The lion now is roaring, quite loudly.
Photo by Travis Jervey.

In part 1 of this series I described how it appears the American public today is no longer asleep and is instead very aggressively participating in the political and cultural debate in ways it has not in many decades, noting how this shift suggests we are experiencing a much more fundamental societal change than a mere shift in voting demographics.

In part 2 of this series I described how this fundamental shift has begun to express itself within the courts and politics in ways unheard of only five years ago. This expression illustrates the bottom-up nature of America, whereby the citizen is sovereign and our so-called leaders can only resist what those citizens want for only so long. And when those citizens become energized, as they now are, that resistance will evaporate with amazing speed.

In part 3 today I am going to take a more pessimistic view, based not on recent events but on the longer view I take naturally as a historian. I do this all the time in my histories. In Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, in describing the political background behind that mission, I could not help noting how that mission changed America and its social goals significantly, for both good and ill. In Leaving Earth, I opened the book like so:

Societies change. Though humans have difficulty perceiving this fact during their lifetimes, the tide of change inexorably rolls forward, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

I then documented in detail the space efforts by both Russia and the United States in the decades after the Apollo landing and the politics behind those programs, with both providing a great window into how both societies changed in the second half of the 20th century. As I concluded, “They were like ships passing in the night.”

Similarly, the major cultural and political shift away from big government and the regulatory state that I think we are now experiencing in the United States is not going to change our country overnight. These things take time. People who firmly believe it is a good idea to “gender affirm” confused little kids by cutting off their breasts or castrating them are not going to change their minds easily. People who believe in big government — especially those who benefit from it — are not going to meekly allow that big government and those benefits to vanish without a fight.

The left’s long march through the institutions

From a historical perspective we merely need to look back as the left’s own century-long campaign to fundamentally transform the United States. The idea that government social programs were a good idea was firmly resisted by Americans for decades. Even after many years of effort, beginning aggressively during the Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson administrations in the early years of the 20th century, it was only with Franklin Roosevelt in the middle of that century that a limited number of federal social programs were finally introduced. Americans simply did not like the idea of giving the federal government a lot of power. Nor did they like the idea of increasing the “government dole,” as they would describe contemptuously such aid at that time.

Johnson signing the Equal Opportunity Act in 1964.
Click for original image.

It wasn’t until Lyndon Johnson and the post-1964 Democratic Party landslide that the left was finally able to pass its “Great Society” social program, creating numerous new government agencies designed to pass out government aid across a wide swath of the American landscape. That program was further strengthened after the post-Nixon Democratic Party landslide in 1974, leading to the very leftist Carter administration and its many very radical but now very influential federal programs.

Even then, these programs were still designed to work within the framework of the American model of capitalism and freedom that also centered sovereignty not on the government but on the citizen.

What had changed however was that the public no longer questioned the concept of using the government to cure society’s ills. In fact, from the mid-20th century on, if you dared question that idea you were routinely considered a wild-eyed extremist whose ideas were dismissed out of hand. The debate was closed.

Thus, in the first quarter of the 21st century, a hundred years after Wilson, that the left was finally able to, as Obama put it, “fundamentally transform” America. By then Americans had become so enamored with their big government and the regulatory state that they were willing to accept its dictates almost blindly. When COVID arrived that public was so convinced the administrative state was god that people in their panic were willing to allow that government to literally cancel the Bill of Rights and many basic laws designed to protect individual rights.

Things change

That decision — to give almost absolute power to the administrative state during a temporary crisis — has ended up backfiring on that administrative state. For the first time in more than a century, everyone saw unequivocally that government was not the answer, and in fact giving it more power only made things worse.

This reality became even more evident during the Biden administration. Spoiled by its ability to rule arbitrarily during the COVID epidemic, the administrative state continued to escalate its power grab once the epidemic subsided. More people were blacklisted. Opposition to the government was met with censorship. New rules imposed racist quotas everywhere while demanding that girls risk injury playing sports against cross-dressing boys.

Now however people were no longer living in fear of an unknown virus, and could see this power grab (for insane reasons) for what it was. The result was the election in 2024 and the landslide for Trump.

America, where the citizen is sovereign

Having noted this shift, however, it would still be a mistake to think things have changed radically. What we have now instead is a public that for the first time in more than a half century is open-minded to change. It has not yet abandoned the idea of a big regulatory state, but it now is willing to a question the usefulness of that state very coldly.

Thus, it is imperative for lovers of freedom to push even harder now. It is imperative for the Trump administration to cut at least one or two whole departments at the federal level in order to prove such change will not only do no harm, it will actually improve the state of American society. Prove this once or twice, and the walls against change will begin to fall.

But make no mistake. Changing people’s minds in this fundamental way will take many years and many battles. To push for change, the right now has to do what the left did for the past century, never give up, never give in, and continue the fight on all fronts and at all times.

By doing this and winning small but in time bigger and bigger victories, those who love freedom will slowly convince a now skeptical American public that freedom and tiny government really is a good thing, despite the risks it entails. Freedom also brings glory and success, in ways that can never be imagined in advance.

That glory and success will be the proof that brings freedom back to America.