What’s in and out in the Trump 2.0 era?

Relax, political fashion victims – I’ll have you back on the right side of history in no time!

Photo by Shaojie on Unsplash

“I am a woman of color. I am a mom; I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional.”
CIA staffer in a CIA recruitment video, 2021

In many circles, a radical critique of American society as structurally racist, hostile to marginalized communities, and embedded in a rapacious capitalist system that will destroy the planet became a sort of conventional wisdom. In this view, opposing Trump had to be joined to a struggle against all these aspects of oppression (the “omnicause”) and to social transformation… This view spread through sympathetic cultural milieus where it already had a considerable presence—universities, media, the arts, nonprofits, advocacy groups, foundations, and the infrastructure of the Democratic Party itself—redefining what it meant to be on the left.
Ruy Teixeira, The Liberal Patriot, 23/1/25

Even within liberal parameters, any worldview that takes its own truth claims seriously — be it secular progressivism or conservative Christianity or accelerationist transhumanism — will naturally seek some form of culture-shaping power and, when the opportunity is there, hegemony as well.
Ross Douthat, NYT, 25/1/25

We cannot understand the problems of the liberal establishment today without recognizing that it became the establishment and never adjusted to this new reality.
Daron Acemoglu, NYT, 26/1/25

You need someone who’s not going to be intimidated by a political, corporate, and cultural establishment that’s completely lost touch with mainstream Australians… [who’ll declare], “The establishment got you into your budget/energy/education/housing/immigration mess and isn’t going to get you out of it.”
John Roskam’s vision of an Australian Trump, AFR, 23/1/25

Many liberals… are not just shrugging but somewhat relieved – even secretly thrilled – that Trump is finally running the big experiment. They, too, have begun to wonder what things actually cost… Because, like it or not, everything has a cost. Open borders cost social harmony; closed borders cost productivity… Social inequality costs wellbeing; DEI programs erode trust. Racism leaves money in the form of human potential on the table; corporate anti-racism guff gobbles it up… We know the value of the Western consensus, now we want to know the price. Comrade Trump is overturning years of self-congratulation to show us how much things really are.
Parnell Palme McGuinness, SMH, 26/1/25

Noticing fellow dinner party guests are no longer visibly relieved when you strangle a potentially problematic discussion in its crib by busting out one of the classics – “But… Trans women ARE women!”/“Diversity IS our strength!”/“No human being is illegal!”/ “Defund the police!”/“Black Lives Matter!”/Arrest Kony! etc.

Considering following in AOC’s footsteps and quietly removing those pronouns from your social media bios?

Not sure if it’s still a good career move to make a song and dance about not celebrating the Australia Invasion Day public holiday?

Relax, long-neglected Precariat Musings readers. I’m Nigel, I’m from New South Wales, and I’m here to help.

Who’s who in the zoo
Back when magazines were a thing, a frantic editor with a spare page to fill could always rely on the good old ‘In and Out’ list. A bunch of overeducated, underpaid twentysomething ink-stained wretches would appoint themselves arbiters and pronounce on whether flares/vintages typewriters/shrimp cocktails/Jungian analysis were currently ‘in’ or ‘out’.

With the recent vibe shift, or ‘political realignment’ as it was known back in ye olde days, many things that were in are now out, and vice-versa. If you’ve long prided yourself on unerringly being on the right side of (yet-to-unfold) history, it must be disorientating to wake up on January 20 and somehow find yourself on the wrong side of it. I imagine it’s as mortifying as learning everybody is suddenly laughing at you for being a flare-wearing, vintage typewriting-using, shrimp cocktail-eating, Jungian analysis-haver when that’s, like, so five minutes ago.

Refreshed from my long break, I’m here to help, not judge, dear reader. After all, we’ve all had our moments of Queers for Palestine youthful insanity.

Please find below a list of what was in during BDE (the Before-Donald Era) and, even more importantly, what’s in during ADE.

