism” is its reactive twin. It claims to defend free speech, parental rights, and traditional values—but in practice, it also seeks to police thought and behavior. It bans books, dictates what teachers can say, punishes corporations for perceived ideological disloyalty, and brands political opponents as “enemies of the people.” What began as resistance to moral overreach on the left has mutated into state-enforced conformity on the right.

From Freedom to Fear

The rhetoric of freedom has become a weapon of control. The right’s culture war now extends into classrooms, libraries, and even the private lives of citizens. When state governments tell teachers what words they can use, restrict reproductive decisions, or censor academic research on race and gender, they are not defending freedom—they are curating ideology.

This new right-wing wokeism cloaks itself in patriotism, religion, and family values. Yet, beneath that language lies a clear pattern: the use of government power to impose a moral and cultural hierarchy. It is no less intrusive than the excesses of progressive orthodoxy—it is simply a different form of authoritarianism, one rooted in class, race, and nationalism rather than identity politics.

The Message from Voters

This week’s election results across the country offer an apparent rebuke to both extremes. Voters in red and blue states alike rejected candidates who campaigned on grievance and moral panic. They supported referenda affirming reproductive rights, endorsed moderate local leaders, and sent a message that Americans are tired of living inside a never-ending culture war.

The takeaway is unmistakable: most Americans do not want left-wing or right-wing wokeism. They want competence, fairness, and respect for pluralism. They want leaders who protect freedom without weaponizing it.

This year’s results suggest that the electorate recognizes something fundamental—that freedom is not the property of any ideology. It is not a tool for silencing one’s opponents or enforcing one’s values. It is the shared foundation of democratic life, which depends on tolerance, debate, and the willingness to coexist with difference.

A Return to Civic Balance

The challenge for the next administration—whoever leads it—will be to restore a civic equilibrium. Universities must defend intellectual pluralism without bending to either ideological camp. Statehouses must protect education from political manipulation. And both parties must reclaim the center as the space where democracy breathes.

The Trump movement’s original insight —that the cultural left sometimes overreached —was not wrong. But its cure has been far worse than the disease. By turning moral outrage into governance, the right has revealed that it, too, can become “woke” in the authoritarian sense: hyper-sensitive to symbolic threats, obsessed with purity, and willing to use the state to enforce conformity.

The lesson from this political cycle is that Americans still believe in freedom, not the partisan freedom to dominate, but the constitutional freedom to disagree. They are rejecting the politics of fear, whether it comes wrapped in the language of diversity or in the flag of nationalism.

The Bottom Line

The country that once debated whether cancel culture had gone too far is now living through its conservative mirror image: the cancellation of dissent by those who once called themselves anti-cancel. The pendulum has swung from one orthodoxy to another, but the underlying danger is the same—the shrinking of democratic space.

Americans are saying enough. The fight for freedom is not a war between left and right wokeism; it is a defense of democracy itself.