Five years ago, progressive ideas about social justice dominated corporate America, universities, and public discourse. Terms like “diversity, equity, and inclusion” were everywhere, companies proudly announced their commitments to racial equity, and questioning these initiatives could get you labeled problematic—or worse. But something’s shifted. Professor Eric Kaufmann documented this change in his 2024 book and noted the retreat of DEI mandates, a substantial rightward shift among young people from 2021-24, and rising backlash against certain progressive policies. For those who’ve felt uncomfortable with aspects of this movement—many of whom are Boomers—this feels like vindication. Here are thirteen “woke” ideas that are fading, and why some people are relieved.
1. Mandatory DEI Training
Remember when every company made you sit through hours of diversity training? Those sessions where you learned about microaggressions, implicit bias, and unconscious racism? They’re disappearing fast. Major corporations, including Walmart, Target, Ford, and Toyota, have quietly scaled back or eliminated these programs entirely.
The trainings were supposed to make workplaces more inclusive, but critics argued they often felt accusatory, making people defensive. Companies spent billions on these initiatives, but research questioned their effectiveness. Now that the political and legal landscape has shifted, many organizations are pulling back. For Boomers who resented being lectured about their unconscious biases, this feels like common sense returning.
2. Hiring Based On Identity Demographics
Companies used to openly announce hiring goals based on race and gender—aiming for specific percentages of diverse candidates in management roles. McDonald’s ended their set representation goals in January 2025. Meta stopped their diverse-slate hiring approach. PepsiCo dropped its representation goals for management positions. Amazon scrubbed DEI mentions from its annual reports.
A backlash to the “woke movement” began emerging in 2021, with state laws removing certain race-based information and ideas from education. In 2025, executive orders directly attacked DEI practices as discriminatory, ordering them to be stopped within the federal government. This led to companies eliminating certain content about race from websites, and a notification that schools and colleges would lose federal funding if they didn’t stop DEI activities.
The argument was always that diversity improves outcomes and brings different perspectives. But skeptics—particularly Boomers who built careers on merit-based advancement—saw it as discrimination. To them, hiring should focus on who’s most qualified, period.
3. Calling Everything “Racist” Or “Problematic”
There was a period where seemingly anything could be labeled racist—hairstyles, food preferences, Halloween costumes. The constant expansion of what was considered problematic made people exhausted. You couldn’t have conversations without worrying you’d accidentally say something offensive and get called out publicly.
This created what some called a “culture of grievance” where offense-taking became a sport. Boomers especially felt this keenly—they’d lived through actual civil rights struggles and saw the term “racist” being diluted to meaninglessness. When serious racism gets lumped in with trivial cultural preferences, nothing means anything anymore.
4. Gender Ideology In Elementary Schools
The inclusion of gender identity curricula in early education became massively controversial. Parents discovered their young children were being taught about gender fluidity, preferred pronouns, and that biological sex was just a social construct.
In 2024, anti-woke efforts focused heavily on schools, though with mixed results. Some school boards that promoted transgender inclusion policies faced opposition from GOP presidential candidates, while progressive candidates held onto seats in high-profile races. The debate continues, but the certainty that this curriculum should be everywhere has definitely faded.
5. Demanding Everyone Share Their Pronouns iiiiiii
For a while, introducing yourself meant stating your pronouns—even if you’d never questioned your gender identity. Email signatures included “she/her” or “he/him” declarations. Companies made it standard practice. The intention was to make trans and non-binary people feel included, but it often felt performative and compelled.
The practice hasn’t disappeared entirely, but it’s no longer automatic or expected in many spaces. For Boomers who saw it as theater that solved nothing, the fading of this practice feels like relief from performative progressivism.
6. Cancel Culture And Public Shamings Over Old Tweets
The early 2020s saw people losing jobs, opportunities, and reputations over things they’d said years or decades earlier. A problematic tweet from 2010 could destroy your career in 2020. The mob would descend, demand apologies, and push for professional consequences. It created an atmosphere of fear where nobody felt safe.
This culture of punishment over rehabilitation made everyone walk on eggshells. Boomers watched younger people enthusiastically destroy each other’s lives over minor infractions and thought it looked like the Cultural Revolution, not progress. While cancel culture still exists, its power has diminished. Companies are less likely to fire people over Twitter outrage, and public figures are pushing back rather than immediately apologizing.
