An ascendant Right is replicating the Left's heavy-handed approach to culture. Credit: Getty
Perhaps you remember the Great Dr. Seuss Controversy, which took place almost exactly four years ago amid the annual “Read Across America” campaign — and which goes surprisingly far to explain the relentless whiplash of American politics. Four years ago, it was the cultural Left that targeted the beloved children’s author on progressive grounds. Today, an ascendant Right is replicating the same heavy-handed approach to arts and culture.
Sometime around the end of the second Obama term, people started to discover that Dr. Seuss — Theodor Seuss Geisel — had drawn crude images of Asian, black, and Jewish people. Those images had been there all along, sitting uneasily with his famous books, which consistently champion liberal and environmentalist values. Only now, the “problematic” drawings started to overshadow the good doctor’s achievements.
When First Lady Melania Trump sent a collection of 10 Dr. Seuss books to a Massachusetts library in 2017, she received a furious response. “You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature”, the recipient of the books, librarian Liz Phipps-Soeiro, lectured in a blog post. “Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”
That was hardly the end of it. The NAACP called for “censorship” of all Dr. Seuss books (yes, the organisation unabashedly used the “c” word). Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which publishes his works, pledged to remove six of the author’s most offensive titles from future publication.
But the real scandal came when, a little more than a month into his first term, President Joe Biden failed to mention Dr. Seuss in his announcement for Read Across America Day, which customarily involves a president and/or first lady reading a Dr. Seuss book to schoolchildren. The outrage was instant: “Dr. Seuss Is Canceled”, went one headline at the libertarian Reason magazine.
Spoiler alert: Dr. Seuss wasn’t cancelled. His books have spent so much time on the Amazon bestseller list, the Atomic Habits guy is jealous. But Biden’s opponents saw it as an attempt to move the culture to the Left, the first of many. They seethed as he invited transgender influencers to the White House, showered accolades on progressive icons like Bruce Springsteen and George Soros. They vowed to restore sanctity to American culture once they had a chance.
Well, how’s that working out?
We now have the Gulf of America, while the US taxpayer has clawed back the $47,000 that United States Agency for International Development splurged on a Colombian “trans opera”. Inveterate Twitter troll-cum-diplomat Ric Grenell has been appointed the president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a position for which he is as suited as I am to translate Dr. Seuss into Bulgarian.
I am not saying that the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss is why we have a second Trump term. Nor is that controversy congruent to the consequences of four more years of MAGA. But minor as that affair may seem, it is a neat microcosm of our ineffective, herky-jerky politics, the main goal of which is increasingly only to undo whatever the other side has been doing.
Constant whiplash between political and cultural extremes isn’t what people signed up for. You could certainly argue that the Biden administration went too far in some of its diversity initiatives, but the branding of every black person in any position of institutional power as a “DEI hire” is a MAGA tic most people don’t endorse, as River Page pointed out in The Free Press.
People wanted normal, which shouldn’t be surprising, since Americans have for centuries been a pragmatic people. Even today, we are actually far less polarised then news reports would have you believe. It’s rather that the activists at the poles have megaphones the size of Kansas, which they buy with the cash raised from ideologically motivated billionaires (Soros, the Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, Elon Musk — take your pick). Those groups can then boost candidates who need both publicity and cash. The rest of us are like the archetypal guard in a bank-heist movie, bound and gagged with masking tape, helplessly watching the scene unfold.
When he was attorney general of the United States under George W. Bush, the dour John Ashcroft covered up the Spirit of Justice statue because its naked breast offended his evangelical sensibilities. In which case, he should have quit. We don’t elect censors or moralisers. To their credit, the new Trump people don’t share Ashcroft’s moralising spirit. Their supposed enemy is wokeness, a term that could mean anything from cringeworthy shows of political posturing to worthwhile efforts to acknowledge past injustices.
The Trumpians seem to genuinely believe that the country is in the grip of a Leftist cultural revolution. In their fervor, they forget that at least half of Americans — the ones who vote for Democrats — flatly reject that view. And that, wide-eyed activists excepted, most liberals simply seek after a decent life: a measure of financial stability, happy and healthy kids, and, yes, the fundamental American right to worship as they please (or not at all) and to speak their minds.
