But it’s not just among newcomers or minorities that the woke are losing their grip. Many long-time liberals have been shocked by the abandonment of concepts of free speech and open inquiry by many Democrats, including by some in the Biden administration. Trump may perform like a dime-store Mussolini, but it’s increasingly clear that the push towards censorship comes largely from the left, which has captured most of the media. Liberal journalists like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald have uncovered the odd ties between Democratic operatives, including in the media, and organisations like the CIA and FBI, once widely suspected as right-wing enforcers.

This is less a shift to the right, as occurred with neoconservatives under Reagan and Thatcher, and more an internal rebellion. As long as Republican politicians remain loyal to Trump, while adopting extreme views on social issues like abortion and flirting with white-nationalist themes, there’s little chance liberals will embrace the GOP. But liberals increasingly can’t share the stage with progressives, either. The 2020 Harper’s letter against cancel culture, signed by many left-of-centre writers and academics and published in a left-of-centre magazine, was no endorsement of conservatism. It was blowback against ‘illiberalism’ and a ‘stifling atmosphere’ which its signatories say has ‘intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity’.

The best way for Biden and the Democrats to revive themselves, as Bill Clinton political guru James Carville notes, would be to detach the party from gender, race and other lunacies of the ‘faculty lounge’. In contrast, an approach that seeks reform within the framework of the constitutional order and favours middle- and working-class upward mobility would work well – particularly with working-class whites and Latinos as well as the suburban moderates who hold the balance of power in American politics.