Donald Trump won the election of November 5, 2024 because he offered Americans a chance to reconnect with the greatness of their national story. The majority of Americans gave him their votes because they aspire to find an America in which they can recognize themselves. There was the loss of influence of the leading world power on the international scene: disorganized and inglorious departure from Afghanistan, mistrust of Russia, China, Iran, rise in power of the Brics. Trump’s victory overcomes these external contingencies. For those who have followed what has been happening in the United States for ten years, the return of Trump is the meeting between a man who promises the restoration of a national destiny and a People who do not want to disappear.
Is Trump a populist? Unless we refuse to highlight nuances in populism, the Trump case requires an analysis to be placed in the context of the debates and contradictions taking place within American society. Following his resounding comeback, the question came to me as to whether it was possible to put an equal sign between the supposed populism of Trump and that which came to power in Senegal? One of the reasons for D. Trump’s victory, a crucial one it seems to me, is the wholesale rejection of an ideology whose metastases have deeply fractured American society: wokism. By voting overwhelmingly for Trump, Americans rejected Wokism, which in many ways bears troubling similarities to Pastefism.
Wokism is an amalgam of theories as explosive as they are strange and even absurd, having as a common denominator the exaltation of minority identity. Minorities are essentially and eternally victims. The executioners: the white male, the patriarchy, the heterosexual. They are the cause of all social injustices, racism, discrimination, virilistic rationality, the insecurity of sexual or gender minorities and all other reasons for victimization. All woke minorities, that is to say awakened, thus find themselves in a heterogeneous coalition of revengers under the banner of intersectionality. The watchword: minorities therefore victims, victim one day, victim forever. The victim has all the rights. The executioner is condemned without trial to perpetual repentance. To listen to his defense or his denials is to debate with him. The wokist does not debate. It cancels, ostracizes, pathologizes, intimidates the contradictor, before banishing them from the circle of public respectability.
Initially, we believed in yet another creative originality of the faculties of Letters and Human Sciences, useful in occupying academics without talents like the identitarian philosopher Ibram X Kendi with his Critical Race Theory or Judith Butler and her manifesto Undoing Gender or deranged sociologist Robin DiAngelo again with White Fragility. The Wokist virus escaped from the university laboratory and spread into the public space as a dominant ideology, with its corollaries: right-thinking, political correctness, progressivism, censorship of anything that more or less contests its dogmas. He submitted media, the New York Times or CNN, Hollywood, the economic sector. These elites have taken up the cause of these victims of a new species who must absolutely refrain from offending under penalty of being boycotted, banned, expelled from the camp of Good. Better still, they lent their support to this ideology at the cost of a divorce from ordinary people in real life. These real-life Americans have been mocked, called remnants of the old America of “white privilege” to be deconstructed.
America, which understands nothing about systemic racism, which considers that gender is a biological given and not an option, is seen as racist and transphobic. Meritocratic America, which challenges “white privilege,” has not understood that it is the original sin of the white man whose ancestors oppressed blacks and indigenous people. America, which considers it stupid to talk about toxic masculinity, ignores that masculinity is the cause of all violence in the world, that against women, animals, and wars. America, which expresses a reservation in the face of demanding auctions, and the public and media omnipresence of LGBT+ propaganda, is mocked by the macho muckrakers from the deep country. America, which refuses the promotion of abortion as well as the ability of women to dispose of their bodies as they wish, is reviled, reduced to a congregation of indestructible inbred obscurantists. It is to this sterile and rent-seeking ideology of resentment, of revanchist progressivism whose excesses would take a long time to record here (threat to the cohesion of the American Nation, to the essence of its dream), that Trump’s voters said: Go retro!
Demonstrating that Pastef is wokist is too vast an intellectual undertaking to expose in this contribution. On the other hand, we can point out common methods: single thinking, refusal of debate, delegitimization, Manichaeism. Pastef’s intellectual terrorism results in attacks against all people who venture to express a different opinion, a pretext for debate. However, the insulting pack will remind the reckless contradictor that it is for the debate of ideas, even though it only opposes insults and anathemas to the slightest argumentative statement. As with the wokists who prevent conferences and cancel professors, Pastef is an impossible debate. Delegitimization, which I borrow from the brilliant compatriot Hamidou Anne, is the fact of refusing the other a title to opine. He is denied responsibility for his opinion. It is illegitimate to speak for the sole reason of real or supposed allegiance to one side or to speak against the cause. Wokists are not doing anything different when they consider that a white person, for example, is not legitimate to speak of racism, simply because they are white. You have to be racialized to debate racism. Finally, by his name Les Patriotes, Pastef divides society between patriots and those who are not patriots simply because they are not on their side. They are the camp of good and the others the camp of evil. The wokists operate in a similar fashion. You come from a minority, therefore a victim de facto belonging to the camp of good. You do not belong to a minority, you are an oppressor, on the side of evil.
The Pastéfian trinity is in 3 D: Denial-Defamation-Delegitimization. Denial is another name for bigotry. Argumentative reasoning has no hold on the sectarian. Léon Festinger, in a book co-written with Henry Riecken, Stanley Schachter, Failure of a Prophecy, illustrates this quite well: “Say [au sectaire] your disagreement, he turns his back on you. Show him facts and figures, he will ask you about their origin. Use logic, he doesn’t see how this concerns him.” The Pastef is the eviction of reason by a faith without light or salvation. The phrase attributed to Tertullian goes perfectly with Pastefian: “credo quia absurdum” “I believe because it is absurd”. Defamation seems to be part of Pastef’s DNA. We can no longer count the litany of people given over to public opinion, whose honor or consideration are trampled on the basis of accusations from the leader of Pastef, without the beginning of proof to date. Wokists have excelled in this field by destroying the reputations and careers of politicians, artists, journalists, professors, condemning them to social death.
Obviously, the populism attributed to D. Trump is the other name of an enterprise of restoration of a Nation fractured by an ideology of revenge of minorities. Pastéfian populism is a 3 D enterprise where a gang installed in Denial behaves like “tongue cutters” seeking to silence any opinion contrary to theirs and like “head cutters” to liquidate socially, not yet physically, their contradictors, through Defamation and Delegitimization. In this, Pastef ticks all the boxes of wokism.
Louis Mory MBAYE