Trump’s counterreaction has itself been immoderate, as evidenced by the harsh language of the new administration’s executive orders targeting transgender protections. Just as most Americans were never going to burn their Dr. Seuss books, most also are perfectly capable of living and working alongside people who hold different beliefs and espouse different values. We’ve never wanted anything but normal, but normal seems to be increasingly elusive in American politics.
So far, Trump 2.0 has shown himself to be just as obsessed with race and gender as the wokest junior staffer in the Biden administration. “Like its antithesis on the Left, the woke Right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought,” Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in an insightful essay for The Atlantic. Fort Liberty is Fort Bragg again, though its namesake this time around is World War II hero Roland L. Bragg, not the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. The move will cost several million dollars and will do absolutely nothing to help ordinary Americans with egg prices or medical bills.
You don’t have to be a genius to see how all this turns out. After four more years of Trump, people will be exhausted, as Trump is an exhausting character. They will want something entirely different (sorry, Vice President Vance). The answer will probably come in the form of a moderate Democrat who shuns the language of the academic and activist Left: someone like Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore or Jared Polis.
Of course, that nominee will still need support from the Left, possibly in the primary, definitely in the general election. Promises and assurances will be made. Once in office, the new Democratic president will placate those liberal groups by reversing many of the policies that Trump is implementing today: pronouns back in email signatures, DEI trainings restored across the federal bureaucracy, no more country music at the Kennedy Center, no more Dr. Seuss. All of which will make the Right seethe once more, preparing us for the next cycle of our reaction-counterreaction politics.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Moderate politics is not only attractive because it accurately describes where most Americans stand on most issues. The more a politician tacks away from the extremes, the less likely he or she is to engender a strong political opposition.
Trolling takes a toll. At first, it seemed like Trump might begin his second term with a measure of popular support, but his early moves have been so sweeping, so striking, that people are protesting again, as they did in 2017. To be sure, many people do support cutting the federal government and making merit the basis of hiring, but unaccountably blaming a plane crash on “DEI” and humiliating the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have chosen to work for the federal government was bound to have major blowback. Already, according to The Bulwark, “Trump’s approval rating is falling fast.” And his second term is barely a month old.
Who will have the courage to change this state of affairs, the courage to be moderate? To borrow from the poor fish in The Cat in the Hat, “this is no fun at all”.
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SubscribeGood try but you simply fail to exonerate the Biden Democratic administration.
But of course it’s not just America that is in the grip of a woke left cultural revolution, but the entire Western World.
Trump is a bizarre guy, but he talks to the majority who understand the damage the woke left are inflicting on us, from their gender wars to DEI to migration and welfarism.
Trump is a disruptor, and now is the time we need a disruptor who talks and responds to the majority.
There will be mistakes but anything will be an improvement on the corrupt woke cultural left.
Correct. The Left pushes as far as possible when in power then encourages the Right to be moderate when the tide turns. Their hope is to maintain as much of their leftward gains as they can.
Theirs was the revolution, ours the counter-revolution.
Horseshit
Try explaining why you think as you do next time… “Horseshit” moves no one…
“Woke Right” is a vacuous click-baity notion and this article reveals an incredibly shallow understanding of American political history in recent decades. It certainly has not been a “constant whiplash between political and cultural extremes”….quite the reverse; it has been a steady long march to the Left that has only just now started to go into reverse. (Just started mind you.)
“When Putin talked a while back about people in the West who want to “destroy [its]traditional values and impose their pseudo-values… which would corrode [it] from within”, ironically, the people he was talking of really did know how to mount a successful invasion. However you choose to describe them – social justice warriors, virtue signalling liberals or ‘the woke’ – they achieved a rapid colonisation of every single institution of civil society in America. And all without firing a shot. They didn’t conquer the citizenry with bombs; they hypnotised them with ex-cathedra incantations of pseudo-values so absurd that – only a few years ago – would have seemed like they must be just kidding. They have been groomed, at the West’s most prestigious schools and universities, to such pitch-perfect self-righteousness that it would never even occur to them that they might be imposing their ‘pseudo-values’ on a public with little realistic means of democratic resistance….” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
The author writes for the NYT and Washington Post, who’d have guest.