BDE
IN
Newness – see New Labour, the New Democrats, neoliberalism and neoconservatism
Secular liberalism/New atheism
Maximising individual autonomy
Capital
Globalisation
Davos
Multilateralism
Global labour arbitrage
Complicated supply chains
Corporate tax cuts
A borderless world
Mass migration
Joining social media lynch mobs
No-platforming people with unorthodox opinions
Fearing the morally polluting effects of unorthodox opinions
Slacktivism/Gesture politics
Multiculturalism
Oikophobia
Minoritarianism
DEI
ESG
Identity politics
Oppressed-oppressor binaries
Being fiscally conservative and socially liberal
Many genders existing
Suppressing hate speech/hate facts
Wokism (or whatever you want to call it)
Fast-moving linguistic taboos
Hate crime hoaxes
Land acknowledgements
Activist early-career employees over-ruling CEOs
Not being heterosexual
Not being white, or white-adjacent
Walking the Fifties privately while talking the Sixties publicly
Holding luxury beliefs
The future being female
Decriminalising crime
Financialisation and deindustrialisation
Spreading democracy at gunpoint
The Military-Industrial Complex
Free-market fundamentalism
Allowing wealth and power to concentrate at the top
Wealth creators
Plutocrats and the Professional-Managerial Class
Not noticing/caring about growing wealth inequality
Tone policing the lower orders
The green energy transition
Expensive power, even in some nations with vast natural resources
Multinational corporations morally instructing consumers
Regulation
Letting the credentialled class make all the important decisions
Learning to code
The green energy transition
The legacy media
Going to university
Fact checking
High-tech indentured servitude
The Clinton and Bush dynasties
Elite sexual depravity
Gifting China the rope it may yet hang us with
Trump Derangement Syndrome
Voting aspirationally
Boomers
Booming property prices
Rampant NIMBYism
Robbing the young to featherbed the old
Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo
The 1619 Project
Being conspicuously non-racist
The legacy media covering up FDR’s wheelchair
Oprah Winfrey

IN
The Old Gods
Religious revivalism/adult conversion
Collectivism
Labour (until mass automation truly kicks in)
Deglobalisation
Mar-a-Lago
Isolationism
Mass automation
Nearshoring/Reshoring
Corporate tax cuts*
Borders
Remigration
Pretending you’ve always been a free-speech absolutist
Pretending you’ve always been open to debate
Multiracialism
A newfound appreciation for Western Civilisation
Majoritarianism
Merit-based opportunity
Big business sticking to its knitting
Class politics
Being oppressor-oppressed non-binary
Being fiscally liberal and socially conservative
Two genders only
Deregulating the marketplace of ideas
Being based
Forging colour-blind and merit-based societies
Openly mocking land acknowledgements
Bossism
Admitting you’re a run-of-the-mill heterosexual (rather than identifying as queer)
Colourblindness
Walking and talking Fifties values
Mocking the PMC’s luxury beliefs grift
Masculine energy
Recriminalising crime
Financialisation and reindustrialisation
A more reluctant and transactional approach to foreign entanglements
The Mass Surveillance Industrial Complex
Technofeudalism
Wealth and power stay concentrated at the top, but the snooty PMC overseer class gets thrown to the wolves (i.e. the disgruntled lower orders) the second AI agents can do their jobs
Tech bros
Plutocrats and the common people
Addressing inequality-exacerbating problems, such as broken housing markets
Mocking woke scolds
Drill, baby, drill
Cheaper power
Minimal corporate virtue signalling
Sweeping deregulation
More popular democracy
Learning to AI
Independent media
Not going to university
Community notes
High-tech indentured servitude
The Trump clan
Elite sexual depravity
Containing China
Admitting Trump isn’t literally Hitler
Voting realistically
A less censorious Left
Post-Boomer generations
YIMBYism
Greater intergenerational fairness (mainly from the Boomers dying off)
Richard Hanania and Freddie deBoer
Putting a man on Mars
Doing what’s right
The legacy media covering up Biden’s cognitive decline
Joe Rogan

*It’s funny how these never seem to go out of fashion