7. Equity Over Equality As The Goal
The shift from equality (equal treatment) to equity (equal outcomes) represented a fundamental change in goals. Equity meant engineering results, so everyone ended up in the same place, regardless of choices, effort, or ability. It required treating people differently based on identity to achieve identical outcomes.
Critics argued equity required discrimination and denied individual agency—if outcomes must be equal, then personal choices and work ethic become irrelevant. Boomers who succeeded through effort saw equity as insulting to everyone: it denied credit to those who worked hard and removed accountability from those who didn’t.
8. Men In Women’s Sports
This became one of the clearest flashpoints. Biological males competing in women’s athletics dominated competitions, breaking records and taking opportunities from female athletes. Advocates said trans women are women and deserve inclusion. Critics said this erased women’s sports entirely and was profoundly unfair.
Public opinion shifted dramatically on this issue. Even people generally supportive of trans rights drew a line at biological males in women’s sports. States started passing laws preventing it. Athletic organizations began implementing stricter policies. For Boomers who fought for Title IX and women’s sports opportunities, watching those gains disappear to accommodate gender ideology felt enraging.
9. Defund The Police Movements
“Defund the police” dominated 2020 protests. Cities cut police budgets, criminals were released without bail, and public safety collapsed in progressive areas. Crime spiked, businesses left, and residents fled. The real-world consequences of this ideology became impossible to ignore.
Even the most progressive cities quietly reversed course. Police budgets were restored, sometimes increased. Politicians who championed defunding suddenly supported law enforcement again. Turns out people actually like having police respond when they’re robbed. Boomers who watched society abandon common sense for slogans felt vindicated when reality forced corrections. You can’t have functioning cities without public safety—that’s just obvious.
10. “Lived Experience” Trumping Data And Facts
Academic and corporate spaces elevated “lived experience” over empirical evidence. Personal feelings about oppression became an unquestionable truth that overrode statistics, research, or objective analysis. If someone from a marginalized group claimed something based on their experience, contradicting them—even with data—was dismissed as invalidation.
This created chaos where feelings mattered more than facts, and subjective experience couldn’t be questioned. Boomers raised in a world where evidence and reason mattered watched this with horror. Science, data, and logic aren’t tools of oppression—they’re how we determine truth.
11. Dismantling Meritocracy As “White Supremacy”
Progressive ideology labeled meritocracy itself as white supremacy—the idea that advancement should be based on ability and achievement was framed as inherently racist. Standards, testing, and competition were attacked as tools of oppression that needed to be eliminated for equity.
This meant removing gifted programs, eliminating advanced classes, ending standardized testing, and lowering standards across institutions. The stated goal was equity, but the result was bringing everyone down rather than lifting anyone up. For Boomers who succeeded through merit and believed in rewarding excellence, this was madness. Calling achievement “white supremacy” insults everyone who worked hard, regardless of race.
12. Apologizing For Sins Committed By Ancestors
There was a period where people were expected to apologize for things their ancestors allegedly did, take responsibility for historical injustices they had no connection to, and accept guilt based solely on their race. White people were told they had collective responsibility for slavery, colonialism, and every bad thing in history.
This concept of inherited guilt made no sense to most people. You can acknowledge history without accepting personal responsibility for things that happened generations ago. Boomers especially rejected this—they didn’t own slaves, they weren’t colonizers, and they’re not apologizing for being born.
13. Constant Focus On Race In Every Situation
Everything became about race. Every issue, every problem, every interaction was analyzed through racial lenses. Critical race theory frameworks taught that racism explained all disparities and was embedded in every system. This made race inescapable and omnipresent in ways that felt exhausting and counterproductive.
Many people—including minorities—found the constant racial focus divisive and reductive. It reduced people to their race, assumed everyone’s defining characteristic was skin color, and made productive conversation nearly impossible. Boomers who lived through integration and believed in colorblindness saw this as regression, not progress. They fought to be judged by character, not color. The retreat from race-obsession feels like returning to Martin Luther King Jr.’s actual vision: judge people by who they are, not what they look like.
