This is the concluding part of Unmasking Trump Derangement Syndrome. Part 1, which ran last week,  focused on defining and describing TDS, and then debunking the core claim of TDS.  If you missed reading Part 1, click here.  This concluding part identifies the central socio-political drivers of TDS and offers suggestions on how to counter it and prevent its recurrence. 

TDS Causally Explained

The sources of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) lie in a sequence of socio-political patterns that are visible at least as far back as the 1980s. Each pattern fostered a kind of path dependence that favored the emergence of the next pattern. In order of their emergence, they are: 

  1. IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE – of leading policy-shaping institutions (i.e., universities, the media, and the Democratic party).
  2. IDEOLOGICAL PURGING – that is, of dissident staff/participants and viewpoints from within those leading institutions.
  3. IDEOLOGICAL POLICY FAILURES – driven by the deficiencies of the resulting public policies.
  4. FAILING POLICY ELITES’ THREAT PERCEPTION – from their failure-induced unpopularity.

The first pattern – ideological capture of the universities, the media, and the Democratic party – has been documented by a variety of surveys. Regarding America’s campuses, it is well known that “university and college faculty have long leaned left . . . .” But “a notable shift began” in the mid-1990s, in that “[b]etween 1995 and 2010, members of the academy went from leaning left to being almost entirely on the left. Moderates declined by nearly a quarter and conservatives decreased by nearly a third.” In other words, universities shifted from having a somewhat open but widely liberal culture toward having a closed leftist monoculture.  

A similar change reshaped the news media. Survey data shows that by the 1980s, journalists had become far more liberal and secular than the country at large. Author Batya Ungar-Sargon links that shift to demographic changes in the profession: in the 1930s, just three in ten journalists had a college degree; by the 1960s, two-thirds were college graduates; by 1992, 82 percent were, and by 2002, 89 percent were – while for America as a whole, the percentage with BA degrees remained one-third. Hence, a rising share of journalists brought campus perspectives into the media – and they did so just when the campuses were incubating an increasingly leftist monoculture.  

A parallel shift happened within the Democratic party. Survey data assembled by political journalist Kevin Drum shows that “[s]ince roughly the year 2000 . . . Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot button social issues while Republicans have moved only slightly right.” As happened with the media, the Democrats’ ideological change reflected a demographic shift. Per Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, the Democrats have become “the party of upscale college grads, while Republicans represent an increasingly multiethnic working class.”  

A look back at the Democrats’ 1992 party platform graphically illustrates the magnitude of the party’s subsequent leftward shift. Sounding more like Donald Trump than Kamala Harris, the platform opened with a pledge “for a revolution in government – to take power away from entrenched bureaucracies . . . in Washington and put it back in the hands of ordinary people.” A similar vibe echoes throughout the document. For example:  

  • “We vow to make government more decentralized, more flexible, and more accountable.”
  • “[We will] restor[e] America’s economic greatness . . . [and] the basic American values that . . . will always make it great: personal responsibility, individual liberty, tolerance, faith, family and hard work.”
  • “Our Party’s first priority is opportunity – broad-based, non-inflationary economic growth . . . .”
  • “We reject . . . the big government theory that says we can hamstring business and tax and spend our way to prosperity . . . .”
  • “We must also tackle spending, by putting everything on the table; eliminate nonproductive programs; achieve defense savings; reform entitlement programs . . . ; [and] cut federal administrative costs by 3 percent annually . . . .”
  • “Welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life. . . . [P]eople who can . . . [must] go to work within two years . . . .” 

No wonder political science Professor Wilfred Reilly posted on X last August: “I’m voting Trump because he and I are both tough-on-crime, kinda-pro-choice, border-wall-building, Bill Clinton Democrats.”  

The second pattern, ideological purging, is a natural follow-on from the large-scale ideological shifts noted above. In the universities, this involved a kind of “mopping up” in the years after progressive leftists became a dominant majority across humanities and social science departments. By 2018, survey data showed that right-of-center faculty were now a near-extinct species on American campuses. Professor Michael Langbert examined party registrations for “8,688 tenure track, Ph.D.–holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report . . . .” He found that:  

[F]aculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free – having zero Republicans. . . . [M]ost of the remaining 61 percent, with a few important exceptions, is slightly more than zero percent but nevertheless absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation . . . . Thus, 78.2 percent of the academic departments in my sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference. 

