Can Truckers, Trumpers, and Radio Hosts Help Rescue America?

Conservative talk-show host Mark Levin speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2016 at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md., on March 4, 2016. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Commentary

Hint at an upscale cocktail party that you listen to talk-radio hosts such as Alex Marlow, Andrew Wilkow, or Mark Levin, and you’re likely to be sipping Chardonnay alone for the remainder of the event.

Politely disagree with “top drawer” corporate executives, professionals, or academics who rush to offer the opinion that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, or Ron DeSantis is acting “recklessly” by permitting Floridians to continue earning a living during the pandemic, or Canada’s populist leader Maxime Bernier is the northern face of the KKK, and you instantly become persona non grata.

In the United States and Canada, such is the “woke” disposition that prevails among the “crème de la crème” of our “sans frontières” hopelessly deluded globalist intelligentsia. For Ivy League American Marxists, orthodoxy is the rule and dissidence is summarily punished.

Common People Once Had Simple Dreams

Many ordinary men and women of my generation were the first in our families to attend a university. For many of our fathers and some of our mothers, their first real job had been military service. After 1945, they returned from various theaters of war with high hopes for new opportunities and promising futures.

Many of the sons and daughters of World War II veterans didn’t feel compelled to rush off to enroll at a university. They entered trades, started small businesses, or took promising entry-level positions in private industry and gradually rose through the company ranks.

By the mid-'60s, most of us who took up college studies did so with some particular profession in mind. Teaching, engineering, business administration, law, and medicine were popular choices.

For young people from modest-income families, university attendance didn’t necessarily amount to “university life.” Most of us who attended college commuted to classes at local universities and spent our leisure time in our own working- and middle-class neighborhoods.

Few of us were from families who were rich enough to presume they could think for the poor, and so we pursued simpler dreams of marrying our sweethearts, earning a decent living, and acquiring homes.

A Recklessly Transformative Revolution

Beginning in the summer of 1968, student unrest exploded in France and soon spread to all corners of the Western world. The governing ideology driving students into the streets was revolutionary Marxism.

Following the Paris uprisings, everything began to change. Simple dreams of well-ordered, happy lives were abandoned in favor of “self-realization” and promising new Utopias.

A cultural, political, and sexual revolution blew us over faster than a twister can level a trailer park. Traditional affections for work, faith, family, and country began to wither.

Impressionable young people without healthy affections to unite around are inclined to choose unhealthy alternatives. We surrendered to a reckless and self-destructive “revolutionary movement,” and over our lifetimes many paid dearly for it.

Today, the so-called “counter-culture” of the 1970s has morphed into a ubiquitous “woke” conventional wisdom in the 21st century. It has become almost superfluous to point out that what was once a fringe “hippie” movement when I was in high school has become a mainstream neo-Marxist disposition in American education, the arts, journalism, entertainment, sports, politics, and even the upper ranks of the military.

In a comprehensive, best-selling assessment of “American Marxism,” Patriot Radio host Mark Levin called attention to an important 2021 essay “Thus Always to Bad Elites” by Ted McAllister, a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University.

McAllister writes: “Today, we have a very different elite than America did as recently as the 1980s in terms of their nature, goals, ambitions, style, and ways of exercising power. The deepest fact of our time is that America has a bad elite, a mendacious one whose skills, values, goals, tastes, and types of knowledge are hostile to our nation’s inherited cultures and plural people.”

This new elite, says McAllister, “lack historical knowledge and vision, which they supplant by, or exchange for, the powers of transformation and change.” They are literally intoxicated by power.

Over the course of a single lifetime, all of our formative institutions have succumbed to this destructive revolutionary transformation, and our so-called “social justice movement” continues to be led by high-earning graduates of America’s toniest schools and universities.

A Parallel Universe

Can the iron grip of an over-schooled “wokerati” be pried from the necks of ordinary Americans? Can the despair among common men and women who were once the backbone of free and well-ordered societies ever be lifted?

For university-educated American patriots seeking to turn these pernicious intellectual developments around, it’s important to understand that resistance to tyranny requires reliable alliances.

It will be crucial to teach more young people to think outside the Marxist box. But it will also be important to mix and collaborate with human beings who actually live in a clear-eyed state of separation from progressive higher education. You may find that the average long-haul driver is capable of more “rational analysis” than the average university student. I have yet to meet a trucker who believes men can give birth.

For those willing to push the boundaries of safe spaces beyond college Facebook friends, secure campuses, faculty rooms, VIP lounges, coffee shops, yoga studios, bike lanes, spas, and tennis clubs, there is a parallel universe of working-class humanity waiting to be discovered.

Show willingness to take common men and women seriously, and you may find yourself in entirely new and surprisingly informative conversations. That’s always been my experience, and it has become even more true throughout the CCP virus pandemic.

Try bringing up Donald Trump or a favorite talk-radio host among the individuals who are loading your moving van or repairing your plumbing or doing any of the other labor-intensive jobs that we are told Americans won’t do. You may find new friends and valued allies.

No one would argue that all North American workers have fallen out of step with the left. Many members of big unions and government agencies continue to support “progressive” politicians who disproportionately protect their job security, entitlements, and regular wage increases. Others are still being duped by the constant barrage of woke propaganda coming from legacy media and entertainment outlets.

But many hard-working Canadians think much like the thousands of their American counterparts who participated peacefully outside the Capitol building at the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington.

The contemporary right doesn’t seek violent insurrection, as did groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter during the bloody summer of 2020. Common people want the democratic order of their nation restored. They simply seek leadership they can trust.

Perhaps the “salty” anti-Biden chants we are beginning to hear at American sports events are signs of a new awakening. Ordinary Americans want their jobs and businesses back and a larger share of their hard-earned salaries. They want their private lives back, the right to dissent returned, and the restoration of honest elections.

If not truckers, Trumpers, and radio hosts, who else will step up to begin rescuing America?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.