Dashed Hopes of Common Sense

From its emergence, “Make America Great Again” has doubled as a nostalgic call to action and a promise for a dramatic course correction. Its proponents vow to rectify the wrongdoings of successive political generations: to reclaim a set of American principles that the alleged villains of the leftist elite have either corrupted, forgotten, or willingly abandoned.

Many who dreaded the unprincipled, brutish chaos of Trump & Co. nevertheless acknowledged the existence of the issues he shouted about. Even if he described them with typical unmeasured vulgarity, Trump wasn’t wrong to identify a southern border dysfunctional enough to no longer resemble a border, an abandonment of common sense in favor of a professed sensitivity to ever more obscure identity groups, and an illiberal policing of thought and language in leading cultural and even medical institutions. The left tacitly justified its overreach by fixating on the incorrigible sins of America, often listed from seats of cultural privilege by those who most benefit from America’s virtues. 

There were, in other words, some issues to be dealt with, some balance to be redressed, some pendulum that needed to begin its oppositional swing. For many American voters, the Democratic leadership refused to sufficiently name the scale of the problem, either because they were unwilling to implicate themselves in its creation, or because they were unwilling to run afoul of the set-menu orthodoxy on immigration, race, gender, and history that their own fringe demanded. 

Some tentatively hoped that even with Trump at the helm, MAGA’s diagnosis of voters’ discontent—which Democrats still couldn’t get a handle on—was at least broadly accurate enough to lead to some positive changes. At this point in the administration’s tenure, however, such hope recedes and a grimmer reality appears. Its most unsettling feature is not Trump being Trump—his rashness, instability, and torching of norms are all playing out as promised—but the fact that a movement built on decrying the existential threat of leftist activism expects us to believe that unchecked activism from its own side will somehow produce different results.

In other words, countering the excesses of the left with the same excesses on the right dooms those on the political right to repeat, rather than correct, the follies of their opponents. 

Take DEI. A well-intentioned goal of greater access for minorities in an increasingly diverse country animated the DEI mission within the Democratic Party. But subsequent manifestations of the ideology in cultural institutions and schools destroyed faith in the project, as unpopular racial preferencing took precedence over meritocracy, and a commitment to a highly politicized anti-racist agenda was mandated to the detriment of other civil liberties, such as freedom of speech or conscience. 

Biden’s executive order “to advance an ambitious, whole-of-government equity agenda” exposed Democrats to the charge of granting the government too much power over a nebulous issue that arguably involved an attempt at thought control. The new “equity agenda” represented a departure from a civil rights-era commitment to equality of opportunity, in which meritocracy—the content of one’s character, if you like—counted more than skin color or group identity in determining outcomes. 

In his countermove, Trump could have scrapped the federal DEI program on the grounds that unpopular activist agendas have no place in government. Instead, he harnessed the same overreach of federal power for his own activist agenda, not only shutting down DEI programs in the government, but creating a list of private companies to pursue for theirs. If voters hoped for a check on a leftward ideology that surveilled federal employees for latent signs of racism, Trump has delivered its mirror image: a ban of DEI that encourages a McCarthy-style purge of the old ideology and vows to “excise references to DEI … principles, under whatever name they may appear,” raising the same alarm bells over freedom of speech and conscience that DEI did. 

The MAGA campaign promised an end to the broader climate of “woke,” better characterized by political philosopher John Gray as “hyper-liberal ideology.” One of the critiques of this ideology was its “virtue-signalling” policy rhetoric, which promised justice, but when carried through often worsened the causes it claimed to champion. Federal and corporate DEI workshops can actually make people more racist, for example. Biden’s student debt forgiveness promised “to ensure higher-education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity,” when in fact, “between 69 and 73 percent of the debt forgiven accrues to households in the top 60 percent of the income distribution.” The COVID school closures advocated by left-leaning teachers’ unions and Democratic states disproportionately affected poor students and students of color, while it became taboo in progressive circles to question them at all.

In these and other issues like gender activism and “defund the police,” rhetoric from progressive Democrats alienated their previous working-class voters and made them the party of the elitism they purported to topple. This is partly because to understand and advance hyperliberal ideology requires access to money, education and networks. The loudest voices pushing niche identity politics were likely several degrees of insulation away from the poverty and crime that actually beleaguered people. 