Another shrill running cover for the establishment. What is he doing on Unherd?
Never hurts to hear what the other side is thinking. We don’t have to accept it
We seem to hear nothing but and they are all pretending to be something they’re not
…I thought funniest bit in the article was quoting The Bulwark for the claim that Trumps popularity is waning.
Guessed.
Shill
but the branding of every black person in any position of institutional power as a “DEI hire” is a MAGA tic most people don’t endorse,
It’s also an absurd straw man. How stupid are you?
Careful with such questions. The author may take it as a challenge.
Ahem, examine the evidence before you and there’s the answer.
there is zero indication that the democrats would pick a more moderate leader. In fact with the end of the old guard, it will be the younger more ‘progressive’ or as i call them bat shit crazy leftists that will assume control of the party.
Saying Trump is obsessed with race is like saying MLK was obsessed with Race or that FDR was obsessed with War. Trump is reacting to the culture, the imbalance and the extremism of the left
Just as his father was when he marched with the K K K in the 1920s? Not to tar the son with the faults of the father. Perhaps when he maintained Fred Trump’s policy of not renting to any blacks in the 70s. Or in 1989 when he took out a full page ad in the NYT calling for the summary execution of the “animals” known as the Central Park Five: black teenagers later exonerated by DNA evidence. Not that Trump retracted anything; he’s too strong for that. Or maybe when he promoted the Birther lie against the first non-white president. Yeah, just run-of-the-mill reaction. Nothing to see or pay attention to here.
“…Not to tar the son with the faults of the father…” – like you’ve just done
the problem with the Democrats platform (same with Labour) is that they swapped one base for another, and the problem is those base’s are simply incompatible.
the Left cannot push ‘jobs for the working class, cheaper goods, while pushing net zero ,DEI and Mass Immigration’
As the Democrats found out pandering to black women, 6% of the US does not win one elections if you do at the expense of farmers, miners, people who work in the Oil industry
So they have to pick their base, Workers, Tax payers, people concerned about crime, immigration or radical leftists.
I think the ship has long sailed with the former and simply put pandering to radical leftists make you a student protest group not a government in waiting
I don’t think this author understands how the world is and how far removed the left is from it.
With the erosion in centralised media, these people no longer control the message, there downfall is inevitable because no one buying the rubbish they are selling
I do not think any of you will be able to justify Trumps lies about reducing inflation. Nobody except perhaps Mr Tusk’s lifestyle is going to be cheaper for anything these yahoos are doing. We are already ready for the next chapter.
“…pandering to radical leftists makes you a student protest group not a government in waiting.” Genius! (May I use it?)
“When First Lady Melania Trump sent a collection of 10 Dr. Seuss books to a Massachusetts library in 2017, she received a furious response. ‘You may not be aware of this, but Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature’, the recipient of the books, librarian Liz Phipps-Soeiro, lectured in a blog post.”
Pure Donald-Trump knee-jerk hate from the librarian, nothing more. The Left has such a hard time just being nice.
Like humour, being nice isn’t allowed by Marxists, especially those on public payrolls.
If anyone to the slight left of you is a Marxist, what does that make you? And while I’ll grant that you know a lot about some things, being nice ain’t one of ‘em. Almost all of your humor is at least a bit mean, and you admire vicious people. Right?
Why should Jerry Carroll be kind? Nothing is gained by treating the woke scum with kid gloves. They deserve contempt and derision, and I applaud Jerry Carroll for supplying it.
And yet the Be-Kind Brigade virtue signal their purity with the righteous harshness and cruelty of religious cult members.
Isn’t it weird that the Left think billionaires trying to influence politics is bad now that the Right have some billionaires of their own……..it wasn’t bad when they all supported the Left of course.
It’s ok when they do it.
