Rousing the Conservative Dragon

Stanford historian Victor Davis Hanson has a column out in which he suggests that perhaps the conservative behemoth is stirring in this country and is about to put an end to the insanity that seems to have descended over our culture like a fog (my words, not his).

Here's his lede:

Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst. How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?

They don’t see much backing for the current border policy and illegal immigration, yet it continues. Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events. They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.

Certainly, former President Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.

In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time. In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.

Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.

How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?

Hanson goes on to offer some answers to that question:

Conservatives, by their nature and unlike the Left, are more inclined to accept existing institutions rather than to radically alter or destroy them. They were asleep at the wheel in 2020, when left-wing-funded lawsuits radically transformed Election Day in many states into a mere construct. Some 70 percent of the electorate in key precincts voted by mail or early, with far fewer ballot audits or authentication.

They focus on nominating more conservative judges, not packing the court itself. They work to take back the Senate, not to end the filibuster or bring in two new states with four new senators.

Traditionalists often feel they have no time for politics. They prefer to focus on their families, jobs, communities, and churches. Until recently they shunned organized boycotts. They abhor massing outside the homes of left-wing politicians and judges.

They shrug and concede that universities, teachers, government unions, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, entertainment, and professional sports are hopelessly activist and left-wing.

The environmental, social, governance (ESG), diversity, equity, and inclusion, and LGBQT+ agendas were unfathomable acronyms to Middle America and thus mostly ignored.

So conservatives often slept through the woke revolution.

Now, though, it seems that people are finally being roused from their slumber. Hanson cites the significant economic hit suffered by Target, Anheuser-Busch, Disney and perhaps others to come as signs that the conservative dragon has had enough.

You can read the rest of his column at the link. I hope he's right that we've had enough, but the problem is that cultural decline is on a ratchet. We accept so much deviance and then say "enough!" The decline pauses, but it has established a new baseline. It never recedes. A decade or so later, starting from the new baseline it proceeds to push the limits again and a new generation, having become accustomed to the level of deviance previously established, tolerates further decline.

At some point we become Sodom, if we haven't already.

But maybe not. Perhaps there'll come a time when our culture will wake up and roll back the moral, social and economic delusions under which we've been living. Hanson's column reminded me of the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence:

"...all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

It might be germane to quote, too, the next sentence:

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

We'll see.