Is It Springtime in America Yet?

A strange thing has been happening recently.  I’m becoming optimistic.  For the first time in years, I’m beginning to think the American people might be on the verge of breaking out of, to borrow a phrase from Gerald Ford, “our long national nightmare.”  When I first began this publication I evoked Winston Churchill’s fear that should Britain not defeat Nazi Germany “ . . . all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age . . . .” We remain on the brink, but I’m seeing signs of improvement.

Having been buoyed by the hope of a “red wave” as the 2022 elections approached, I don’t want to get too excited, but I sense a shift in public opinion.  Recent polls indicate that Joe Biden is the least popular president in seventy years.  Large majorities suggest that the American people disapprove of his job performance in the half dozen most critical areas of presidential leadership.  Polls are notoriously fickle and can change overnight, but when they show Donald Trump with a significant lead over Joe Biden in the overall approval ratings, and in most of the so-called swing states, something must be happening. Perhaps the American people are recovering their common sense.

Perhaps these hints are just wisps in the wind.  I don’t know.  But still change seems to be in the air.  It’s spring, and summer is right around the corner.

I meet more people, who nod in agreement when I refer to Joe Biden as a doddering disaster.  I meet Democrats who wonder “what’s going on with all these migrants?”  I meet others who are stunned by the staggering levels of anti-Semitism and violence exploding on college campuses, and who are appalled by the ubiquitous street crime they see around them.  They seem open to the idea that these disasters are the result of foolish and feckless policy decisions implemented by the administration and other Democrats in big cities and on university campuses.  As recently as this morning an old friend I haven’t seen in a few months approached me while I was standing in line at the local bank and told me that, even though he has been a “lifelong Democrat,” he was “done with Mr. Demento.” This is not Texas.  This is the San Francisco Bay area where almost everyone absorbed liberalism in their mother’s milk. 

But what really struck me recently is the behavior of an other old friend of mine.  Born and raised in the Bay Area, with deep family connections to California Democratic party big shots, he is a U.C. Berkeley alumnus.  Afflicted by “Bush Derangement Syndrome” for eight years he insisted that Bush the younger had been “appointed” president by the Supreme Court. 

This friend once told me that he felt like a football player drafted by the Democrats.  He said that he gets up in the morning and puts on the pads and uniform and says, “Put me in coach!”  I just shook my head and figured the medical staff must have just tattooed a big letter D on his behind when they severed his umbilical cord.  Accordingly, it was no surprise to me that he came down with a raging case of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” the night Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election.

Caught up in the Russia hoax, for two years he assured me that Trump was about to be arrested, charged with treason, and dragged from the Oval Office by the FBI.   He was totally taken in by the hoax because all the people he knew and trusted, all the media he counted on, told him Trump was a Russian agent, or “Putin’s puppet,” and that “the walls are closing in.” 

Naturally, when the Sino-virus hit, he was all about “following the science,” and enforcing the unconstitutional edicts of Antony Fauci, the NIH and all the local tyrants. Masks, face shields, social distancing, and constant testing were all critical, he thought.   When the vaccine was finally available, he was all in on the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” nonsense.

Accordingly, I was almost stunned when a few weeks ago he quietly expressed his consternation about the border crisis, street violence, and high prices.  Since he sounded as though he was drifting my way, I just let him talk.  A few weeks later we picked up where we had left off.  He even appeared open to considering what conservatives might have to say about these issues.  Coming from him, these were amazing concessions.

This was so unusual I was beginning to think he’d been red pilled!  But maybe it was just Biden, the most potent red pill of them all.

This is totally anecdotal, but still, it feels like the tectonic plates of American politics are shifting under our feet.  I can’t help but suspect that if it is happening to him, it must be happening to many, perhaps millions of otherwise ordinary

Democrats and independents offended by Donald Trump’s abrasive manner, but appalled by the chaos attendant to calamity Joe and his policies.

Combined with Trump’s steadily rising poll numbers, his raucous reception by black and Hispanic residents of Harlem, a New York borough where nobody has sighted a Republican in decades, and his exuberant reception by a predominantly black crowd at a Chic-fil-A in Atlanta recently, and it is hard not to sense that something big is happening.

Recently Wendy Bell closed her Newsmax show with a commentary about how she too sensed a “Great Awakening” beginning to spread across the land.  Should the nation be so fortunate as to escape that gray totalitarian winter I’ve feared so long, we may have an opportunity to right the American ship.  Should that come to pass, we will have gained time to carry out critical reforms, but the longer-term threat of autocracy will persist, and the time gained will be short.  We must put that time to good use.

The last seven years have shown clearly that freedom is in eclipse in America because our republican institutions are vulnerable to the proliferation of political and financial corruption in governments at all levels.   As Lord Acton famously put it, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  The American people need a political, social, and cultural renaissance.  We must work wisely to rebuild the trust of our fractured nation and make government safe for liberty.  That will be the work of a generation.