By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2024-12-11 23:02:25 | Updated at 2024-12-12 02:06:06
3 hours ago
The other day, a former student wrote me regarding post-Election Day events.
“I just feel like a tide has shifted and that it feels more like the Reagan ’80s than at any point in my life,” he marveled.
I agree.
It’s not just that Donald Trump is the once and future president, while Kamala Harris has already shuffled off to the Mike Dukakis Home for Embarrassingly Failed Democratic Candidates, where she can share box wine and catty remarks with Hillary Clinton.
It’s that the entire energy of the nation, and maybe the world, has changed overnight.
From the Daniel Penny exoneration, to the reopening of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris before all the leaders of the West — including Donald Trump, but notably excluding Joe Biden — to the triumphant flights of Starship and a sudden shift in relations with previously difficult neighbor countries like Mexico and Canada, these last few weeks have felt like one big shout of “We’re back, baby!”
Well, that’s one thing elections are supposed to do.
Every few years the nation is, in a sense, reborn.
We pick different leaders, we change policies, we even, to some degree, change our image of ourselves.
Under Biden, our national self-image was gloomy for the most part.
You can liken him to America’s King Lear, a ruler whose mind has deserted him.
(Jill Biden and Kamala even make plausible stand-ins for Regan and Goneril. Unlike Lear, though, Biden lacked a loyal Cordelia).
It was a presidency, in Shakespeare’s words, constituting a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.
Which is also a pretty good summary of Biden’s debate performance.
When that performance made it obvious that Biden was not merely too senile to govern — nobody in the insider cabal minded that — but also too senile to successfully campaign, he was unceremoniously booted.
Though Harris, his replacement, had never won a Democratic delegate, no one dared contest her rammed-through nomination.
She ran a cheerless campaign under the banner of “Joy,” but in reality was a mere cog in the Democratic machine trying to pose as “brat.”
She took a drubbing, and now everything is different.
Under Biden, and especially with the prospect of a successor regime under Harris, America’s prospects were grim.
Now they’re bright, and all sorts of problems that were thought to be too tough to deal with — immigration, shrinking the deficit, reforming education, the bureaucracy, the military and more — are suddenly being addressed by competent people.
Well, as I say, elections are supposed to do that.
Of course, the powers that be don’t like this one bit.
Through a combination of censorship (in 2020 The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was called Russian disinformation; in 2024, Joe pardoned Hunter for what was on that very laptop), bullying via mobs and cancel culture, and sheer hectoring by a controlled, cheerleading media, the Democrats managed for a while to make the many people unhappy with the way things were going feel like they were a powerless minority.
We lived under a milder version of what tyrants accomplish, a condition called “preference falsification.”
If it’s not safe for people to express their true feelings, even a majority can be made to feel hopelessly outnumbered.
And it mostly worked, until the election revealed that most Americans weren’t on board with open borders, a DEI-based military, woke racial politics, a diplomacy simultaneously warmongering and weak, and rampant corruption.
Because that’s another thing elections do: They reveal the true preferences of the voters.
Tied together with Trump’s victory is Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) and its rebirth as a free speech platform rather than a hive of censorship.
(Elite leftists have fled X for a new hive of censorship called BlueSky; their objection to X isn’t that it was censoring them, but rather that it wasn’t censoring their opponents.)
Free speech lets people criticize what the government is doing and what politicians and pundits are saying, and it lets people signal to others how they feel.
You can’t pull off preference falsification if there are any open channels of free speech, which is why the left has gone all-in on censoring “misinformation” — their term for a truth that is politically inconvenient.
But censorship, preference falsification and overweening government are recipes for stagnation.
Free speech and free elections, as we’re seeing right now, are the path to both freedom and dynamism. Keep that in mind in the coming years.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
