The Great Clarification

We were living in a dystopian novelist's dream. Not anymore.

There was a time when our society looked as if it were a unique blend of dystopian novels. The good news is we are beginning to recover.

The bad news is that although the recovery may be relatively fast, it will not be overnight.

Consider where we’ve been.

The Diversity – Equity - Inclusion (DEI) monitors on university campuses were echoes of George Orwell’s warnings in Animal Farm (some animals are more equal than others) and Big Brother’s minions in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The passivity with which large numbers of people greeted inconsistent pandemic directions – such as Black Lives Matter rallies were fine, but attending grandma’s funeral would spread the virus – had hints of the dulled society in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 may have come closest to the mark with warnings of a twisted world of screen addiction; one where the government did not have to worry about what people were reading because most of the people were not reading at all.

[Incidentally, Bradbury’s short story The Pedestrian has equal punch. The protagonist is arrested by the police because he’s simply walking at night as television sets flicker from the homes of his compliant neighbors. Replace television with computer or smartphone flickers and the story could have been written yesterday.]

Fortunately, change has arrived. DEI programs are going the way of leisure suits, schools are restricting smartphone usage, anyone who volunteers their pronouns raises eyebrows, and the idea that our future can be entrusted to a coven of experts invites derision.

We are, of course, in for a prolonged campaign – the DEI advocates have not evaporated – but there is a welcome realization that what appeared to be a real-life version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers was false. Most of the voters had not become woke automatons but instead had decided to grit their teeth and hold their tongues until election day.

What happened? The Great Clarification. There was a time when an assumption that everyone was operating from the same dictionary was common. Adults assumed that schools, universities, and even companies were roughly the same as the ones they’d known throughout their lives. They thought that the political parties were on separate sides of a mainstream and that they weren’t in separate galaxies.

It was easy to cling to those assumptions because there were no grand pronouncements. The shift occurred quietly and in increments and by the time a large number of people noticed the “long march through the institutions, it appeared to be irreversible.

That’s when a major mistake was made. The dystopian utopians became too cocky and showed their cards. They thought that the hellish Trump was so “out there” and arrogant and tasteless that the average citizen would reach the same inescapable conclusions as the credentialed crew in the faculty lounge. They turned “lawfare” into a political strategy and squelched freedom of expression.

What they missed was that the tactics were noticed. The more they depicted Trump as flawed, the more human he became. Their political advisors must have dozed through the 2016 GOP debates. Whenever the conventional candidates, such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz, pointed out Trump’s lack of polish, they inadvertently portrayed him as more genuine.

With The Great Clarification of what was really going on with lawfare, back-channel understandings between Big Tech and Big Govt, and questionable conduct by the FBI and the CIA, fear of him was replaced by fear of them.

By 2024, Trump’s main opponent was the Establishment, and the billionaire outsider embraced one of the most powerful themes in American political history by declaring, “They’re not after me, they’re after you, and I just happen to be standing in their way.”

When the election rolled around, Trump had survived two assassination attempts. In many quarters, he was regarded as a wounded healer; an imperfect leader who stood between a blue-collar-friendly coalition and an elite cadre who disdained them (“garbage”) even more than it did Trump.

The coming change is already making rumbles beyond America. The ultimate non-Trump, Justin Trudeau, is sinking in Canada. The British Labor Party makes Nigel Farage look like Winston Churchill. Marine Le Pen is rallying a France First movement composed of people who are tired of importing France’s enemies. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni wants to use the navy to blockade unauthorized immigration from North Africa and, although retired, Germany’s own open-borders non-Trump, Angela Merkel, is well on her way to becoming the second-worst chancellor in her country’s history.

In short, the United States and Western Europe are experiencing the reaction to what is regarded as a violation of a social contract, a common understanding which holds that, although those in power may enact different policies, they must not seriously threaten the rights of the citizens and/or the health of the nation.

A common and exacerbating characteristic of this problem is that it has been adopted and worsened amid denials that it even exists. Thus, the enablers of open border policies usually would not argue that such policies are beneficial. They would assert that the borders are secure, there is no problem at all, and to object to the programs is evidence of xenophobia.

In the end, the best book to read about the impending changes may not be a novel at all. My nominee would an account of how an assortment of Ivy League wizards enabled American involvement in Vietnam.

David Halberstam’s book is not about dystopia, but its title sums up the self-image of our modern elites: The Best and the Brightest.