We’ve all felt this building now for several months, but the drama is reaching a crescendo and a conclusion with the turning of 2024 to 2025. The end of the first quarter of the 21st century seems to be ending in the most implausible but widely shared emotion: hope itself. New Year’s seems like just a date on the calendar, but this time it means much more.
Determination is overcoming fear, light is replacing darkness, and a bright vision of the future is displacing the gloom. Hope is different from optimism, which G.K. Chesterton described as a mere empirical prediction, just like pessimism. Despair and hope are better words: The former is the absence of faith, and the latter is the belief that goodness is possible through faith.
This hope is a substantial and notable cultural change that is obvious, so much so that even The New York Times is reporting on it. It mentions in a long piece that “Christmas tree maximalism” has been the rage this year, with trees decorated so extravagantly that you can no longer see the tree itself.
Why might that be? Of course, the newspaper did not speculate. But any reader knows the answer. It’s about leaving behind the toughest four years of our lifetimes, characterized by grave levels of uncertainty in every area. In economics, inflation has been devastating for everyone, much more so than the data would indicate. The learning losses from COVID-19 pandemic-era school closures are all around us, made worse by digital addiction and overall demoralization.
We can dig through all the data to find and reveal the evidence, whether on crime, birth rates, low output, rising inequality, and declining lifespans. It’s all there for anyone to see, even as we have watched the United States’ great cities descend into squalor, businesses and residents fleeing. It’s been too much even to process, mentally or emotionally. It creates the persistent feeling that something terrible, something exogenous to the social order, has seized control and will not let go.
And yet, what we’ve watched take place in American society over several years is an inspiring determination to rebuild and recover. The most conspicuous and headline event, of course, is the triumph of President-elect Donald Trump. The movement he represents seems without precedent, which you know if you have been anywhere near the rallies. I was in Phoenix recently, and the entire city seemed to be in a rumble of anticipation a day before his plane landed.
At my hotel, I was awakened at 3 a.m. by cheering crowds outside the window. I gave up sleeping and went outside to find that the line to hear Trump speak some eight hours later had already woven around the block and back. Can you even imagine? What would cause thousands of people to skip a night’s sleep to be present for a speech they could watch on TV? We know. There is magic in this movement, something more awesome and rooted than any cultural force.
I was talking with a cameraman from CNN about it on the elevator down. We were marveling at the noise, the unrelenting spontaneous cheering. I asked him what he thinks is behind this. He said that he wasn’t sure. I said to him that I suspect it is happiness, relief, and hope for the future. He quickly agreed that this was it. He clearly understood. It’s actually impossible not to understand.
You could say that this is all misplaced, that no one man and no president can possibly match the expectations behind him. That is true. Most people know that. In fact, this movement is centered on Trump, but ultimately that is not the whole substance of it. He is the vessel and the focal point, but the cultural determination to rebuild and recover is made of much more.
At AmericaFest in Phoenix, I spent quite a lot of time talking with people who were there—families, workers, students, and everyone. The whole reason for this is both simple and philosophically highly sophisticated: These people all just want their lives back.
They want the freedom to practice their faith, raise their kids, start and work in businesses, safely walk the streets, publish and read the truth, eat healthy food, and be rewarded for their labors. They want to trust their doctors again. They want to like their schools again, and go to the movies without being assaulted by creepy messaging.
This is not a movement about theocracy, dictatorship, imposition, or any of the other dark fantasies we’ve been presented with over several years. All the paranoid warnings about MAGA extremism melt away once you see it up close. I’m gradually coming to the view that most of this was never real in the first place or, in any case, was always a wild exaggeration from a very small sample of marginal cases.
The essence of what is really going on boils down to the normal hopes and aspirations of people of all classes to be trusted again to live their lives in peace and build prosperity for themselves. To understand that requires no access to deep philosophical treatises, opinion polls, or expert views from the Ivy League. It requires only open eyes and an open heart.
The U.S. Constitution is what was supposed to provide this for people. But it has been obvious for years now that something has gone very wrong. I recently scrolled through a remarkable document, a 500-page chronicle put together by a little-known outfit called the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), created only in 2018 but exercising a vast power over digital technology.
Among the postings directly targeted were the early seroprevalence studies of Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, whose work implied that the wave of infection would end a high degree of population immunity without vaccination. In other words, CISA was directly targeting good science in favor of propaganda, and worked closely with all of the social media companies to achieve its goals. It also directly targeted The Epoch Times, which CISA claimed “pushed conspiracy theories about coronavirus and protests in the U.S.”
This is all alarming and scary, to imagine that people in government could have such a profound disregard for the First Amendment. But you know what’s even worse? Suspecting that such a thing is going on but having no proof. That’s when you start to go crazy and imagine that you might be experiencing some kind of paranoid delusion. It’s better to have firm proof so that at least we know that our intuitions are credible.
We finally have that now. This is just the beginning, of course. I’m not likely ever to get through the 17,000-page document produced by the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. I’m still glad that it exists. Better to know than not know.
Knowing means gaining confidence that what has been broken can be fixed. When we observe that this was not some scary ghost or mystical thing that was targeting our lives and liberties but really just a system built by men, it’s like the last unveiling in Scooby-Doo, when the mask comes off and reveals the mayor of the town.
It has been rough, but American society seems to be fixing itself—and not from the top down, but from the bottom up, through the hard work, energies, prayers, and pious patriotism of people who still believe that America can be a land of opportunity, home of the brave and free. Let the elites sniff and the corporate media balk, but it is happening anyway.
It’s exciting to consider also that if America fixes itself, this can be an inspiration to the entire world to embrace the idea of freedom and the capacity of people to organize their lives without centralized impositions and controls. In such a world, culture can flourish as never before, just as we’ve seen in the rebuilding of Notre-Dame Cathedral.
Indeed, let that cathedral be a symbol of our age: many centuries to build, one day to burn, years to restore, but now gleaming and gorgeous as never before. So, too, for all of our lives.
