A few weeks ago, Peggy Noonan wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal entitled Government Keeps Going Too Far. She observed that the reason the progressives are out of favor is that they went too far.
She reflected on President Trump signing the Executive Order to stop biological males from competing in women’s sports. There was joy in the room from all of the young female athletes, while the cultural progressives who pushed transgender ideology on the rest of us were strangely silent. This led her to a realization:
My simple thought: that in our politics now we consistently go too far and ask too much. It has become a major dynamic in the past 20 years or so. It manifests in a kind of ideological maximalism. You must get everything you want and grant your foe nothing. In terms of the issue above, you don’t ask society to give you something you deserve—good and just treatment of all transgender folk. Instead you insist that others see reality exactly as you do—that if a man experiences himself as a woman, then you must agree that he is a woman, and this new insight must be incorporated into all human activity, such as sports.
Reaction to the Trump executive order from those who disagree with it has been curiously absent. The reason is that they know they went too far.
She gives other examples. In the past, Americans haven’t been all that concerned about immigration, legal or not. But the Biden administration let in millions of illegal immigrants, to the point that today almost no one is in favor of letting that continue. Biden went too far.
We learn that our foreign aid bureau, USAID, was giving millions of dollars to such projects as promoting atheism in Nepal, funding a DEI musical in Ireland, helping Indonesian coffee companies become more gender-friendly, and the like. Trump and Musk cut all of that out and the public rejoices. The Democrats don’t defend them. They know they had gone too far.
Let me give some more examples, not just from the government but from the progressive ideology that has ruled us until recently.
Homosexuals have long been mistreated. That’s true, and most Americans became supportive of gay rights. That wasn’t enough. One of those rights had to be same-sex marriage. Making that legal wasn’t enough. People have to accept homosexual behavior. That wasn’t enough. People have to approve of homosexuality. That’s not enough, people have to approve of transgenderism. Not enough. Children should be allowed to have sex change operations. Not enough. The government should pay for them. . . . Activists kept pushing. But they went too far.
Equality of opportunity turned into equity of results. Nondiscrimination turned into affirmative action, which morphed into DEI requirements. Criticism of Israel turned into support for terrorism and raging antisemitism. They keep going too far.
Going too far inevitably breeds a reaction in the opposite direction. The point at which that will happen is not always clear, but those who insist on getting more and more extreme will eventually arrive there.
This raises the inevitable question. If progressives have persisted in going too far until the public turns against them, what about the conservatives, now that they are in ascendancy? Will they go too far too? Is this already happening?
Noonan notes some pushback against Musk’s DOGE task force. Is all of that cutting going too far? She raises that possibility, but offers a defense: “They are up against, or trying to reform, a government whose agencies themselves were often maximalist and went too far.”
She published that column on February 6, and now, just a month later, the new administration is not quite as popular as it was then. President Trump is certainly someone with a proclivity to go too far. He perhaps has to go pretty far to undo the damage of the previous regime. But he says he wants the Panama Canal, Canada, Greenland, and now Gaza and parts of Ukraine. Too far?
I prefer to think that he is playing 3-D chess and practicing the principles of his book The Art of the Deal.
At any rate, should conservatives set specific goals and try to achieve them? Or keep pushing as far as they can, until the pendulum swings the other way?
Illustration: Icarus Still Flying Too Damn Close to the Sun by Daniel X. O’Neil from USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
