The Sleeping Conservative Dragon Is Waking Up!
Victor Davis Hanson
By Victor Davis Hanson, contributor, Daily Caller, June 1, 2023
Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst.
How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?
They don’t see much backing for the current border policy and illegal immigration, yet it continues. Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events. They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.
Certainly, former President Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.
In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time. In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.
Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.
How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?
Conservatives, by their nature and unlike the Left, are more inclined to accept existing institutions rather than to radically alter or destroy them.
They were asleep at the wheel in 2020, when left-wing-funded lawsuits radically transformed Election Day in many states into a mere construct. Some 70 percent of the electorate in key precincts voted by mail or early, with far fewer ballot audits or authentication.
They focus on nominating more conservative judges, not packing the court itself. They work to take back the Senate, not to end the filibuster or bring in two new states with four new senators.
Traditionalists often feel they have no time for politics. They prefer to focus on their families, jobs, communities, and churches. Until recently they shunned organized boycotts. They abhor massing outside the homes of left-wing politicians and judges.
They shrug and concede that universities, teachers, government unions, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, entertainment, and professional sports are hopelessly activist and left-wing.
The environmental, social, governance (ESG), diversity, equity, and inclusion, and LGBQT+ agendas were unfathomable acronyms to Middle America and thus mostly ignored.
So conservatives often slept through the woke revolution.
Yet suddenly they realize their apathy allowed the country to descend into something the nation’s founders never imagined or intended, and antithetical to what most knew as America just a couple of decades ago.
So conservatives are awakening from their slumber. And they are discovering that they too can boycott, agitate – and roar.