Every academic department studied by Langbert contained far more Democrats than Republicans, several by large multiples. In departments that are especially popular with students who later take up careers in law and public policy, the D to R ratios were, respectively:  

  • Political Science: 8.2 to 1. 
  • History: 17.4 to 1. 
  • Philosophy: 17.5 to 1. 
  • Sociology: 43.8 to 1. 
  • English: 48.3 to 1. 

Such a landscape of left dominance and conservative absence becomes self-reinforcing. An informal survey by political science Professor Steven Teles confirmed that “with each passing year, every class of admitted graduate students is further to the left of, and displays a more activist orientation toward scholarship than, the class preceding it.” According to Professor Sam Abrams, on the contemporary campus, “dissent from the progressive stance is treated as treason . . . .”   

The mass media likewise began purging dissenters from progressive-left orthodoxy. Among the most notorious of those ostracisms was the campaign of harassment and antisemitic vilification waged by New York Times staffers, which by 2020 drove the left-leaning centrist opinion editor Bari Weiss to resign. That same year the Times fired editorial page editor James Bennett, for his decision to publish an op-ed by conservative senator Tom Cotton, which argued for deploying the military to stop the widespread “Black Lives Matter” riots, and end the rioters’ property destruction and attacks on police. Bennett later wrote: “The Times’s problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side . . . to an impulse to shut debate down altogether.” 

The Atlantic conducted a similar purge in 2018, by firing its newly-hired conservative writer Kevin Williamson on the very day he was scheduled to begin work at the magazine, based on objections to Williamson’s pro-life opinion statements. As one writer put it, Williamson “was unacceptable for the Atlantic,” even though he had “literally wr[itten] a book titled The Case Against Donald Trump . . . .” 

These purges, along with the more widespread hiring bias evidenced by them, were highly effective. As Batya Ungar-Sargon notes, “by 2014, just 7 percent of journalists identified as Republican,” and by 2015, “96 percent of journalists who made donations to a political campaign contributed to Hillary Clinton.” 

While not quite as extreme, a parallel trend has reshaped the Democratic party. A Brookings institution survey reports that “[i]In the quarter century since Bill Clinton’s first term, moderates’ share of the party has fallen from a plurality of 48% to just 35% while liberals’ share has doubled from 25% to 51%.” This shift in the voting base is reflected in the changing issue emphasis from Clinton’s to Obama’s presidency. President Clinton balanced the budget, passed a robust anti-crime bill, and artfully framed abortion as a procedure that should be “safe, legal, and rare.” In contrast, both the Obama and Biden presidencies witnessed cascading budget deficits, emphasis on systemic racism, restrictive scrutiny of police practices, and embrace of leftist cultural issues like transgender medical interventions for children and adolescents. 

No wonder that by 2022, polling data showed “[t]he Democratic Party is perceived by voters as being both ineffective and out of touch . . . .” Sixty-one percent of voters viewed Joe Bident’s Democrats as “out of touch with hardworking Americans” and “so focused on catering to the [party’s] far-left . . . that they’re ignoring Americans’ day to day concerns” like “rising prices” and “combatting violent crime.” But progressive Democrats disagreed, as shown in their response to moderate Democrats’ opposition to the “Green New Deal;” this “convinced liberals that the only way to advance their agenda is by purging moderates and taking over the party.”  

Of particular relevance to TDS, these efforts to purge moderate and conservative voices from campuses, the media, and the Democratic party has a distinctly radicalizing side-effect. Studies of group polarization, assembled by legal scholar and policy advisor Cass Sunstein, conclusively show that “when people with similar views debate an issue, they end up with more extreme positions than any of them previously held.” As a rule, “closed groups of like-minded people, if left to their own devices, will move towards the extreme.”  

And this well describes where we are now: Leftist monoculture campuses prepare our “best and brightest” students for leftist monoculture law schools and public policy degrees; those students then populate and reinforce the increasingly leftist monoculture of the Democratic party, its affiliated think tanks, and leading mass media platforms. As well summarized by political philosopher Yoram Hazony: “we have entered a new phase in American history . . . in which [neo-]Marxists, having conquered the universities, the media, and major corporations, will seek to apply this model to the conquest of the political arena as a whole.” 

All this brought about the third socio-political pattern behind the rise of both Trump and TDS, namely, the left’s cumulative legacy of catastrophic policy failure, driven by its impractical ideology. That legacy has only intensified amid the left’s growing ideological dominance. Pertinent to the origins of TDS, the most important aspect of those policy failures is this fact: in nearly all cases, the policies were especially popular among upper-middle class voters, while their resulting harms were most intensively visited on working- and middle-class Americans. 