Leftists running our institutions: “We need to castrate effeminate boys, give double mastectomies and testosterone to girls who feel uncomfortable about puberty, make the girls’ room an inclusive space for penises, and give grade-school kids books about little boys giving blowjobs.”
Normal people: “No.”
Alexander Nazaryan: “Why are you people so obsessed with sex stuff? Can’t you talk about anything else? So weird. Why does everything have to be a culture war with you?”
Best comment.
Well, how’s that working out? —–> with the curtailing of USAID’s most egregious wastes of our money and saying out loud that there are only two sexes, it’s working out well. Will there be excesses? Sure, because that’s what happens when the pendulum swings from the extreme on one side. It never stops in the middle, at least not at first.
This “Dr. Seuss is racist” idiocy is indicative of people who insist that figures of the past live up to standards of the present. Some of his works were done during WWII when the Germans and Japanese were mortal enemies, not sympathetic figures. But it’s the left; common sense is missing from that gene pool.
Another problem with the Left: They all make sweeping generalizations, all the time. No one among them understands nuance, complexity, or degree. Not one.
You have to be joking. Wantonly Utilizing your Woke meat tenderizers to stomp “radical” liberals into the turf will NEVER be perceived as nuanced
Don’t joke, I ain’t woke. That’s absurd. I’m a moderate liberal with a belief in God and respect for some tradition. But this site has far more right-radicals than it does mirror-image lefties at the other end of the horseshoe. And many comment boards are now little more than backslapping loud agreement fests where every possible virtue is assigned to the Trumpian right and all the worst shortcomings to the “Marxist “ left—as if Marx and his followers are as rabid, ascending, and alive as Trump & company are right now.
I still think your concept of “Center” requires reevaluation. There’s so many “Trump supporters” that are fiscally snd socially liberal. It’s an extremely diverse coalition. And I mean diverse in terms of thought. There’s not alot of thought conformity.
Every time I hear the Left say “we need our own Joe Rogan its like…you had your own Joe Rogan…his name was Joe Rogan!
Been listening to Ezra Klein at your recommendation btw.
Free thinking is now considered “Right-coded.” The Left intelligista isn’t given enough free range to think/speak and God forbid say something a bit offensive. That’s the divide here my man.
Maybe not on some campuses or websites. I agree that the right is more uninhibited in their speech now but I think you’ll find quite a few loud dissenters on the left. Within the Republican Party, significant, forceful to anything Trump wants is scarcely tolerated. That’s a de facto muzzle.
Alot of what Trump is saying is just common sense. Seriously. He’s been given the common sense lane in many many areas. Does he really get to tout that women’s boxing belongs to women? Are you just going to cede that lane?
If you don’t address that there is no Democrat Party. We’re talking common sense.
True enough to a point. But things like coveting Greenland and Gaza and cozying up to Putin tend to cancel that out.
Where you see common sense righting of the ship I see huge overreach and instability—both to some extent deliberate—at the very top, and throughout the sold-out Congress. I genuinely think Trump’s honeymoon reunion period is about to end. His numbers will probably tank hard in the near future. With cause.
You are a super brilliant guy. I just think you’re operating off a false algorithm. You have common sense you see the insanity is whats empowering Trump but you don’t address those fundamentals.
Trump is winning at a very fundamental bully level against other bullies. That’s what people see. Is he a Bully? Yeah but he’s also fighting bullies and crushing them.
I understand and accept that logic to a degree, including the probability of blind spots I can’t see. (Though “operating off a false algorithm” makes me sound like a defective device in a way I don’t love). I know quite a lot about Trump, and he is cunning and unapologetic. But in many ways far from brilliant. A much worse bully than most, with plenty of exceptions like Putin. We are watching him become bloated to an insane degree with very little effective restraint. He has strong strategic intuition but undermines himself quite a lot too. His handling of the meeting with Zelenskyy does not help America or the world. I do hope the Ukrainian can see his way clear to playing his modest cards right—by kissing up to the giant and fragile ego of a world-class bully. We’ll see.
I respect your intellect and impressive knowledge. We just can’t get very far into much of a real discussion when it comes to the most powerful man in the world right now (not Musk or Putin or Jinping, but close calls maybe). We should pace ourselves and maybe follow your idea of talking about movies, music etc. sometimes.
Did you see A Complete Unknown? I’m not a huge Dylan fan but some of his stuff is great, and will endure. Any interest in the late John Prine, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, or long-dead Johnny Cash? (I like ‘em all).
I didn’t mean to be disrespectful with the false algorithm comment but that is the root of all good faith disagreemnt. You feel somebody has gone wrong at a certain step and it pollutes their entire view.
I like that you appreciate that nuance of people. In my humble opinion, there is a failure of the entire Democratic Party to self-reflect on very common sense principles that everyone agrees on. They’re fighting those things.
If you want to limit Trump…stop fighting him on areas when even the Democrat base knows he’s correct. USAID is not a winning case for Dems. I would recommend supporting the necessity of its freeze and audit because it was not doing what it was designed to do. USAID is clearly a “canary in the coal mine” of government waste.
It didn’t take it as disrespectful but maybe a slight underestimation of my perspective.
I get your point on picking battles. But there is huge misrepresentation both on the nature of what’s being funded and how much axeing it will save. DOGE recently reinstalled some infectious disease workers rather too late after an Ebola outbreak in Africa. The WHO, also in Trump’s blurry crosshairs, had to step in. And Musk pleaded with FAA retirees to come back, after mass staff cuts. All this while Musk anticipates billions in federal loans. Who will examine those? Or the corporate subsidies ordinary taxpayers pay for while massive tax cuts and weaselly loopholes go to the very rich?
(I’m sure with your economic knowledge and rhetoric that you can find fault with some of that, but I doubt you can honestly dismiss the whole paragraph).
Runaway private enterprise and corporate larceny needs to be reined in too. Such evenhandedness is not on Trump’s agenda at all.
The adolescent “move fast and break things” approach of broligarchs, now symbolized by a chainsaw, is not an improvement on the idea of going in with a scalpel. Nor is “kill first and ask questions later”.
There are downsides. I completely agree that cuts or drastic changes always present unintended consequences. If 80% of an entity is bad that still means 20% is serving a legitimate purpose.
The reason I support rapid moves is because I think we’re way past time to start cutting into the debt. In a legalistic bureacracy, there is almost limitless barriers to subvert the Executive through banal process like injunctions.
I’ve not seen the Dylan movie yet. I’ve been going light with movies lately. Might watch some MacGruber tonight. Haha
I freakin’ loved MacGruber! Movie and series, as crude and silly as they are.
On a related comedy note, I liked The Last Man of Earth, also starring Will Forte. It may go down better during a pandemic though.
Haha. Ended up watching 22 Jump Street. The plot is amazingly stupid.
I prefer comedy that doesn’t take itself too seriously and I like irrationalism for comedy. Last Man in the World looked really existentialist to me. I can only take so much seriousness. I do enjoy the occasional psychological thriller but I feel like the market is oversaturated with dark themes. Sometimes you just want to be entertained ya know. The world is heavy enough as it is.
Fully agree that 22 is “amazingly stupid”…I also watched and enjoyed. While I do like witty and wordy stuff as well, I tend to like very silly and wild comedy too, such as Brooklyn 99. If you get Apple TV you might like or have already watched Bookie. IMHO Step Brothers is an amazingly stupid gem.
I’ve seen a little Brooklyn 99. I have watched that Backstreet Boys Criminal Lineup probably 100x. Hilarious.
At the beginning of Covid, I was watching a ton of Sandler (sometimes with an edible). Kinda funny that if you watch Ridiculous 6 or a few other of his movies, there’s actually like 4 subplots going on at one time if you slow things down and watch scene to scene. Sandler is alot smarter than the “critics” give him credit for. If he wanted to do more films like Uncut Gems he could. He just chooses not to be all dark and joyless all the time.
The Ridiculous 6 baseball scene is one of my favorites. Its out on YouTube.
I agree that Sandler ain’t no dummy. He first showed he could be serious with Punch Drunk Love. I actually hated Uncut Gems because I found it to be sick in the head and heart—but it was a “serious movie”, and Sandler can act. I appreciate the raw silliness of Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore to be honest.
*forceful opposition [edit feature not working]
My response here was removed. It wasn’t rude or personal in tone but I think it was “voted off the island”. It’ll probably come back after some totally unnecessary multiple of 6 hours.
Oh man. Excited to see it.
Guess it won’t post. The only part I want to repeat is that I’m glad you gave Ezra Klein a shot. He’s well to my left on many things, but I trust his sincerity and willingness to actually listen to almost anyone. He points out the absurd ineffectiveness of modern progressives (like him, not me) when it comes to running cities and getting things done. And he’s definitely a lot more even-tempered than me!
This is trash. The leftists are actually insane and can’t play nice. I once had a sister who had been extreme left screaming and yelling at me for daring to celebrate the 4th of July.
This rewriting of history is insane, and for the record this is what everyone who wasn’t a delusional progressive was saying for years and we were told that by asking for stability and normalcy we were oppressing minorities, we were horrible istaphobes and that in the future they would dance on our graves. Sod off you cretin.
Oh my Sodding off are we. Well, delusional hate filled thinking might be far more irritating than you realize
It must be hard for the author to accept that America convincingly chose the one-term and twice-impeached ex-President and convicted felon over both the incumbent President and the incumbent Vice President of the United States of America.
This suggests how extreme the Left has been in pushing average Americans away from the center into far left ideological territory.
Yes, the pendulum swings back and forth, but this is a feature not a bug. And Trump’s current focus on exorcising unelected political zombies from federal agencies by decreasing the spend of the federal government is a two-for-one win for the American people considering that we’re $36 trillion in debt and spending $2 trillion more each year than we collect in taxes. We shouldn’t be in such a fiscally-irresponsible predicament, and we shouldn’t have federal agencies stealing away the will of the American people by seeking the overthrow of Presidents based on false narratives, such as Trump Russia Collusion.
Correcting the excesses of the past is a good thing.
Corrective injustice and meeting extremes with extremes. Does that have a noble or a bloody history? Both maybe, depending on your examples and reading of history.
What is this injustice that you’re extrapolating, AJ? I’m genuinely curious. Within the past two months, Trump has been fulfilling election promises as he starts the national trajectory back to the center for Americans. Are you inferring that he shouldn’t do this, contrary to the purpose of democratic elections?
That said, I appreciate that you’re formally recognizing how extreme the Left has been in America.
The Left has an extreme but they’ve never been in charge in charge, Cantab. Now the extremes are at the helm in this White House, in a convergence of anti-government. ethno-nationalist, and tech-broligarch radicalism If you think this bulldozer and chainsaw approach to both domestic and foreign policy is not creating a tidal wave of mistakes and injustices, or rests anywhere near the center, I don’t think you’re watching closely.
Oh dear, AJ. This retort reads like an extreme Leftist’s conspiratorial post on X. I hope it was posted in haste and isn’t representative of your true beliefs.
You may emphatically disagree with the democratic choice of Americans (you have a right to believe as you wish), but I assure you that the sky is not falling and secret Naz|s are not about to knock at your door.
I promise to you that America will survive just fine, just like with every previous swing of the pendulum before today.
Wishing you the best.
He’s a good dude and good response.
My re-response to Cantab won’t post but I’ll take it. Back atcha dude.
The Biden administration set the world on fire, and outside of the liberal multilateral networks the world ain’t gonna forget that too easily. Americans saw the consequences of open borders too. JD is a shoo-in unless the diabolical Dems can find a fresh new candidate not associated with the Dark Lord’s work.
So Alex, can you point me to some of your articles admonishing the far left (Democrat Party, legacy media and the education establishment) to not be crazy and mean?
I love how you have decided to define Trump’s second term within two months of his taking office but people were still giving Biden time to shape his after two years. THAT’S what’s exhausting and that’s why Trump is moving at breakneck speed to change the little things — So normal can remerge for most of his term in office. Look, I get it. You need to write content that pushes buttons. The press coverage is just as exhausting as the politics.
What a shockingly in adequate essay. “Can’t we all get along?” Apparently not. What this author seems utterly oblivious to is that these ideological divisions are not mere superficial policy differences, but reflect significant differences in underlying worldviews. Just what do we do with gender dysphoria? Well, it turns out the answer to that – far from being “pragmatically” shaped by tacking into the center – will be determined by your underlying understanding of human sexuality, mental disorder, etc.
Of course most people are unable to clearly articulate their views on these matters… but not because they have no views. On the contrary, they have views that are bone-deep and rock-bottom, that determine their attitudes to many aspects of contemporary life. And there is no path forward for the country, oher than finding those differences, illuminating them, and talking through them. Just why did otherwise quite virtuous people (black and white) practice slavery? Just how can we help someone who thinks they were ‘born in the wrong body’? Far from being irrelevant trivialities at the margins of public discourse, these differences go to the heart of our review of human existence, the historical records, even what ethical norms we should live by.
The author hasn’t given our situation very much thought… we all long for “normal” but it turns out we have very different ideas what “normal” means. Why?
This is not a philosophical issue for most parents and we don’t have time to discuss it. An increasing number of parents are afraid to send their kids to school – or to a doctor or to a counsellor – for fear of government-funded personnel cutting them out of their children’s lives and cutting off their children’s body parts. Where I am, kids are overdosing on government supplied drugs. ‘Big ideas’ that destroy our children will be resisted. Mother bears are not left or right.
Why do articles keep appearing in UnHerd that make me think upon finishing them, “what the hell was that?”
The trick with reading Unherd articles is to know when you are ingesting crap!
These moral equivalance balancing acts require a skill the writer doesn’t have.
The author makes the perfectly reasonable (and self-evidently valid) point that most people are more moderate than the activist extremists on either side, and I would have expected at least some of the comments below to acknowledge that. Doesn’t really seem to be the case, which is a shame. I think you can paraphrase most of them as “well, you started it!”, which is a playground refrain that doesn’t reflect well on the maturity of at least some of Unherd’s readership.
Right because like the Author you arrogantly see yourself as perfectly in the “Center” when in fact you likely did nothing as the Far Left was destroying Western Culture.
What if the Ideological Center tilted so far to the Left that people who believe themselves to be in the Center are unable to see reality?
Could the Right hypothetically become as Bad as the Woke Left? Sure. Have they so far…not even close.
T Bone, do you believe that “the Far Left was destroying Western Culture” is a centrist view?
Until the Left drops its insistence on arbitrarily implementing stupid and objectively discriminatory rules it will remain in the wilderness. The American Left/Right Binary used to mean something like Creative Class/Responsible Class where the Liberals came up with ideas and Conservatives audited the checkbook.
Of course it’s possible to be both creative and financially responsible but it’s difficult. At 37 trillion in debt it no longer matters who caused such massive debt. What matters is that it starts to get reversed. That starts with eliminating spending on projects that denounce merit. Without a Merit-based economy it will be impossible to climb out of crippling debt because the social hierarchy of the economy is untethered to reality.
The pendulum swings, then it swings and then it swings again!
Speak for yourself! ~” But minor as that affair may seem, it is a neat microcosm of our ineffective, herky-jerky politics, the main goal of which is increasingly only to undo whatever the other side has been doing.” For many of us, every bit of it is effectiveness incarnate into Law.
If I Ran the Zoo is probably the best banned Dr. Seuss book.
“The Trumpians seem to genuinely believe that the country is in the grip of a Leftist cultural revolution. In their fervor, they forget that at least half of Americans — the ones who vote for Democrats — flatly reject that view.”
But the author forgets, or is unable to see, that though liberals have been living blissfully in a bubble and in theory would have harmed only themselves, they also owned all the acceptable means of political expression. Not just the media but the mores, down to the block and family chats. My sisters can passively or aggressively criticize my pro-Trump views, tolerating no argument; but if I dared to even obliquely joke about a Democrat, well there goes the peace.
This is one of the most even keeled free breathing editorials written in UNHerd for a while, and thus the piranhas rip and tear with non surgical aggression, fearing that OH DEAR. Someone sees the vulnerable state of Alt Right Phobias. The pendulum is already swinging, Trumpie is being as asinine as he can possibly be, My God how poorly the president of Ukraine was treated in a gangland beating. Your righteousness stinks of the swamp it arose from.
The pendulum is swinging? Is this like a “vibes” thing where the Left tries to manifest reality through performance theatre?
The Democrats did nothing for 3 years but “talk tough” and scold everyone about “Protecting Democracy” and standing with our “Allies.”
It’s going to be a long four years if you guys are going to do this “The Tide is Turning” thing at every turn. It reeks of desperation from people that know they’re losing badly.
The Democrats haven’t even come close to hitting their floor yet. They are a trainwreck of a political party. A historically bad chapter in a historically ridiculous party.
Like Bari Weiss, Nazrayan is right to warn the Right to curb its excesses lest it alienate most citizens of whatever political leaning.
Yes, please, can’t we all just be moderate? Most of us are here in the middle, not with the wacko right or wacko left. This is just why I read Unherd.
seem to genuinely believe that the country is in the grip of a Leftist cultural revolution….
Yes, because it was and I am no Trumpist… Also, there will be no truly Moderate Democrat (one can wish) so Vance will win…
The author seems to have a very short memory. It wasn’t just about cancelling Dr Seuss and Uncle Ben.
Wildly irresponsible spending on “climate justice.” Soaring inflation after reckless deficit spending increased the money supply. Attempts to “end fossil fuels.” The nearly complete abandonment of border controls and immigration.
Skyrocketing crime rates in major cities, and fiery but mostly peaceful lootings. A growing police state ignoring violent crime, while FBI SWAT teams, guns leveled, arrest utterly unthreatening pro-life activists and Catholics. Intelligence and law enforcement operatives censoring news stories and opinions at social media firms. COVID policies that were borderline totalitarian.
Two major wars that our State Department could’ve prevented, were they not so busy funding transgender issues in South America, and hoisting rainbow flags at our embassies.
Normal, reasonable liberals don’t drive the Democrats. Extreme far left radicals do.
The average American doesn’t have the beliefs of an Antifa operative, or a college sophomore at Sarah Lawrence. The Biden Administration’s leadership team certainly did, and for four years the country seemed to be run by a committee of Women’s Studies professors, with largely disastrous results.
The second Trump administration has made a few minor missteps early on, but they couldn’t possibly do a worse job than their predecessors.
…very brave to go there Andrew, but it was the ascendency of Yin over Yang which has created the chaos, just as the ancient wisdom would predict.
If we end up having a civil war, it will be PRECISELY because of the moronic intransigence and lack of self-awareness this author evinces.
“In their fervor, they forget that at least half of Americans — the ones who vote for Democrats — flatly reject that view.“
The amount of people who believe something to be true has no bearing on whether that thing is true or not.
This is a really strange article that seems to try and pretend to be politically neutral to snipe at Trump and exonerate the Democrats for the worst of their crimes against the people.
The “woke right” stuff fails to recognise that the Right have realised that politics is about winning. Recent years/decades have made it clear that a moderate classical liberalism is incapable of standing up to an organised, aggressive left.
To not fight fire with fire is simply to accept virtuous defeat. Critics of the “woke right” tend to be very keen on the need to defend Western civilisation, yet are unable to accept that there’s actually a battle on to do so. Appeals to liberal values are about as useful as trying to stop the war in Ukraine by asking Putin to be nicer
I think the clue here is the phrase “And his second term is barely a month old.” Get back to me in a few years. Until then, find something meaningful to write about…
The greatest creation of the west was the liberal, tolerant citizen. Humans are not normally like this being by nature viscous tribal creatures.
The wokes attacked (and continue to attack) this citizen, using the citizen’s desire to be kind, fair and tolerant as a weak point for controlling bullying.
For the most part they have succeeded and the Trump admin just represents further decline from this high point, there is no going back, the author is naive to think there is.