From Harvard to the Los Angeles Times, the old quid pro quo is falling through.

D on’t look now, but, out of the corner of my eye, I think I may spy a salutary pattern. For as long as I can remember, alterations to the cultural scene went in only one direction. Recently, this has changed. Having marched for years through our institutions, the American left is finally meeting some resistance. Better still: On some fronts it has lost ground. There, action is yielding reaction. NPR’s hiring of Katherine Maher signaled that it intended to remain parochial. In response, Congress defunded it. Stephen Colbert transmuted The Late Show into a de facto extension of the DNC; in return, CBS canceled it. American Eagle made a commercial for denim that inspired a ludicrous backlash among the identitarians; in reply, the company’s stock soared. The owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, made it known publicly that he was no longer interested in subsidizing a daily version of the New Republic; in riposte, the most annoying among his employees chose to leave. Taken together, these developments have not fixed the problem — in classical terms, they’re Marathon, not Salamis. They have, however, indicated what is possible, and, in politics, possibility can prove addictive.

To hear the left tell it, these shifts represent an unconscionable threat to American journalism, American culture, and even to American democracy itself. But that, of course, is so much self-serving nonsense. There is nothing written in the stars that demands that all of America’s institutions must be run — or even influenced — by a tiny sliver of the population. Nor, in a free country, is it mandatory that what has been done be preserved forever. If Congress can decide that NPR and PBS are worth funding, it can also decide that they are not. If CBS can give Stephen Colbert the reins of The Late Show, it can take them away should he prove incompetent in the role. If American Eagle — and other corporations — can choose to kowtow to the delirium of the neurotic online left, it can also tell its emissaries to pound sand. And, yes, if the Washington Post can be oriented towards the presumptions of the Democratic elite, it can just as easily be reoriented away from them.

It has often been remarked that, when progressives warn that a given change is a “threat to democracy,” they really mean that it is a threat to bureaucracy. So it is here. For more than five decades, the Democratic Party and its beneficiaries have proven extremely adept at maintaining a host of powerful institutions that are able to deliver hard results independent of the will of voters, and consumers. Observed on a spreadsheet, the consequences of this play have seemed utterly baffling. Because it couldn’t raise enough money from volunteers, NPR required millions of dollars in funding from taxpayers. Because its appeal was so niche, The Late Show was losing $40 million a year. Because his newspaper was so cramped and so boring, Jeff Bezos was subsidizing it to the tune of $100 million per annum. From the perspective of the message-launderers, however, this was a terrific deal: They got a large and prestigious platform that they could use to insinuate that their strange little ideology was mainstream, while some remote third party — be it a billionaire, a corporation, or an irritated taxpayer in Boise — ended up footing the bill.

It is this latter part of the equation that is now in jeopardy. Just as, during Covid, parents and school boards decided that they no longer wished to send an unqualified blank check to the education system each year, so the figures responsible for maintaining the Permanent Progressive Archipelago are starting to express skepticism about their roles. From Harvard to Twitter to the Los Angeles Times, the old quid pro quo is being broken. It is astonishing that there was ever much room for a proposition that amounts to, “You give me your money; I’ll use it to fund my fanatical political project; no questions asked,” and yet, inexplicably, that has been the norm for most of my adult life. In most realms, it still is, but the ball is now rolling, and, as, one by one, the marks catch onto the ruse, that should change for the better at last.