Restoring American Culture
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 29, 2025, at Hillsdale College’s Blake Center for Faith and Freedom in Somers, Connecticut.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared that he and his supporters were “the party of common sense.” In his Inaugural Address on January 20, Trump returned to this theme. With his flurry of executive orders, he said, “We will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It’s all about common sense.”
I agree. But what is “common sense”? At the beginning of his Discourse on Method, René Descartes said that common sense was “the most widely distributed thing in the world.” Is it? Much as I admire Descartes, I have to note that he was imperfectly acquainted with the realities of 21st century America. If he were with us today, I am sure he would emend his opinion.
After all, is it common sense to pretend that men can be women? Or to pretend that you do not know what a woman is? During her confirmation hearings, a sitting member of the Supreme Court professed to be baffled by that question.
Is it common sense to open the borders of your country and then to spend truckloads of taxpayer dollars to feed, house, and nurture the millions of illegal migrants who have poured in? Is it common sense to sacrifice competence on the altar of so-called diversity? To allow politicians to bankrupt the country by incontinent overspending? That’s the start of a list one could easily enlarge.
In the cultural realm, is it common sense to celebrate art that is indistinguishable from pornography or some other form of psychopathology? Is it common sense to rewrite history in an effort to soothe the wounded feelings of people who crave victimhood? Is it common sense to transform higher education from an institution dedicated to the preservation and transmission of the highest values of our civilization into a wrecking ball aimed at destroying that civilization?
Like most important concepts—think of love, justice, knowledge, or the good—common sense is not easy to define. But we know it when we see it. And more to the point, we instantly sense its absence when it is supplanted.
In recent years—indeed, at least since the 1960s—our culture has suffered from a deficit of common sense. That deficit has eroded a great many valuable things, from our educational institutions to our cultural life more generally.
These days, the revival of common sense is often opposed to the rule of that coterie of bureaucrats the media calls “the elites.” As a shorthand expression, it makes a certain amount of sense to speak of elites. The folks in Davos who want to vaccinate us into oblivion, encourage us to give up steak for insects, and keep tilting at windmills to battle the weather are members of that shiny, self-satisfied group. So are the products of our Ivy (and near-Ivy) League institutions—those whom the critic Harold Rosenberg called the “herd of independent minds” who all think alike, believe they were born to rule, and occupy nearly every perch upon the tree of societal privilege.
But rather than being a true elite—which suggests a quota of excellence, merit, and achievement—the apparatchiks we call “the elite” are really just the credentialed class. They are often clever and always politically correct. Eric Hoffer, the so-called “longshoreman philosopher” who was prominent in the 1960s, was right to observe that “self-appointed elites” will “hate us no matter what we do,” and that “it is legitimate for us to help dump them into the dustbin of history.”
Indeed, that exercise in large-scale institutional tidying-up is central to President Trump’s effort to bring about the “restoration of America” through the triumph of common sense.
It is worth pausing over the word “restoration.” The dictionary tells us that the verb “to restore” means “to bring back to good condition from a state of decay or ruin.”
There are essentially two parts to this process. The first is to acknowledge frankly the state of decay or ruin for what it is. The abnormal is not the normal just because it is prevalent. For example, the mutilation of children is not “gender-affirming care.” Anti-white racism is not “anti-racism.” Illegal migrants are not “undocumented ‘new neighbors.’” A bisected cow in a tank of formaldehyde is not an important work of art.
The second part of the ambition to restore American culture begins by rescuing vital examples of cultural achievement from the sneering oblivion to which the establishment elite consigned them.
As to the first, the state of decay or ruin, I suspect that we are all familiar with what the “long march through the institutions” wrought in American culture. The phrase is a bit of Marxist jargon popularized in the early part of the last century. Its basic idea is that the best way to achieve the longed-for revolution is through a process of co-option. Take over a society’s schools, churches, and other cultural institutions, marinate them in a broth of liberationist ideas drawn from Marx and other left-wing intellectuals, and pretty soon you have taken over the commanding social, moral, and political heights of that society.
In a 1973 essay, “Utopianism, Ancient and Modern,” commentator Irving Kristol touched upon the conservative indifference to the claims of culture. “For two centuries,” he wrote,
the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.
Kristol was talking more about the humanities than about art. But his point applies equally to the attitude of the elites who manage the affairs of our society regarding art and culture. They did not think or care much about art—it was something that went on, as it were, behind their backs. But then one day they woke up and found the art world, including the formerly staid world of museums, was awash in sexualized garbage, postmodern inanity, and race worship.
This process was part and parcel of a larger cultural rebellion against bourgeois values that got going with the advent of modernism. Today, we are living in the aftermath of that avant-garde: all those “adversarial” gestures, poses, ambitions, and tactics that emerged and were legitimized in the 1880s and 1890s, flowered in the first half of the last century, and live on in the frantic twilight of postmodernism. Establishment conservatives have done nothing effective to challenge this. On the contrary, despite little whimpers here and there, they have capitulated to it.
From the moment Donald Trump was shot at a rally last July, people have been speaking about a “vibe shift,” a shift in the zeitgeist of American culture. That revolution in sentiment picked up speed with Trump’s election in November, and it began barreling down the main line with his inauguration. We always hear about the “peaceful transfer of power” when a new president takes office. The usual procedure is for the old crowd to vacate their positions while the new crowd slides in to take their places. The institutions remain inviolate. Nothing essential changes.
Trump’s ascension was the opposite. He was elected not to preserve the status quo but to remake it. On January 20, he moved quickly to show that his administration would not be a colloquy of words only. It would be a locomotive of deeds. Within hours of taking office, he had issued some 200 executive orders and proclamations, affecting everything from immigration and the border to taxes and the cost of living. He ordered that the U.S. withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization and directed that federal employees return to working full-time and in-person. With the stroke of his pen, he obliterated DEI operations throughout the government. The exhibition of energy and self-confidence was extraordinary.
Trump has repeatedly said that his common-sense revolution would usher in a “new golden age.” In the context of unleashing the economy and technological innovation, we can understand this to mean literal gold. But a large part of our new golden age will be aggregated under the rubric of normality. The return of common sense is also the return of the normal. What would that look like in the realm of culture? [more]
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