One could devote a whole book to those policy failures (which I am presently writing), but for purposes of this essay, a bullet-point summary will have to suffice. These include, among others: 

  • Massive federal spending blowouts, rationalized by the progressive doctrine of “Modern Monetary Theory,” which falsely claims that such spending does not cause inflation – but which actually and predictably did spike inflation, imposing especially painful harms on workers and middle-class families. 
  • De-policing, de-prosecution, and decarcerating, which instead of reducing Black-White disparities in arrest and prison rates (the intended goal), just unleashed waves of brutal violence and mass theft, especially so in lower income, often minority and immigrant communities. 
  • Suppressing immigration enforcement to create a wide-open southern border – that effectively surrendered the border to drug- and sex-trafficking cartels, in turn greatly increasing the number of sex-trafficked children, admitted millions of un-vetted migrants into American cities, straining both law enforcement and social services near to breaking points, and putting downward pressure on low-skilled workers’ wages. 
  • “Progressive” education policies, including higher spending for school bureaucracies, racial quotas for both admissions and classroom discipline, diversity/equity trainings, “critical history” curricula like the 1619 Project, and canceling middle school algebra and AP classes – none of which improved minority students’ performance or lowered the racial achievement gap; but which did reduce opportunities for talented low-income students, fattened bureaucracies more than expanding classroom resources, made classrooms more chaotic, and often worsened race relations. 
  • “Whole of government” Diversity-Equity-Inclusion mandates – that divert both taxpayer funds and employees’ focus away from core mission agency functions and instead subsidize costly DEI bureaucracies and consultancies, dilute meritocratic hiring, subject employees to divisive “victim vs. oppressor” racial stereotypes, and spread empirically unsupported accusations of systemic racism by non-minority employees.   
  • Green energy mandates, like blocking power plants fueled by natural gas or next-gen nuclear and instead subsidizing otherwise unsustainable wind and solar farms – that greatly raises electricity costs, disrupts reliability of high-volume electricity output, imposes energy poverty on working people, and if forced on developing countries, would block the pathway out of poverty for millions of the world’s poorest citizens. 
  • Children’s gender choice and transition policies – that neglect biological constraints, forgo diagnostic precautions, expedite irreversible gender transitions, subvert parental authority over children, and push biological males both into the most private of female spaces and toward unfair dominance of female sports. 
  • In the national security arena, abandoning deterrence of geopolitical rivals – by seeking to appease global antagonists, surrendering hard-won spheres of influence, and downgrading critical allies, all of which has emboldened existential adversaries like Iran, Middle East jihadists, Russia, and China.  This makes American involvement in foreign wars more likely. 

The highly impactful array of policy failures did much to fuel the rise of Trump, which thereafter fueled the rise of anti-Trump delirium. A brief look at the emergence of each phenomenon helps explain how our hyper-polarized divide came to be. 

The rise of Trump owes much to the aforementioned imbalance between those who supported such failed policies – predominantly white, upper-income, highly-educated, and often politically influential – and those that suffered the most direct and acute harms from them – mostly working and middle class, more racially mixed. and having far less political influence. This class-based asymmetry is documented by such works as Salena Zito and Brad Todd’s The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, and Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class.  

Particularly relevant to Trump’s rise is the fact that, despite the visible failure of so many of their favored policies, the progressive left has displayed a stubborn resistance toward reconsidering and modifying their policies. On the contrary, when faced with questions from outside the progressive bubble, the response has often involved a combination of denigration – “That’s racist! You’re sexist! Islamophobia!” – and efforts either to censor the questioner, or to induce self-censorship. Censorship efforts reached a new level following Trump’s 2016 election victory, when the outgoing Obama administration along with subsequent Congressional initiatives created a government-run censorship consortium, purportedly to combat “disinformation.” As later revealed in Congressional hearings, this consortium successfully pressured social media platforms to block true accounts of inconvenient facts like COVID’s origins in a Wuhan lab (partly financed by American tax dollars), and Hunter Biden’s ownership of the highly incriminating laptop that dozens of Democratic national security officials falsely claimed was just Russian disinformation. 

Taken together, these practices on the part of the progressive left amounted to a deliberate effort to narrow, and in some cases to slam shut, what social scientists call the “Overton window,” namely, the acceptable range of public discourse. 

