On September 7, 2018, in his first major address since leaving office, former President Barack Obama excoriated the administration of Donald J. Trump. By then, the latter president had been in office for over a year and a half. Obama, cajoling students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to vote, offered a withering takedown of what he characterized as his Republican rival’s failed policies. The former president punctuated the air with a run-down of U.S. history’s ebbs and flows, even while urging those in attendance to have faith in better days ahead: “We waged a civil war. We overcame depression. We’ve lurched from eras of great progressive change to periods of retrenchment.” Although the roughly 1,300 students, staff, and faculty cheered vociferously that day, now—some 7 years hence—it may be worth asking: Did anyone really understand what Obama meant? What, after all, really is retrenchment? 

With the following, I propose that although the word itself lacks both everyday clarity and theoretical specificity, here in the US, it may be the left’s next choice as a useful lexical tool. Confronted with so much clickbait and internet slop, the academic left does well to take stock of its political lexicon. Case in point is a recent article by Yves Winter. In “What is an Imaginary?,” the political scientist provides a richly researched genealogy of the word imaginary—its origins, history, and current purchase in various academic disciplines. Winter correctly signals the pervasiveness of “imaginary” in contemporary academic discourse and the confusion as to what the word means and does. After all, in everyday speech, imaginary feels clunky as a noun; Winter traces its trajectory to existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and a subsequent “translation of the French imaginaire, which is itself a twentieth-century coinage.” Ultimately, Winter shows how the concept “took on a life of its own and could be mobilized by divergent theoretical traditions for different ends”—including the likes of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. In sum, Winter deftly proves his mission to be more than just “scholarly housekeeping”; rather, he traces the definitional trajectory of imaginary, illustrating how the word ‘transmogrified’ from suggesting an individual category into a collective one. 

Retrenchment—a concept now becoming ubiquitous among US-based sociologists and among education researchers—has experienced a similar definitional sea change in the past thirty or so years. Originally associated with economic policies, the term has been consistently molded to fit into a second definitional frame, suggesting something akin to ‘the scaling back or challenge to the inclusion of Critical Race Theory in education.’ This type of retrenchment is not of the welfare sort that shook up the social safety net in Reagan’s 1980s. Rather, it exists in milieu of social, cultural, and educational affairs. Strangely enough, one of the more precise definitions of retrenchment to be found is not on a policy website but rather in an internal document for use within Bay Area Rapid Transit. Someone based in San Francisco, it seems, is hoping that the word becomes well-traveled among society writ large:

“retrenchment refers to the ways in which this progress is very often challenged, neutralized or undermined. In many cases after a measure is enacted that can be counted as progress, significant backlashes—retrenchment—develop in key public policy areas. Some examples include the gradual erosion of affirmative action programs, practices among real estate professionals that maintain segregated neighborhoods, and failure on the part of local governments to enforce equity-oriented policies such as inclusionary zoning laws.”

More scholarly publications have generally agreed upon this definition, even though it remains without a proper lexical treatise. Like Winter’s imaginary, retrenchment also has a uniquely circuitous genealogy. With a bit of digging, we arrive at the scholarship of Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at Columbia University, who is perhaps most known for her concept intersectionality—a framework for examining how multiple social identities, especially those of marginalized groups, connect within broader systems of power. Her article titled “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law,” while not providing an explicit definition of this novel retrenchment, treads close to the thought of Antonio Gramsci when invoking the word. Crenshaw can be credited as having crafted academia’s contemporary definition of the concept. She explains that “Gramsci explicitly recognized that the two fundamental types of political control—coercion and hegemonic consensus—were dialectically linked and thus had to be understood together;” this, she links to antidiscrimination vis-à-vis the law, but also alongside education policy. This has since led to a significant amount of scholarship—notably, Devon W. Carbado’s “Critical What What?” from 2011 and more recently, a book from political scientist Domingo Morel. 

Crenshaw’s allusion to Gramsci is apt. Within Gramsci’s thought, “trenches” embody the long-standing pillars of civil society—schools, churches, and media outlets—that sustain capitalism’s ideological dominance. Rather than a frontal “war of maneuver,” the Italian philosopher’s “war of position” demands a prolonged battle of ideas: gradually reshaping public consciousness within these institutions as a precondition for emancipatory change. Somewhat strangely, it does not seem to be Gramsci himself who coined this version of retrenchment. Rather, in the introduction to Gramsci’s essay “Americanism and Fordism”— published among his Prison Notebooks—the editors and translators of the volume, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith write that “an essential, though unspoken, premise of Americanism and Fordism is that the revolutionary working class movement was in a phase of retrenchment and defeat throughout the capitalist world.” Hoare’s presence in the Gramsci translation is particularly important. Indeed, the introductory notes in the Prison Notebooks were largely written by Hoare, a polyglot and committed leftist. Crafting exotic words such as “retrenchment” routinely appeared in Hoare and Nowell Smith’s translations: “In order to provide a better translation of Gramsci’s language, Hoare and Nowell Smith adopted neologisms and created a completely new English vocabulary.” Tellingly, the Oxford English Dictionary lists “trenchment” as “obsolete” or “rare,” from the 17th century and meaning “a work formed by trenching; an entrenchment.” In French there does exist “retranchement,” which is defined as “ouvrage permettant, au cours d’un combat, d’arrêter les assaillants ou de se mettre à couvert. Abattre des arbres pour construire des retranchements”—that is, a “structure used during combat to stop attackers or to take cover. To fell trees in order to build entrenchments/fortifications.” Thus, retrenchment is what someone does in order to save their skin while facing attack. In this way, retrenchment may break a common pattern on the left. After all, several terms that now function as right-wing smear words —“woke,” “cancel culture,” “Critical Race Theory”—started as neutral or academic: they were originally employed by the left as standard-bearers. The right—aided by the likes of Christopher Rufo and Ann Coulter and so adept at the games of appropriation and sullying, has weaponized these concepts against the leftist who coined them. The left has thus largely played defense on terminology—watching its own academic vocabulary get weaponized, then scrambling to reclaim or disown it. Retrenchment flips the frame: rather than defending a label, it imposes one. Whether it can now travel from academic and policy circles into plain speech remains to be seen. 