For Gray, this is where hyperliberalism departs from more focused historical activism that sought to end class inequality. “Once questions of identity become central in politics,” he writes, “conflicts of economic interests can be disregarded.” Many of the left’s rallying cries, in other words, involved minimal real sacrifice from the privileged. They could believe they were justice-warriors who championed the poor while remaining almost entirely in the realm of discourse, rather than substantially parting from their own time, money, or status. 

Trump’s MAGA campaign promised an end to such reality-estranged identity politics. But so far, we’ve only seen a different set of elite, out-of-touch billionaires cravenly insert their own identity-based shibboleths in place of their opponents’ mantras. Left or right, these are still the politics of identity, and they still deflect from the issues that face voters on the ground, while encouraging toxic, irrational tribalism on both sides of the aisle. 

A post-Biden administration could have called out the hypocrisy of an elite-educated class who could fiscally and culturally afford to prioritize policies’ language and political coding over their efficacy or appeal. Instead, Trump has used the same playbook: shouting loudly to signal to his base that he will deliver radical “justice” for them, while neglecting pesky little details of whether or not the policies will actually work for the groups he’s speaking to. 

Brazen economic moves like tariffs may signal a grand shakeup to Americans who feel forgotten or disadvantaged by the globalized economy, but they are likely to only hurt American consumers by raising the prices of goods and services across the country. Meanwhile, the DOGE chainsaw antics—what Paul Krugman calls “austerity theater”—has so far succeeded only in making government less effective and has little chance of cutting federal spending in a meaningful way. The fact that the man holding the chainsaw is the literal richest in the world and likely invulnerable to any catastrophic fallout of his actions smacks of the same hypocrisy of those who rallied to “defund the police” from the safety of their affluent gated neighborhoods. 

If much of the justice-signaling by the privileged left was “virtue theater”—a performance both untethered to and masquerading real issues—Trump’s circus show is no better. “Queers for Palestine” contains no more irony than the party of evangelical Christians bending a knee toward a ketamine-fueled father of (reportedly) 14 children by four different mothers, or celebrating the return of the misogynist Tate brothers from Romania, where they picked up charges of human trafficking, rape, and money laundering.

Another breaking point was the far left’s moral confusion in the immediate wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Widespread campus protests and subsequent congressional hearings exposed disturbing antisemitic trends on the left: either the outright celebration of murder and rape under the guise of “resistance” or the quiet reluctance to name the event for what it was, regardless of preexistent geopolitical issues in the region: terrorist slaughter. Sam Harris, speaking of students at the most prestigious and historic universities in the country, wondered in 2024: “Were you one of these imbeciles who couldn’t figure out who the bad guys were on October 7th?”

How are bad guys faring now? Promising to restore common sense to American culture would surely mean a new era of moral clarity when it comes to foreign adversaries. Instead, Trump and his administration have contorted themselves into the same ethical backbends that made children and elderly peaceniks in kibbutzim, at least to some Americans on the left, the villains on the day of their own slaughter. Now, the villains for some on the right are the legions of besieged, raped, and dead Ukrainians and their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Trump calls a “dictator” and who he claims “started the war” with Putin’s Russia. 

At the heart of the hypocrisy lies that uncanny resemblance between the two political poles. The writer Andrew Sullivan describes MAGA’s governing tactics in terms often associated with hyperliberals at the height of “woke.” For both the critical theorists on the far left and the post-fact MAGA brigade, “truth” is fundamentally unfixed and can therefore be contorted to meet the needs of today’s narrative or tomorrow’s explanation. “Critical Trump Theory,” Sullivan writes, “is unfalsifiable, irrational, and seeks to replace objective reality with Trump’s lived experience so that, in the end, only his power remains.”   

The promise was common sense. The delivery is an inversion of truth and morality. In the case of Ukraine, this not only deserts an ally and desecrates American credibility on the world stage; it heralds a dangerous split with Western allies and a departure from a liberal Western worldview.

The mistake was ever hoping that actual historic American values—the checks and balances, individualism, distrust of centralized power, and inherent governmental restraint embedded in the classical liberalism that shaped the American Constitution—occupied any space in the MAGA promise. Some Trump champions have cheaply invoked the revolutionary nature of America’s founding as a justification for the insurrectionary chaos of its administration. But the careful, discerning spirit of the American Revolution, not to mention the self-knowledge of the Founders, finds no place in the MAGA movement. 

The 18th century American Revolution grounded itself in the cautious notion that, as John Adams warned, “absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats, and democrats.” Yet we still see this intoxication play out today, as both left and right succumb to the seductive thrill of illiberal power.