Common Sense Revolution

The most popular and encouraging part of the upheaval unleashed by the Trump presidency may be the administration’s fierce determination to break the grip that wokeness, the new racialism, and gender ideology have had on all levels of government, as well as on the commanding heights of civil society. As William Voegeli perceptively argues in the latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Trump speaks for the 80% of Americans who are appalled by “anti-racism” being turned into a weapon of war by other means; who want free speech to be respected again; who are alarmed by limitless social engineering, the genital mutilation of the young, and literally open borders; who do not want women’s sports to be dominated by biological men; and who deeply resent the constant invective being directed against the noble American project itself.

President Trump has repeatedly spoken of a “common sense revolution,” a “revolution” that puts the lie to the para-Marxist claim, beloved by academics, journalists, and almost all politicians, that the concerns of citizens are almost exclusively “bread-and-butter” ones, and that “culture war” issues are at best a distraction and at worst an exercise in demagoguery, racism, and homophobia.

That view was perfectly—and predictably—expressed by Piotr Smolar, the Washington correspondent of the influential French leftist newspaper Le Monde. A few days after Trump’s inauguration, he contended that Trump’s promise of a “revolution of common sense” was nothing more than “a conservative reaction to certain recent developments in American society, notably the recognition and promotion of sexual and racial diversity.” Never mind Trump’s broad appeal and his success in building a genuinely multiracial, patriotic coalition. For Smolar and his ilk, the appeal to reinvigorated civic common sense is nothing more than an exercise in “populist newspeak,” at once dangerous and irrational.

Trump’s response to the woke revolution is indeed “reactionary” (rather than revolutionary) since it aims to undo, or at least significantly mitigate, the harm done to the country by left-liberal currents who confuse “diversity” with a Manichean cult of victims and exploiters, who deny the reality of the sexual binary—the natural and fecund complementarity of men and women—and who confuse liberty with limitless liberation and a crude coercive utopianism.

Trump did not start this culture war. That was the work of those who repudiate our moral and civic inheritance in the guise of fully actualizing liberty and equality. But he is to be credited for refusing to treat its destructive work as “historically inevitable,” and thus irreversible.

Too many of his critics on the establishment Right, the Freedom Conservatives, for example, proceed as if the moral foundations of democracy have not been brutally assaulted by a cultural and political Left grown ever more destructive and illiberal. These soi-disant conservatives may oppose woke fanaticism, but they are not willing to do much about it. They confuse moderation with a not-so-slow accommodation to the intellectual zeitgeist, and thus succeed in conserving very little. They direct their misplaced ire at those who (perhaps indelicately) resist the culture of repudiation and the revolution of nihilism. We have little to learn from such faux moderation.

As Megan Messerly pointed out in an astute discussion of Trump’s “common sense” culture war in a Politico piece from February, Trump is building a tent that houses far more Americans than merely the social and religious conservatives of old. He opposes abortion-on-demand and has pardoned unjustly held pro-life prisoners (many of them old and infirm) who were given draconian sentences for violating trespassing laws. As Messerly points out, social and cultural conservatives welcome “the revolution of common sense,” even if some worry that Trump will tend to downplay pressing moral issues that cannot galvanize mass 80% support (or opposition).

Nearly the entirety of Trump’s supporters—and many others besides—are opposed to “transgender wokeness, the indoctrination of kids, the oversexualization of kids,” as one senior White House official told Messerly. These are increasingly winning issues. But as Messerly also points out, many in the secular wing of Trump’s coalition have bought into the premises (for example, diversity, openness to moderate forms of gender ideology, an easygoing moral relativism) that allowed woke “bull***t” (as Trump has bluntly called it) to metastasize in the first place.

They had little or no concern with these notions ten years ago. In a word, many have revolted against the ideological fanaticism without quite knowing the reasons why. Perhaps this is best understood as an inchoate form of what Leon Kass once called “the wisdom of repugnance.” My guess is that many of the more egregious DOGE revelations—surely an American version of glasnost—aptly highlighted in President Trump’s Joint Address to Congress in March (almost all centering around supporting and promoting sexual and cultural transgression) will only make more citizens stand up to wokeness. The revelations about USAID alone, which, per J. Michael Waller, has “become an out-of-control agency spending billions a year in bloated crony contracts, rotten from top to bottom with systemic fraud, corruption, and politicization,” are enough to justify Trump’s case to the American people. But these good folks need to know why their “resistance” is perfectly reasonable, and thus nothing to be ashamed of.

For all this, I am inclined to give two cheers to the common sense “revolution,” and not the proverbial three. Common sense has been under sustained assault both theoretically and practically for a very long time now. Its undoubted truths (and good sense) are not self-evident. It needs a theoretical defense and an articulation by writers, thinkers, and theorists who are in a position to expose the sophistry of social constructivism and deep-seated moral relativism.

One cannot adamantly oppose the repudiation of common sense and continue to ignore the grounding of free and decent political life in certain unchanging truths about human nature and the nature of reality. These provide the ultimate ground, the surest foundation, of a politics of common sense, as our Founders surely knew. Human beings are not autonomous, and liberty is always liberty under God and a non-arbitrary moral law. We aim to conquer nature—and human nature—at our own peril, as the 20th-century experience with totalitarianism, and our own recent experience with uncontrolled biotechnological experimentation, surely show.

Too many members of the common-sense coalition have unthinkingly adopted the language of gender (think “gender reveals”), not knowing that this mode of discourse implicitly liberates “gender identity” from any grounding in natural and biological reality. Hence, the truly mad assertion, as far from common sense as one can imagine, that men and women are just two possible “genders” among 73 or, for that matter, 173.

While a majority of Americans are right to assert the inherent dignity of our homosexual friends and neighbors, it was surely a mistake to separate marriage from any grounding in the nature of things (that is, the sexual binary, and the accompanying “production” of new human beings and citizens). We must face a damning truth: de-naturalized marriage led inexorably to the terrible excesses and fantasies of transgenderism. As C. S. Lewis put it so well in his incomparable The Abolition of Man:

In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the gelding be fruitful.

The appeal to a reinvigorated common sense, to a broad anti-ideological coalition, is indeed a necessary first step in the recovery of moral and civic sanity. But it is not enough. We must ultimately recover common sense’s roots in practical wisdom, in right reason (the intellection of the true, the good, and the beautiful), and in a humanizing appreciation of moral limits and self-restraint. As the great political philosopher Eric Voegelin liked to point out, the Anglo-American world was once a bastion of common sense and sound constitutional politics, and thus was seemingly immune to the totalitarian temptation. But beginning in the 1960s, an inchoate, ill-defined, and ill-defended Anglo-American common sense increasingly gave way to the ideological deformation of reality. We must not let that happen again. The common sense “revolution,” which is really a noble restoration, must never take the self-evidence of common sense for granted, especially in an age deformed by ideological lies.

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