I was there when ‘woke’ began in the Sixties – and Trump is about to take it all away

Donald Trump’s return to the White House is more than a political shift, writes Peter Popham, it’s a direct challenge to the Sixties ideals that shaped a generation

It’s all about our generation. A mere five years separate me from Donald Trump, the new president of the United States. And it’s clear that he is coming to get us. He is the avenging angel, bent on shutting down the Sixties and all the energy and the causes the era spawned.

A lifelong non-smoker and non-drinker, he was the one at the side of the dance hall, looking on with contempt as we cavorted.

My generation was there at the dawn of all the progressive stuff: women’s liberation, gay liberation, sexual liberation, free schools – but also “Ban the Bomb” and world government. In the issue of Oz magazine I worked on as a schoolboy, the one that got its editors prosecuted and sent (briefly) to jail, all these causes were there in embryo. Yes, we were “woke”, years before the word was even thought of.

And now we are in his gun sights. “We’ll get radical woke ideologies the hell out of our military.” That’s his threat from day one.

Already, the white flags are going up; fellow travellers are tearing off their liberal clothes and asking where to sign.

Elon Musk was on stage at the pre-inauguration rally, stammering his boast that “we’re going to set the foundations for America to be strong for a century – for centuries – forever”.

Of the backsliding billionaires, he’s the least revolting, having tacked right for years. But Mark Zuckerberg as a primaeval hunter, beating his chest, firing his fact-checkers and going after his Hawaiian pigs with a bow and arrow? Jeff Bezos, executing a handbrake turn on the liberalism of the Washington Post?

At Sunday night’s rally, The Village People performed YMCA, the song that has become Trump’s signature tune. It’s been a gay anthem since about 1978, but no longer, as the group’s squirming leader, Victor Willis, explained. “We do support that we have a new president and we should all wish him well until he gives us a reason not to.” Besides, “the sad truth” is that if their preferred candidate Kamala Harris had won, they “would never have been invited to perform at her inauguration.” Willis, show some backbone!

Let’s not imagine we are safe on this side of the pond. The Burmese have a rueful proverb reflecting their proximity to China: when China spits, Burma swims. We’re no better off here. When Uncle Sam spits – when President Trump spits – Britain swims. Politics is already shifting as our leaders try to read the runes and take a stab at which of his crazy pronouncements – five per cent defence expenditure anybody? – to take seriously.

Kamala Harris reacts as Donald Trump claims people in Springfield, Ohio, are ‘eating the dogs, eating the cats’ (AP)

One thing no one will get away with is pretending it’s not happening. Pretending that – when we chuckled along with Kamala Harris at the man’s statements about the people in Springfield, Ohio, “eating the dogs, eating the cats” – the rest of America chuckled with us and sent Trump packing. Sadly not. He’s here to stay.

And so is the hinge moment which his second presidency assuredly means.

It’s not going to be straightforward. This is not like confronting a Mussolini or a Hitler, who we can read like a book. As Michael Ignatieff wrote in the Financial Times, Trump is a trickster; like the Joker in Batman; like other similarly disruptive, confusing, ambiguous figures dotted through mythology. He gets under our skin. He throws us off balance. He rings up Keir Starmer – and before the prime minister knows it, he’s talking, not about the neatly listed policy points, but about bird kills by wind farms and how the coyotes feasting on the birds are getting so fat they need anti-obesity drugs.

We are in the dark about how seriously to take the man. And that’s a problem, because we also don’t know how seriously to take ourselves. Perhaps this is the way in which Trump, too, is a figure defined by the Sixties.

Irony was our preferred register and seriousness the deadly sin. The editor of Oz, Richard Neville, our hero at the time, called his memoir of the Sixties Playpower. We were having a laugh. It was a gas, gas, gas. Seriousness – continuity – commitment – let alone institution-building – these were what we were rebelling against. Peter Pan was our symbol. Growing up? No thanks. We’ll stay the way we are: incorruptibly innocent.

Thinking with gloom and trepidation about Trump 2.0 – the new age dawning today – one sees that every generation since ours has come through puberty with the same play-obsessed, egocentric notions that we pioneered.

Punk kicked against the hippies, but in the same transgressive spirit. Grunge, slackers, trans – all with their lives lit up like ours were by the same excitement, doing what’s never been done, singing what’s never been sung – but in the same self-centred, idealistic key.

Well, this time around, the Trump presidency is not going to be a bizarre, farcical interlude in the progressive age. This time around, Trump’s coming to get us. It’s the moment to consider which of our Sixties blooms have usefully taken root – producing flowers and fruit of lasting value – and those which have turned out to be weeds or grown out of control.

We will watch as Trump takes on Washington’s swollen bureaucracy, burdened with acronyms like DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and ask ourselves – does the UK not have similar progressive origins?

If Starmer is to make a fraction of the headway he needs to on health, housing and transport before the next election, will he not have to adopt some Trumpian ruthlessness towards the layers of lawyerly regulation that have made getting anything done in this country impossible?

As the waverers swing to the right, we face a bonfire of the progressive vanities. It’s an ugly moment. Who knows what the trickster has up his sleeve for us? The challenge is to ask ourselves, with an honesty that has often escaped us in the past half-century: what can go and what must not.