Opinion | Four More Years of Trump May Make America Normal Again

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Donald Trump’s supporters and critics alike have called his election victory a revolution. He himself once promised it would mark a retribution. To me it has more the feeling of a revelation.

It’s an “Emperor’s New Clothes” event for America and perhaps for the rest of the West too, an overdue recognition and repudiation of the regime of oppressive insanities we have been subjected to for a decade or more.

We’re all familiar with the details of Hans Christian Andersen’s moral parable: the unscrupulous tailors who trick a vain monarch into believing their empty work is a fashion innovation, the ambitious courtiers who go along with the fiction and vie with each other for the king’s favor, the crowds who silence their shock at the emperor’s nudity for fear of standing out from the rest, and the small boy who alone calls out the truth in the charade.

For a decade or more—yes, even when Republicans have been nominally in control—we have been led by peddlers of a set of ideas that have clothed our institutions and the country in social and political doctrines, fake claims and strictures that have inflicted untold harms.

The fancy new items of invisible attire that our nation’s rulers have made us wear for too long include these:

The idea that people who have stolen into this country illegally should be showered with all the rights and benefits of citizens, that it is immoral to deny them those rights, and that they should instead be treated as victims of persecution and given “sanctuary” in our crowded and fiscally strained cities.

The idea that a nation that sits atop one of the greatest reservoirs of natural energy resources on Earth should forcibly restrain itself from exploiting them to “save the planet” on the basis of politicized science, while other countries are free to do much more damage to the global environment.

The idea that after a century and a half of progress in expiating America’s original sin of racism and making the country more equal, we are suddenly obliged to believe that America is as oppressive as it was in 1619, and that the best way to right the past wrong of treating people based on the color of their skin is to treat people based on the color of their skin.

The idea that children should, without parental consultation or consent, be free to choose their “gender,” be assisted by the state in committing acts of self-mutilation to do so, and all on the understanding that we have repealed millennia of science and just discovered that there is no such thing as biological sex.

The idea that democracy and freedom are best protected by denying people the right to express certain views that the authorities deem “misinformation” and by weaponizing the law against political opponents lest they weaponize the law for political purposes.

Ambitious elites in business and civil society went along with the fictions. Politicians on all sides, including Republicans, declined to dissent for fear of being called out. It took a man with some of the instincts of a child, a political ingénue lacking the sophistication to participate in the sham, to call the whole thing out for what it was.

Much of what Mr. Trump promises for his second term leaves me cold. I doubt, despite a shiny new Department of Government Efficiency, that we are on the brink of eliminating waste. I doubt that imposing tariffs on trillions of dollars of imports will do anything but depress domestic productivity and lower living standards for Americans. I doubt that installing oddballs in high office will result in anything other than mayhem and mischief.

But here’s what I am optimistic about: Four years from now, there’s a good chance that the nonsense we have had to endure will be buried, that important things will have become normal again.

It will have become normal to tell people who have no right to be here that they must leave, and that in the process people around the world will have been made to understand that they don’t have an automatic right to live in the freest and most prosperous country on earth.

It will have become normal for the nation to exploit its enormous energy advantages for its own economic benefit and know that the planet won’t explode as a result. It will have become normal again for children to be helped to respond to the inevitable strains and traumas of growing up not by having their genitals cut out, but by receiving loving guidance and care from family and society; that people will be judged on the basis of their talents and ability, not on their claims of oppression by ancestors six generations in the past, and it will not be automatically assumed that because you are white you should be punished for your supposed persecution of others. It will have become normal to be able to say what you think—on university campuses, in the media, on technology platforms—however unpalatable some people may find it.

And that, to my mind, is progress.