Should Crenshaw’s retrenchment—effectively constituting a neologism—be celebrated as having broken new ground for important antiracist work? Like a photograph, does the label allow us to see the injustices of the world with greater nuance and clarity? Or, alternatively, do these words that hover at the edge of academia—that thrive among think tanks, policy wonks, and activists—actually curtail a more substantive push to convince in more mainstream fora? After all, and as Gramsci correctly signals, “the ideological preparation of the masses is therefore an absolute necessity for the revolutionary struggle.” Yet, the Italian philosopher’s war of position proposes a long-game reformist strategy rather than a revolutionary one. Does the promotion of words and transformed definitions speak to this Gramscian modus operandi or undermine it? Various examples from academic circles suggests that, while the general contours of the term are agreed upon, differences remain. Thus, while Thalia González and Will Martel center retrenchment as a process associated with education, the more public-facing interpretation of Dana E. Crawford does not address education directly, rather it means “the reduction or reversal of progress made in racial equity and civil rights. It is the dismantling or weakening of our policies, practices, laws and societal norms that were designed for justice for all.” David Stovall, too, evinces the term in this broad sense in his discussion of police violence, mass incarceration, and immigration enforcement. Perhaps this was Obama’s meaning.

This said, although many social scientists and education researchers today evince retrenchment as a useful antiracist tool, we should not disallow ourselves to poke and prod at the words we use in hopes of clarifying broader arguments and better understanding our current lexical zeitgeist. What does the term offer to those outside particular disciplines? I suggest that retrenchment—at least from a non-specialist’s perspective—may conceptually be far from perfect. 

First, the definitional transformation that retrenchment has undergone speaks to a longtime tendency in academia to twist and turn everyday language into something specialized. For example, the use of subaltern—although  originally a military term—allows academics to underscore the diminished agency of colonized subjects. Alternatively, the term decolonize has been banalized—rendering quotidian consumer habits politically enlightened. Retrenchment is somewhat vague, yet certainly not the most egregious example of academic gobbledygook; it can best be understood as a type of “insider-shorthand.” In this way, the term often feels the burden of hypostatization—part floating signifier, part agentive appellation that almost acts on its own. As one scholar writes: “the retrenchment has responded accordingly—taking aim at efforts to better educate Americans on matters of race.” For most of history, retrenchment meant merely “the reduction of costs or spending in response to economic difficulty.” Strangely, although this is the definition Webster’s Dictionary provides, the dictionary also provides an example of the word in its novel variation (the third example listed), but without any explanation as to the difference. Retrenchment is undoubtedly living a moment of transition. 

This leads us to point two. While the new definition of retrenchment speaks to matters of policy, culture, and race—and not finances—education policies, positions on race, and curricula are deeply influenced by money. As another article dealing with anti-CRT initiatives states, “From this pandemic-era advocacy, a new form of educative activism emerged, including “astroturf” parental rights groups supported by “dark money.” In this sense, the modified definition almost tasks us to interrogate the relationship between financial currents and social movements. What is the point of contact between race, education, and money? 

Thirdly, retrenchment, as newly defined by educational policy researchers, strangely exemplifies what it is meant to define—at least by certain, albeit admittedly far-left perspective. By forwarding the notion that retrenchment and reform are related dialectically, reform, rather than revolution, is situated the farthest horizon of political possibility. Amid talk of retrenchment, reform is presented as the lodestar of progressivism. Perhaps, inspired by Theodor Adorno’s take of jargon in academia, we could propose that the reform/retrenchment dialectic feels edgy even while smuggling in conformist content. 

At the present time, the first term which Crenshaw minted—intersectionality—has made inroads into mainstream political rhetoric that retrenchment has not. At a January 23, 2023 press conference, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced the cancellation of Florida’s Advanced Placement African American history course, saying: “We want education, not indoctrination. And so when you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons, that’s a political agenda.” The New York Times has used “intersectionality” on various occasions. Interestingly enough, retrench—which ran as the New York Times’s “Word of the Day” during summer 2025—has seemingly maintained its original meaning in the newspaper of record. This, too, should give us pause. That is, evidence on where retrenchment will land is not encouraging. Crenshaw’s other coinage—intersectionality—has made the journey from academic framework into mainstream political speech, but it arrived damaged. Yet, can retrenchment—ostensibly a direct attack on curricular maneuvers by the right—sidestep the tentacular strategies of, say, a Christopher Rufo?  

In conclusion, we should remember that Hoare and Nowell Smith’s inspired translation came out in 1971; again, not until 1988 with Crenshaw’s article that the concept would be linked to race and education. It may take another decade or longer to more concretely establish the meaning, uses, and possibilities of retrenchment. Although the term may lack theoretical clarity, it still may become effective among certain US political cliques, or even beyond.

Short bio:

Kevin Anzzolin is a Lecturer of Spanish at Christopher Newport University.