Published August 5, 2025
Is woke dying? Are conservatives actually winning the culture wars? Questions like these have been kicking around since President Trump’s reelection, and they’ve only grown more compelling with the Democrats polling so pathetically since then. Now that woke’s victory is anything but inevitable, the arc of history has bent into a question mark. Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” has broken apart, and the future is up for grabs. Fear of cancellation has largely evaporated as a result. William F. Buckley Jr. worked to halt what even he presumed to be a default progressive direction to history. But could history itself now be going into reverse?
Let’s consider an optimistic, but I think entirely plausible, scenario. What if the current Trump administration were to be followed by a two-term Republican presidency? We saw a twelve-year Republican streak like this when Ronald Reagan’s two terms were followed by a single term of George H. W. Bush. Another triple Republican streak would likely yield an eight-to-one Supreme Court advantage for conservatives. And President Trump’s recent flurry of executive orders would have remained in effect for 12 years, whether Congress converted them into law or not.
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Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow in the Education and American Ideals Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For over a decade, he has been a national leader in the reform of both K-12 and higher education, authoring or co-authoring model legislation designed to protect campus free speech, reintroduce the study of Western civilization, restore the reading of classic literature, prevent high school walkouts for purposes of political protest, block mandatory DEI indoctrination, bring public policy debate back to college campuses, and more. He writes regularly on education issues for a wide range of outlets, particularly National Review Online, where he has been a contributing editor for over two decades.
