The daily news grind makes it clear that we are in the midst of a presidential campaign, which wags sometimes call “the silly season.” Such cynicism is unwarranted. The rough and tumble of politics can be disheartening, but politics has a noble end: to peacefully arbitrate between different visions of the good life.
For conservatives right now, this means that if they get power, they must regain the cultural terrain the Left has conquered in recent years. Because these changes have been so deep, conservatives sense that the continuation of the American way of life depends on not just yelling “Stop,” but reversing ground. This is what conservatives mean when they say that politicians must “know what time it is.”
Progressives, on the other hand, seek to conquer more and more ground. They have for some time now been explicit that their desire is to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” as Barack Obama so nakedly put it a few days before the 2008 election. “Let us transform this nation,” he urged voters as he began his campaign in 2007.
What followed was indeed transformative. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens in 2022 called it the “great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs — regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome — became, more and more, not just passe, but taboo.”
This cultural revolution accelerated in 2020 when the Black Lives Matter riots (633 of them) intimidated many of the gatekeepers of our cultural institutions into accepting unexamined assertions that America is “systemically racist,” or that “white supremacy” is the operating cultural order of the country.
If racism is “systemic” and not a matter of ugly individuals ignoring Christ’s command to love one another, never mind civil rights law preventing discrimination — change must indeed be systemic, totalizing.
The leaders of the 2020 insurrection were as clear about their goals as Obama had been in 2007 and 2008. “We’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country,” BLM founder Alicia Garza told a group of Maine liberals at one point. “We all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society.”
Thus, every institution in the meaning-creation industries, from colleges and universities, to libraries, to museums, to the media, to entertainment, etc., joined the “de-colonization” crusade. The once-august Smithsonian Institution, which had signed up to the decolonization project years earlier, began running items on “whiteness,” including a chart (since taken down) that labeled “hard work” and “rational thinking” as white traits.
The Biden administration has from its start strongly promoted this totalizing transformation. Biden’s first act as president was to sign an executive order that took a “systematic approach” to embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion in all government agencies. He has also pushed for transgender surgeries on minors — read: “mutilation” — despite assertions to the contrary.
All these societal changes have been recent. The Left may pretend that this is time-honored “Mom and Apple Pie” stuff. It’s not.
Now, if conservatives don’t fight to let people be free to use the pronouns that accord to science and the rules of grammar, to save their young daughters from having to share bathrooms with grown men, to say no to maiming minors, or to return to the ideal of race-blind meritocracy, without fear of retribution, then they don’t deserve to be trusted with power ever again.
Their work must be properly seen as a counterrevolution that seeks to restore America’s founding principles. The American war of independence was itself an attempt to restore the colonists to the status quo ante, which George III and the Tories had violated with a series of taxes, restrictions, and demands that the colonists quarter and feed soldiers, which changed the nature of the relationship.
It differed greatly from the French Revolution a decade and a half later, which was an attempt to bulldoze over the past, and which ended in terror. That is more the Left’s blueprint for today.
The 2024 election cycle holds promise for conservatives, and this debate should be, as always, adjudicated peacefully through the political process. We would be foolish, however, not to consider that the Left has a long history of violence — violence that, unlike that in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, lasted months and whose perpetrators went mostly unpunished.
The aforementioned BLM riots paralyzed or disrupted cities for weeks or months in 2020, and were the costliest in history, according to the Insurance Information Institute. Public buildings were attacked. And not for the first time: BLM has unleashed violence on the country since its creation in 2013, including the formative riots in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
Likewise, the pro-Hamas protests this year, promoted by the same revolutionary infrastructure that supported BLM, didn’t just disrupt campus life, but cut off critical urban infrastructure points such as the Brooklyn Bridge. New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg last month let most of those arrested for the violent takeover of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall walk free.
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And leaders such as Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and others have all openly called for violence against their political opponents and Supreme Court justices.
It’s impossible to see this and think that the reversal that conservatives seek will be met with Socratic dialogue. It should, of course. But, alas, that’s not the way the Left works.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Senior Fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation.