Does America Want to Be Saved?
Editor's Note
Donald Trump’s second term has demonstrated that political transformation does not automatically translate into durable power. Executive action, electoral victory, and policy success have collided with a far older and more entrenched constellation of institutions, constituencies, and cultural loyalties that remain largely intact. The result is a presidency that moves aggressively while operating within an environment still shaped by adversarial norms.
This essay from Paul Gottfried confronts the strategic implications of this condition. It treats immigration, culture, and administration as connected fronts in a longer struggle over authority and legitimacy, and questions whether restraint remains a virtue when opposition operates without it. The central issue is one of consolidation — whether the forces now governing can convert disruption into permanence before the moment passes.
Of all presidents I’ve observed in office since first becoming politically aware at the end of the Eisenhower era, Donald Trump is by far the most transformative. I would place Barack Obama, who did much to push our country toward an advanced antidiscrimination regime while expanding the federal bureaucracy, a distant second.
What sets Trump apart and what has become especially obvious during his second term are the range and variety of his critical changes. Among them are eliminating federal agencies and departments attached to the executive branch; bringing tax relief, particularly to the American working class; lowering inflation significantly from the Biden years; taking measures to reindustrialize the country; requiring the federal administration and those educational institutions receiving federal subsidies to stop discriminating against white males and people of faith; securing our borders and ridding us of illegals, with an emphasis on criminal ones; sending the National Guard to crime-ridden cities; making peace among warring countries; bombing Iranian nuclear installations; and capturing the drug-trafficking head of the Venezuelan government and his wife. Trump has achieved all these things during his first year back in office, embattled by a militant leftist opposition.
Moreover, our president has been justifiably described as a force of Nature: He is always moving around, rarely sleeps, and has escaped all attempts by his enemies to end his political life, ranging from lawfare to attempted assassination. Although he’s focused his fire on the “fake media” and his Democratic detractors, he has many malicious, influential adversaries, which may be the source of a problem that has not yet been effectively addressed.
The president has mocked and challenged the leftist ruling class, with some efficacy, but one leader — even an extraordinary one — cannot match the power of those who are attacking him. Comparing Trump to Hitler or “fascists” every time he does something to displease the Left may be tiresome for the rest of us, but it does provide a rallying point for his enemy’s voting base, which is energized by the media, public administration, educational institutions, and the culture industry.
The question is not whether the preposterous name-calling is true or fair but whether it rallies the troops. Trump’s leftist opposition has an electoral base which, unless I’m mistaken, is at least as large as the totality of the president’s own support.
The recently concluded November elections were not entirely “about affordability,” as some Republican apologists would like us to believe. The overwhelming victories achieved by the noticeably woke Democrats in Virginia, New Jersey, and even in my state of Pennsylvania, and the relatively close electoral win of Matt Epps in Tennessee’s usually very red Seventh District, against a very woke Democrat opponent, were not just predictable setbacks for the party controlling the presidency in a difficult market. The Democratic margins of victory were much greater than expected and were due, in my view, to cultural as much as economic issues
Why did the barely sentient Joe Biden do exceedingly well in his midterm elections, when he allowed this country to be overrun by at least ten million illegals and engaged in enough government giveaways to cause an almost 10% inflation rate? By just about any reasonable measure the economy looks better under Trump’s stewardship, even if the inflation rate, which now hovers at about 2.5%, has not come down in all areas as fast as the public would like.
Significantly, however, Trump’s approval ratings, which remain in the mid- or low forties, are no better and may be slightly worse than Biden’s at the same point in his presidency. There is absolutely nothing I can think of in which Biden as a titular president did better than Trump, except to fill his administration with a woke menagerie, which issued nonstop diversity instructions.
I won’t even bother, for example, to contrast their markedly different approaches to international relations. Unlike Biden, who caused a humiliating, costly withdrawal of American military forces from Afghanistan, Trump has undertaken military operations with technical precision and daring.
There is also nothing that would lead me to think that Sleepy Joe is more likeable than Trump. When this atrabilious pol wasn’t semicomatose or else falling off of something, he would swear and curse and once notoriously referred to his political opposition—the tens of millions of Americans who would vote for Donald Trump — as “human garbage.” On other occasions Biden associated this “human garbage” with white nationalists and terrorists. Adding insult to injury, Trump’s predecessor burdened us with a drug-addicted criminal son who shamelessly used his father’s influence to make profitable deals with foreign governments. This gave extra work to Joe’s mainstream media protectors, who laboriously hid Hunter’s misconduct as well as the obvious signs of Biden’s senility.
Although Trump often sounds abrasive in his public statements and political speeches, a practice that I have repeatedly deplored, this loose talk is not the major reason for his low approval numbers or for the vulnerability of his party in national elections. Trump and his party are being punished for standing in the way of leftist rule. Those who relish this rule and wish to expand it hate our “Nazi” president — for good reason.
This leftist coalition has been building its base and power for the last seventy years and now embraces almost all government workers, racial minorities, and easily mobilized ideological constituencies like unmarried college-educated women. These groups were out in force in November against representatives of the “trad” party. And why shouldn’t they exhibit Trump Derangement Syndrome? The president has been cutting the federal workforce with a vengeance while upsetting public sector unions and the LGBTQ lobby. All these demographics were as happy as clams with Biden’s administration and mostly voted for his vice president against Trump in 2024. It would be a grave error to wave off this coalition as merely a lunatic fringe.
