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.