If the 2024 electoral outcome demonstrates anything enduring, it is this: So much for classical liberalism being on the “wrong side of history.”

The American progressive movement has for decades averred that anyone opposed to their designs for remaking American society is a reactionary who, in William F. Buckley’s humorous formulation, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop!” Of course, Buckley thought this a positive, while progressives — with the embedded term “progress” placing them on the side of the angels — believe the whole of modern American conservatism to constitute a sort of rearguard action against change that is not only desirable, but inevitable.
Put differently, for progressives, all change advanced by the Left is “progress,” progress is good by definition, and such progress cannot be stopped.
Of course, to actually hold in good faith that all “progress” is inherently worthy requires historical amnesia, as any reasoned observer might challenge whether the eugenics movement and lobotomies performed upon the mentally ill were unalloyed societal goods. Nevertheless, the need for such intellectual gymnastics to hold that all change represents progress has yet to slow the Left’s convictions, as its headlong march towards human perfection advances unchecked.
Among those free of such certitude, the inexorability of progressives’ historical determinism had begun to show cracks even before Donald Trump’s remarkable 2024 comeback victory, and started to look, well, exorable. The “demography is destiny” cult of future multiethnic Democratic dominance, as advanced by Ruy Teixeira and others, had begun to erode long before November 2024; Recently, even Teixeira himself has changed his tune. It turns out the “fundamental transformation” promised by Barack Obama and delivered by his former vice president (and now rejected at the ballot box) wasn’t merely a rhetorical flourish, but a comprehensive program at odds with the small-R republican and classically liberal val...