Something deeper, I believe, is rumbling behind the astounding support for Mr. Trump, a man who, apart from his large but less than pure business success, appears otherwise entirely without qualification for the presidency. I had a hint of what might be behind the support for him a few weeks ago when, on one of the major network news shows, I watched a reporter ask a woman at a Trump rally why she was supporting him. A thoroughly respectable-seeming middle-class woman, she replied without hesitation: “I want my country back.”
This woman is easily imagined clicking through TV news channels or websites and encountering this montage: Black Lives Matters protesters bullying the latest object of their ire; a lesbian couple kissing at their wedding ceremony; a mother in Chicago weeping over the death of her young daughter, struck by an errant bullet from a gang shootout; a panel earnestly discussing the need for men who “identify” as women to have access to the public lavatories of their choosing; college students, showing the results of their enfeebling education, railing about imagined psychic injuries caused by their professors or fellow students…
Who, one needs to ask, took it away? Short answer: the cultural warriors. I was once in the company of Irving Kristol when someone asked him how the culture wars were going. “They’re over,” he said. “We lost.” By “we,” Kristol meant people with a strong regard for tradition, who valued liberty over government-induced equality, the entrepreneurial over the entitlement spirit.
Irving Kristol was correct; for the moment, at least, the struggle for tradition, liberty and private business endeavor has been substantially stalled. Multiculturalism, identity politics, political correctness, victimhood—the progressivist program generally—are now in the saddle, and do not figure easily to be dislodged.
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