The headlines are full of Donald Trump’s second-term woes. Legal rulings have set back his agenda. ICE deportations have been lower than expected. Staffing the new administration has lagged. Trump’s rupture with Elon Musk was loud and scabrous. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal lives on.

But the right, now dominated by Trump’s brand of national populism, has triumphed and will continue to triumph. Look how far it has come in just the last five years.

In the dark days of 2020, American public life languished in thrall to ideologically captured institutions. The leftist-dominated legacy media and higher education system still enjoyed meretricious pretensions to trust and credibility. Public events ranging from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter to the COVID-19 pandemic dominated controlled narratives of grievance and hysteria that brooked no disagreement. Observers of the then-ascendant ideology—a potent mixture of socialist-leaning leftist politics, subjective “critical theories” seeking to reorder supposedly “systemic” hierarchies of race and gender, the discriminatory DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) regime, the replacement of objective truth with contrarian emotionalism, and a dose of good old-fashioned performative moral grandstanding—could only wring their hands and seek to make sense of the various new phenomena.

Most tried as best they could to avoid “cancelation,” a word given new meaning to describe the myriad personal and professional consequences of being on the wrong side of official orthodoxy. This orthodoxy showed little restraint and less mercy in exercising its power, and reveled in a complacent and pseudo-spiritual confidence in its purported monopoly of virtue.

Fast forward a short half-decade and many of 2020’s certainties are now on the proverbial ash heap of history. The once-dominant narratives of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the COVID-19 hysteria are themselves being held up to critical assessments that they and their proponents often fail. Trump is again president, governing with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress and in most state capitals, with approval ratings that far exceed those of Democrats—who, in the months since Trump’s return are more listless, leaderless, and demoralized than they have been for at least a generation.

Since 2022, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have outnumbered Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents every year—a feat only reached once before in extant polling, way back in 1991. Supposedly oppressed minorities and young people—long the Democrats’ bedrock demographic hope—are shifting appreciably to the right. The highly profitable tech industry—once’s the left’s major hope for durable financial support and long-term informational control—has largely switched sides.

Overwhelming majorities of Americans now say they no longer place much trust in either legacy media (69 percent as of October 2024) or higher education (64 percent as of October 2023), both of which are being defunded on a large and embarrassing scale as a direct result of their embrace of woke ideological prescriptions that often appear to violate federal civil rights laws.

Leftist mass media outlets are struggling to keep viewers, dropping or reassigning controversial leftist personnel, and losing or settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits after broadcasting defamatory “fake news” for which they were once merely criticized—if the violation of public trust was noticed at all. Since December 2023, a majority of Ivy League university presidents have resigned—either in abject disgrace or in advance of their contractual terms of employment, while their institutions are losing billions in donations and federal funds.

DEI is in the ICU. Already unpopular, unprofitable, and unjust, it is now officially prohibited throughout our federal government, in many of our public institutions, and increasingly it is being dropped from our private ones. Mechanisms of state power used to enforce wokeness—even when so-called Republicans were previously in power—are rapidly being dismantled by lawmakers who now realize the full scope of the problem and have no inhibitions about using their electoral mandates to remove them. In recent weeks, the Supreme Court has upheld anti-woke directives, reversing de facto open border and migration policies, abjuring controversial “transgender” rights, defending the mass firings of often partisan federal employees, and protecting other features of “our democracy.”

Are we winning? The trajectory looks good, but there are warning signs.

The Democratic candidate for mayor of our largest city is a self-described “democratic socialist” who has said he wants to “seize the means of production,” “globalize the intifada,” and discriminatorily tax white communities. The governor of our most populous state supports illegal migrants over federal authorities, even when the migrants wave a foreign flag on American streets. The CEO of National Public Radio, which just lost all federal funding by congressional act, continues steadfastly to deny (despite massive evidence) that her news outlet is biased.

Censorious woke speech and behavior policies can still deprive people of jobs and livelihoods. Officials in public institutions where DEI is now legally proscribed are occasionally caught on tape boasting that their compliance is only pro forma and that they secretly intend to prolong their poisonous agenda. Some private institutions, especially in the elite professions, still retain DEI as a guiding ideology. The future of our colleges and universities remains far from certain.

Moreover, much of the judiciary rules with left-wing ideological biases that only the Supreme Court can overturn. The Democratic Party shows no sign of moderating its overwhelming commitment to woke politics, and its so-called “progressives” are firmly in its driver’s seat at the expense of moderates who are aging out or losing ground. Even Florida, ground zero of anti-woke resistance, narrowly avoided the appointment of an outspoken DEI advocate and theorist as president of its flagship public university. These threats remain potent, but conservatives should take heart in the success of their drive to make America great again.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/winning-even-when-it-doesnt-feel-like-it