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Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen said it best: “Last week has totally reset my conception of what’s possible, in two wholly different dimensions.”
As Andreessen often is, he’s right.
Soon after November’s election, I suggested that if Donald Trump were smart, he’d come in like a wrecking ball: Move fast, break things and precipitate change across many fronts all at once, subjecting the Democrats, the media and the left (but I repeat myself) to shock and awe.
Boy, has he ever done that, unleashing unprecedented change in just his first 100 hours.
He banned DEI throughout the federal government, closed the borders to illegal immigrants (according to Customs and Border Protection, illegal crossings dropped 97% by Trump’s second day in office), halted government censorship efforts, refocused the Defense Department from social issues to warfighting, and started a massive cleanup at the corrupt Department of Justice.
The new administration immediately found 80,000 of the Biden Administration’s 300,000 unaccounted-for migrant children, Fox News reported, and Trump overturned Biden’s order blocking the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.
And Trump himself has been all over the place: Lecturing the fat-cats at Davos about freedom (joined by Argentina’s Javier Milei), showing up for the Biden-ignored victims of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee, and barnstorming to California to demand that state and local officials do their jobs and not tie up recovery efforts with red tape.
Meanwhile, his Department of Government Efficiency is already canceling wasteful government contracts, and federal employees are threatening to quit as Trump orders everyone, finally, to end their COVID-era remote work.
A week or two ago, all these things seemed too hard to accomplish.
Now they’re simply being done.
Oh, there’s resistance: The Air Force announced that as part of Trump’s DEI ban it would stop teaching cadets about the Tuskeegee Airmen scandal, an act of obvious bad faith designed to grab headlines.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who knows whereof he speaks, rightly called this “political theatrics” and “passive-aggressive performative nonsense . . . It’s all an act.”
It is an act, and the actors should be sacked.
But that they’re trying this sort of idiocy is proof that they’re flailing and desperate. Trump has the momentum.
One reason for this, of course, is that things like the DEI ban and immigration enforcement are wildly popular.
The American public has never supported affirmative action or open borders.
Those are policy preferences of the elites, who bullied opponents by calling them racist.
That doesn’t work anymore.
So along the practical side of Andreessen’s dual dimensions, it’s amazing: We were headed down a destructive path that, it turns out, most Americans didn’t want, and now we’re quickly turning around.
But the other dimension of Andreessen’s observation is spiritual, and here the shift is even more striking.
In Inman Majors’ excellent novel “The Millionaires,” a political consultant observes that there are only two campaign themes: “Bright New Day,” and “Back to Basics.”
It says something about the poor quality of Democratic governance that Trump can declare a Bright New Day simply by returning to basics — racial equality, an orderly border, a competent military.
Not long ago, a lot of Americans felt pretty pessimistic about the future.
There was dark talk about a civil war or impending economic collapse.
And there was reason to be pessimistic.
The national debt was skyrocketing, civil order was breaking down even as the government stifled political dissent (a condition known as “anarcho-tyranny”), and our ruling class combined smugness, ineptitude and corruption in a particularly disturbing way.
That mood is changing fast, and it’s giving Trump both political and cultural momentum.
It’s now cool to be conservative, The Wall Street Journal reported: “In sports, entertainment, and marketing, displays of conservatism are crowding out progressive postures.”
An optimistic, growth-and-equality oriented culture will be better, for everyone, than the redistributive, consciously discriminatory one peddled by the left.
No wonder people on the right are upbeat.
But people on the left aren’t as pessimistic as they pretend to be, either.
As Seth Barrett Tillman noted, leftists may pretend that America is 1933 Germany, but they aren’t acting like it.
They’re keeping themselves, and their money, squarely at home, not fleeing the country.
As they should.
It’s a bright new day.
You might almost say it’s morning in America, or something.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
