The 'Anti-Woke' Tax That All Americans Are Paying

"Now, in Donald Trump's second administration, that parallel economy is just the economy. Trumpist culture wars have made almost everything more expensive, effectively forcing all Americans to pay an anti-woke tax. Although conservatives usually use woke to describe some form of egalitarianism they oppose, it's proved such an effective epithet that they're now applying the label to anything they need their constituents to dislike."

"Trump has an economic argument for his tariffs, if a rather unconvincing one. But the tariffs make more sense if you look at them as a kind of anti-woke tax. The administration has presented them as a temporary setback on the road to long-term prosperity, a corrective to the cooperative diplomacy of the past, and a promise-one impossible to fulfill-that America can return to some golden age of plentiful manufacturing jobs, the kind of manly work that soft-handed libs with email jobs took from you."

Conservatives once promoted a parallel market of premium "anti-woke" consumer goods. Under Donald Trump, that niche approach has broadened into mainstream policy, with culture-war rhetoric labeling many things "woke" and targeting them politically. Tariffs have been a central instrument, coinciding with modest but steady price increases on both imported and domestic goods since March. The administration frames tariffs as a temporary economic cost and a path to reviving domestic manufacturing, invoking nostalgic visions of male-dominated factory work. Those measures effectively raise prices for all Americans, shifting the cost of political signaling onto general consumers.

Read at The Atlantic