Post-Woke: The Death of the Managerial Class

By KJ Freeman

The Trump administration’s censorship campaign, through the dismantling of DEI, the targeting of Palestinian activists, and a retrograde performance of red-state racism Trump doesn’t even authentically embody, reveals something deeper than reactionary politics. It is the collapse of a cultural order and, with it, the quiet dismantling of the managerial class.

I have now lived through two Trump presidencies. Each time, the Democratic Party has countered him with everything except material transformation. Their strategies rely on moral branding, celebrity endorsements, institutional appeals, and an ever-expanding roster of HR-coded resistance. Beneath the surface, they remain committed to preserving the soft power of corporate elites, NGO interests, and institutional donors.

This time, something feels different. The opposition to Trump is louder but weaker. Institutions that once offered cultural legitimacy, including media, academia, and nonprofit leadership, are cracking under the weight of their own contradictions. The director of the Smithsonian is removed. The New York Times assigns three journalists to the story. But it is obvious to anyone watching. Liberalism’s NGO-era moralism is not an effective counter to a populist president elected again through martyrdom, political persecution, and two assassination attempts. You cannot fight fascism while holding hands with the donor class. You cannot present yourself as a revolutionary when your salary depends on stability.

What we are witnessing is the gutting of the managerial class. Not just mid-level executives but also the professionalized liberals who populate the cultural and nonprofit sectors. This includes DEI consultants, political pundits, university administrators, art curators, and foundation directors. They were never revolutionaries. They were functionaries of soft power, tasked with enforcing institutional ideologies without ever challenging the material structures those ideologies were built to defend.

Their outrage now stems from a growing realization. They are disposable. Their belief that public moralism would earn them protection was naive. They thought aligning against Trump would secure their place in a future political order. Instead, they are being tossed aside by the very institutions they sought to save.

Some sincerely believed they were sacrificing themselves for a greater good. But many were simply playing the game, expecting that their outrage, their statements, their performative integrity would be rewarded with promotions, grants, or media visibility. They assumed Trump would not win.

But he did. Again. Because in America, nothing is more powerful than martyrdom. Trump, through spectacle and persecution, positioned himself as a victim of the very institutions liberals revere. He absorbed the fire they lit and converted it into political fuel. The managerial class misunderstood the game. They confused their proximity to power with power itself.

Today, people panic over fascism like it is new. As if Black people have not been living under fascist conditions since Reconstruction. As if New York City and Los Angeles were not already police states. Surveillance infrastructure expands. Military budgets grow. And still, corpses get sexual assaulted on trains. The city watches but does not intervene.

Ryan Serhant proudly calls New York a pied-à-terre city while playing a direct role in making rent untenable. He is not an outlier. He is the face of an aesthetic elite that sells culture to the highest bidder. It is not about art or life. It is about ownership and resale.

We are living in a loop of contradictions. A Black billionaire releases an album praising Hitler and referencing Mein Kampf while Israel’s state violence turns it into a global pariah. Anti-Semitic memes circulate freely among once-progressive friend groups. The people who posted black squares and attended coexist yoga retreats now quote fascists and repost propaganda.

A sculpture of a plus-size Black woman is labeled grotesque, even as BBW porn continues to trend in private tabs. My phone does not stop buzzing. Every time Trump is in office, they get bolder. It is a comedy. Part fetish. Part repression. All American.

This is not white guilt. It is post-woke exhaustion. People want contradictions. They want permission to say something is racist and still stream the music. They want to reject moralism while maintaining the illusion of ethics. The shame economy is collapsing. All that remains is vibe management.

Morgan Wallen is not hated because he said the n-word. He is hated because the music is mid. Tate McRae’s songs are overexposed, underwritten, and carried by marketing. We have entered the era where even racism has lost its edge. Everyone already knows it is wrong. They just do not want to be told what to do.

The shock jocks are corny. The race realists are just failed comedians who found podcast mics instead of audiences. The tradwives are exhausted. The men who demanded submission are now restless, cheating, fantasizing about women like me. The patriarchal cosplay is falling apart.

Oz has been revealed and behind the curtain is a mess of anti-intellectualism, tech bros with god complexes, and upper-middle-class adults who learned politics on Instagram. Wealth does not prove intelligence. At best, it indicates you had access. At worst, it means your first-grade teacher was a narcissist and now you are too.

We are all flawed. We contradict ourselves. We have moments of grace and moments of rot. But the endless witch-hunts have grown dull. Scapegoats have stopped surprising us. Everyone who once appeared righteous is unraveling in real time. The call is always coming from inside the house.

Eventually, those who never had to examine their beliefs will be forced to. And when they do, they might discover that the people they demonized, including Black femmes, sex workers, broke artists, neurodivergent weirdos, and loud queers, were less dangerous than the respectable gatekeepers they trusted to lead them.