E.G.

I doubt that the movement known variously as wokeism / identity politics / political correctness deserves much of the blame for Trump's victory. But in any case here are some of my current opinions about that movement, which I'll just call "wokeism":
(1) Etiquette is about the regulation of language and meaningful gestures.
(2) Violation of etiquette is what we call rudeness. Adherence to etiquette is what we call politeness.
(3) Etiquette is important. Our sense of what is rude and what is polite makes a major difference to what we say, do, and think. You can make life significantly better for people by making the right sorts of improvements to your society's system of etiquette.
(4) Wokeism as a social movement is about etiquette. That might not be all that it's about, but I do think that that is what it is mainly about.
(5) The core methodological idea of wokeism is that if we treat certain things (e.g., failure to use someone's preferred pronouns) as rude, then this will bring it about that those things actually are rude. This method has a long track record of success. For example, we treat people who pick their nose in public as if they are being rude, and this is what makes it the case that it is actually rude to pick your nose in public.
(6) Wokeism has been extremely successful. I don't have any statistics to back up this contention, but it seems to me that wokeism has had huge uptake across all levels of society, including among many conservatives and even many Trumpists (example: JD Vance complies with pronoun rules here), and has achieved this in a very short period of time.
(7) Wokeism is good. The adjustments to our system of etiquette that wokeism urges us to make are right, and I don't know of any wokeist rules that seem clearly wrong or harmful. In general, the things that wokeism regards as rude are things that should be regarded as rude.
(8) Unsurprisingly, wokeism annoys people. People don't like to be regarded as rude and don't like to submit to new rules, and wokeism forces people to have to choose to do one or the other of those two things.
(9) People experience wokeism in roughly the same way you might experience a fancy dinner party where the expectations are unfamiliar and strange to you. Eventually, once you've got the rules figured out, you can relax, but you're going to feel on edge for a while. You might have to attend multiple dinner parties before you are fully comfortable.
(10) Wokeism is itself rude, because it is rude to treat someone as if they are being rude, and treating people as if they are being rude is precisely how wokeism effects change in people's sense of what is rude. Wokeism is in that way a confrontational movement.
(11) Unavoidably, etiquette is about status and class. Being rude and being polite reveal something about how you have been raised and educated: where you're "from." People make inferences about you by observing your manners or lack thereof. This is true of rules about forks at fancy dinner parties, and is equally true of wokeism's rules. And so it has to be granted, I believe, that wokeism as a social movement is in the business of making people feel bad about facts about themselves that result from their upbringing, where they went to school, etc.
(12) So there is a class aspect of all of this, with one side being associated with what might be called, broadly, "university culture" (a culture that, it needs to be acknowledged, not everyone has the means to participate in) and with the other side positioning themselves as opponents of the universities.
(13) Universities, it should be remembered, have always been in significant part about instilling good manners. One hundred years ago, first-generation college kids would come home with new ways of speaking and being, some of which their parents would have found off-putting and foreign. So it is today with wokeism.
(14) Even if (as I doubt) Harris lost the election because of wokeism, the movement should still just keep going. Its goals are good, its methods are reasonable, and it has already been very successful in such a short period of time. The hard part is probably over now.

Added Nov. 22: Steven Teles is making some really interesting related points about etiquette in today's episode of Ezra Klein show.