The notion that wokeness is departing the public square is unfortunately untrue. Although Trump’s son Eric keeps telling us that his father killed wokeness, there is no evidence this has been the case. One should not confuse Trump’s directives against DEI with the disappearance of our institutionalized cultural revolution. Not all schools and corporations are cooperating with Trump’s directives, and in the November elections politicians who wore their wokeness as a badge of honor did quite well. New York City now has a mayor who, beside being a self-avowed socialist and Hamas-sympathizer, proudly declared himself to be in line with all LGBTQ policies, including the mutilation of gender dysphoric children.
The GOP may not be as eager to attack Mamdani for his over-the-top wokeness as for his other positions. That’s because Republican operatives and talking heads have learned that such denunciations don’t play well with at least half the electorate, which is the one that is more likely to mobilize its troops. It may therefore seem more prudent to talk about taxes and government programs and spreading our “democratic values” to other countries, which is what pre-MAGA Republican leaders typically did. Why bother to get into sticky social questions, especially since the judicial overturning of Roe v. Wade hurt the GOP electorally?
Allow me to raise two problems that will beset the Trump administration going forward.
One, there is obvious ideological and cultural polarization in this country, as there is now in most Western countries. A recently published book by Heritage researcher Jonathan Butcher, The Polarization Myth: America’s Surprising Consensus on Race, Schools and Sex (Encounter Books), demonstrates exactly the opposite of what this work was intended to prove. From reading it, I learned, for example, that 49% of parents are either in favor of or neutral about students being allowed to participate in sports events, when the gender they assign themselves is contrary to their biological one.
Thirty-seven percent of parents seem cool with granting students “unfettered access” to bathrooms, locker rooms, and changing facilities “aligned with their professed gender identities.” This figure surges to 50% when school boards are asked. Only 55% of parents in Butcher’s survey believe they should be informed by school authorities if their child identifies with a gender other than the one that he or she was born with. Thirty-one percent of Republicans, 37% of independents, and 52% of Democrats are for teaching critical race theory in schools. Twenty-six percent of parents and 45% of school board members favor the use of racial preferences for college admission.
On many issues that, according to Republican media personalities, are supposed to favor our side by a “90 to 10 margin,” strong support exists nationwide for the opposing positions. Even Republican voters are not as squarely on the side of the normies as I had imagined.
Within this polarized situation, things may not be moving our way. Although active voters have risen numerically by millions since 2016, these voters do not generally identify as “independents.” Rather, they show themselves to be committed to one of the two national parties; and from what we observed in November and in 2020, it seems the Democrats are generally much more effective in bringing out their base.
Even the Trump victory in 2024 does not refute this generalization. Trump’s tongue-tied, in-every-way-incompetent, but unfailingly woke opponent lost to him by only two million votes. Given the disparate degrees of competence in the two candidates, Trump should have won in a blowout.
Two, a renewal of the culture wars is inescapable if we hope to reverse unfavorable electoral trends. Trump is widely hated, despite an impressive first year in his second term, because he’s kicked over a woke hornet’s nest without being able to destroy it. Back in 1992, Irving Kristol responded in the Wall Street Journal to Pat Buchanan’s support of the cultural war by announcing that the Left had won. It therefore didn’t pay to re-engage in lost battles.
That may be true, but it’s also irrelevant. Unless the cultural Right can renew the struggle that Kristol considered lost, it will find itself permanently disempowered. And we’re not talking here about dredging up country club Republican bromides, like calls for reducing the corporate tax rate and cooperation in passing an amnesty bill. The future of what remains of Western civilization as well as an effective populist opposition to the American Left now hangs in the balance.
This struggle will have to be waged incrementally, just as the Left has done since the 1960s in building up its anti-discrimination regime. Trump has taken the preliminary steps, by firing woke fanatics in his administration and by defunding missionizing NGOs and cultural institutions. But new and more ambitious ways must be found to continue this counterassault.
Unless the Trump team pushes back effectively, the cultural Left will take further ground. It may also be necessary to mobilize popular resistance to the cultural Left, for example, through massive, well-organized boycotts of woke entertainment and advertising and through counterdemonstrations to leftist protests. In any case, something will have to be done to match the Left’s collective energy and mobilization tactics.
The Trump presidency should proceed more quietly than its base to fight back against its adversary’s empire. It must retrace the steps taken by the Left in gaining and expanding its hold on administration and government-funded cultural activities. The current administration should follow the tactics of Biden’s handlers in carrying out its mission in a generally inconspicuous manner. Naturally this job will have to be done without the advantage enjoyed by the other side, which was the presence of an almost homogeneous leftist class of “public servants.”
But this doesn’t make the Right’s task any less urgent. It must now try to impose its will on the administrative state and, wherever possible, the culture—acting quietly, without the kind of boasting to which our president too often inclines. Unless a counteroffensive can be launched, I’m not sure that credible resistance to the Left will remain possible. Our situation is more precarious than the GOP media are willing to admit. Politically and culturally, we remain beleaguered, even with a transformational president in the White House.