Have Americans finally awakened?

In my long life there have been a number of times post-election when pundits nationwide have claimed that the results signaled a major cultural transition. This claim was made in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president. It was made again in 1994 when voters gave the Republicans their first majority in the House of Representatives in about four decades. A similar claim was made in 2016, when Trump was elected for the first time.

In every single one of these cases the claim was false. There was no major cultural transition. Republicans might have won control, but the American public and its political class still largely leaned leftward. There was almost no change politically. Despite for example Bill Clinton’s announcement that “The era of big government is over” after the 1994 election, the federal government continued to grow in size and power, and to do so with ever increasing speed.

Even more significant, in every single case, the American people went back to sleep after the election. They considered the election their statement of what must be done, and assumed naively that the new elected officials would obey that statement. No matter how much conservatives attempted to make the public aware that the government remained out of control and was further beginning to institute leftist policies far outside what anyone in America wanted, those attempts fell on deaf ears.

The American people were essentially not interested. The only political movement that moved with any passion was that of the left, and it took advantage of this passion to successfully to get its policies imposed.

It seems however that the 2024 election signals a real cultural transition, far deeper and more significant than the mere shift of voting patterns to the right that most pundits are noting by all demographic groups.

No, what is happening is a shift in passion. The American public has awakened in a way I have never seen. I give you this news report as a clear sign, as the events it describes occurred last week, after the November election, when Americans in the past would gone back into slumber and stop paying attention. Watch and be amazed, not just by the outrage by hundreds of ordinary citizens, but by the fact that this outrage was reported correctly and sympathetically by a television news report.

BREAKING: Parents blasted the @StHelensSD school board after discovering that a teacher who was arrested for allegedly s*xuaIIy abusing students was LET BACK IN THE CLASSROOM while still under investigation without the school even informing parents.

Why are schools covering for… pic.twitter.com/4o1hFJC89R

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 14, 2024

Rather than go to sleep after the election, parents and students in large numbers descended on a school board meeting to express their righteous anger over the school board’s willingness for years to ignore sexual abuse complaints by students about their teachers. More significantly, this outrage grew quickly because everyone involved was able to get educated about what was happening by the new openness on social media, fueled further by the return of free speech on X.

Nor is this story an outlier. It is the pattern we are seeing nationwide. In another example, when Whoopi Goldberg slandered a bakery in Staten Island — claiming falsely that it refused to fill her order because of her politics when the problem was simply due to mechanical problems that made filling her large order impossible — the public quickly rose up to defend and support the bakery, while lambasting Goldberg for her slander.

Similarly, in only one of numerous recent examples, a Connecticut school teacher went on line to whine about Donald Trump’s election victory, and in doing so she actually threatened violence against Trump supporters. The public response was so loud and overwhelming that her school superintendent immediately removed her from the school premises pending his investigation, and she resigned almost immediately thereafter.

I spent the last four years reporting hundreds of similar slander and blacklisting attacks against the right. In most cases there was little public outcry, either because of apathy or fear of retaliation for speaking out. Now however the public will no longer sit still and take it, but is instead responding with a loud roar. Do not be surprised if Goldberg finds herself fired from her position on the television show, The View, because of this and other absurdly slanderous statements.

Both the school teacher in Connecticut and Goldberg were doing something far different than the hundreds of conservatives blacklisted by the left from 2020 to 2023. Those conservatives were almost always simply expressing reasonable conservative opinions, and getting destroyed because of this. The teacher however was threatening violence, while Goldberg was defaming the bakery with lies. Such behavior is beyond the pale, and should immediately disqualify both from their jobs — teaching any kids anywhere, or doing political analysis on television.

And now, the public is not only aware of these things, it is loudly and continuously rising up to demand consequences for anyone behaving in this manner.

In other words, Americans are no longer asleep. Or as one Japanese general wrote in his diary after leading the attack on Pearl Harbor, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

The Democrats have done all they could in the past decade to awake the sleeping giant of ordinary Americans. The last four years finished the job. Americans appear enraged and unwilling to fall asleep. Instead, they are using their smart phones to pay attention, and are responding angrily when people in the political realm behave badly.

The astonishing house cleaning to come

This is the real transition. American culture for decades has been dominated by a soft leftist bent that the general public was willing to tolerate, even if it often opposed these political goals. That has now ended. The consequences of this change will be hard to measure.

Tomorrow, in part two of this three part essay, I will take a look at how this sea change in the American public’s attitude is influencing the people in power. While it will certainly give Trump and his allies much greater latitude to make many radical changes that in the past would have been politically impossible, it is the changes going on behind the scenes that is more important. Trump is only the most obvious political manifestation of this change.

The less obvious responses elsewhere in the ruling class are both surprising and expected, a contradiction that is simply natural in our complex political culture. And yet, that reaction is maybe more significant than anything Trump plans to do.