The United States is not yet a banana republic, despite liberal efforts to the contrary.
The successors to the long-haired, tie-dyed lefty protestors of the ’60s have finally done it: They’ve taken over. Yesterday’s counterculture has become today’s establishment. They’ve traded their beads and sandals for Zoom meetings and climbed to office cubicles from the streets.
Inconveniently for our woke ruling class, it appears their hold on power will be short-lived. In about three weeks, there is an election, and a storm has brought a new wind.
We pretend campaigns are about issues, but there are forces more powerful than policy.
Culture is upstream of issues. Culture is upstream of the economy. Culture is upstream of everything — because who we are is always more important than what we have.
Culture, not just economics, is driving an epochal gender gap. A culture of strength, nationalism and values that respect manliness is at war with the Biden/Harris culture of weakness and accommodation.
Whoever wins, we know this: Post-election, America will be sleeping in separate bedrooms.
Culture, not just painful inflation, is driving Donald Trump’s growing support among Hispanics, young black men, Gen Z men and union workers. They see strength as the alternative to the chaos at home, abroad and in their own lives — strength that is a welcome alternative to the erosion of our national character and their own masculine identities.
When men work hard, play by the rules and still can’t afford to buy groceries, much less a home for their families, we don’t just have an economic problem: We produce an erosion of masculinity.
American men want to regain their grip.
Comedian Bill Maher, recently infected with an understanding of American culture, has confronted the reality of gender. He tells us, “The Democrats are always bitching to me about their kids, who are like in their 20s, and they are super, uber-woke and driving their parents crazy.” These kids, Maher notes, roll their eyes at the cultural glue that holds our society together, telling their parents, “You don’t get it, Mom, that’s old thinking!”
Maher, who tapes his show in LA’s Television City, near the drippy, bleeding heart of the woke Hollywood establishment, explains, “Get what? Abolish the police? Tear down statues of Lincoln? Maybe give communism another shot? Gender is always just a social construct? It’s OK to have penises in women’s swimming pools and women’s sports? It’s not that I’m old. It’s that your ideas are stupid.”
Kamala Harris’s campaign can sense it is taking on water. It programs Harris to prove she is not a woke opponent of the culture she derided seconds ago. They tell us she is one of us because she grew up in a “middle-class family.”
She is establishing that she believes in nothing — and will support anything that might win her a ballot.
The candidate of nothing intends to erase your identity, too.
A country is outlined by geography, but a nation is defined by its culture. Our culture is our national identity.
Our culture is the assemblage of spoken and unspoken norms and values that all of us hold true in common. Culture is what we care about and fight for collectively. Culture is what unites us as one people and defines us as distinctly American.
America’s culture is special.
From our founding, our culture has been rooted in the principles of individual liberty and self-governance. We rejected being governed by others. A commanding idea undergirded the disruptive American experiment: With a strong work ethic constrained by a shared sense of right and wrong, grounded in religious faith, we could live in freedom. And every American would have equal opportunity to achieve their best.
The enemy of American culture is nihilism, the soulless pursuit of money, pleasure and convenience. The alternative to a uniting culture is division and social disintegration. The loss of cultural order invites despotism and totalitarianism. The postmodern substitute for culture is the belief that we can each have our own “individual truths” instead of a shared understanding of who we are — and who we should be.
We have no need for shepherds if we are not sheep; our culture of self-governance blocks their way.
We’ve had enough.
The people’s surge is growing. Trump’s faith in our freedom to govern ourselves is expanding the Republican Party like your waistline at a cruise ship buffet.
This is not just an election; it’s a realignment that will shape our political parties for decades. America’s culture of self-governance is making a comeback.
Young black men are standing beside old white union workers. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and New Frontier dreamers are flying the same flag as plumbers who drive an F-150. Women who seek fulfillment in sports, Wall Street mavericks and Hispanic immigrants are all taking up arms together.
As Steve Jobs once said, “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.”
Don’t be surprised if these buccaneers win.
Alex Castellanos is a political consultant in Washington, D.C., and a native of North Carolina.