This is why those who merely question the efficacy of affirmative action quotas are often dismissed as racists; or those who point out the violent strands of Islamist and Palestinian ideology are denounced as Islamophobes; or those who question the capacity of adolescents to knowingly consent to irreversible gender transitions are rejected as transphobes. Barack Obama conveyed this same demeaning sentiment in his 2008 comments about voters in declining rustbelt towns, when he said they “get bitter, they cling to guns, or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them . . . .” Eight years later Hillary Clinton displayed the same disparaging outlook in a 2016 campaign comment, namely, “you could put half of Trump’s ‘supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables, Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. . . .” 

In sum, faced with evidence of their several policy failures, the progressive left has reacted just like entrenched powerholders throughout history: They reject the criticism, double down on their policies, and seek to cancel and delegitimize their critics. Adding insult to injury, progressive elites denigrate the valid complaints of working Americans as the misguided rantings of bigoted “bitter clingers.”  

A November 2016 Politico headline well summed up the state of play: “How the Left Created Trump.” The article explained: “[c]onservative voters – including many former working-class Democrats – . . . sent the message that they’d had enough not only of losing economically, but also of being sneered at.” Notably, working Americans’ concerns continued to be excluded from progressive elite discourse, even while progressive elites lectured ad nauseum on the paramount need for “inclusion.” No wonder working Americans had “had enough.”  

With the benefit of hindsight, the then-shocking rise of Donald Trump can be seen as an almost predictable reaction to decades of progressive policy dominance and cultural intolerance. The appeal of Trump’s brash approach is especially comprehensible in light of the fact that neither of the two President Bushes nor Presidential nominees like John McCain and Mitt Romney were able to make a serious dent in the progressives’ wall of cultural and policy supremacy. 

In stark contrast to that history, Donald Trump from the outset of his 2016 campaign offered something different and more effective, namely, full-on disruption of the progressive status quo. For all his purported flaws, perhaps even in part because of them, Trump conveyed a steely determination not to be intimidated, restrained, or defeated by the usual progressive attack machine. As for the customary invectives that most politicians bend over backwards to avoid incurring – “Racist,” “Sexist,” “Islamophobe,” “Ultra-right” – Trump didn’t bat an eyelash amid the torrent of such denouncements. To be clear, some of his poorly parsed comments could be understood as racially offensive, and there is no excusing such statements. But as discussed above, a large part of the tsunami of Trump denunciations involved overstated and mis-reported accounts.  

This leads directly to the fourth and final socio-political pattern, which directly launched TDS: progressive policy elites’ threat perception, triggered by glaring evidence of their unpopularity that the 2016 Trump campaign rendered highly visible. The Trump campaign drew from, energized, and consolidated several long-simmering pockets of discontent with progressive left dominance, especially among working, middle-class, and religiously traditional voters whose concerns had ceased to be welcomed within the Democratic party. Trump promised in no uncertain terms that he would undo a slew of progressive policies that both harmed and insulted working and middle Americans – those whom the progressive left now viewed as unworthy “deplorables.”   

Trump’s 2016 campaign presented the most robust threat yet seen to progressive left dominance of the government and the culture; it put at risk a wide range of subsidies, government jobs, consultant contracts, and regulations, all of which financed, staffed, and controlled the administrative state’s progressive policy agendas. Trump’s acts and words as President just reinforced progressives’ fears. In response, the progressive left doubled down further. Questioning progressive policies was off the table; blaming, defaming, and delegitimizing the disruptor of those policies was the name of the game. 

Hence the non-debatable insistence across the progressive monoculture that Trump is Hitler; the launch and coordination among DOJ and state prosecutors of anti-Trump lawfare; the ramped-up censorship of dissenters from leftist orthodoxy; and a social contagion of defriending, shaming, and ostracizing Trump-friendly voters. In other words, a full-blown TDS pandemic.  

An especially insightful analysis of this kind of opinion pandemic was provided long ago by one of the twentieth century’s leading progressive historians, Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter focused on right-wing opinion surges among early twentieth-century populist movements. Ironically in today’s landscape, that same analysis describes the progressive left’s anti-populist Trump-loathing.   

Writing in the 1950s and 1960s, Hofstadter observed that the early century’s populist movements drew the bulk of their support from rural and small-town America, when industrialization and urbanization were shifting political, economic, and cultural influence away from those communities and toward elites in large cities. Per Hofstadter, “the people in these small towns responded with ‘anxiety’ about their diminished status and ‘paranoia’ toward the new, remote masters of their fates.” Hofstadter identified the “status anxiety” of small-town voters as driving a “paranoid style” of right-wing populist movements, to include racism and anti-Semitism, and with echoes in European fascist movements.  

Yet in 2024, the landscape described by Hofstadter has been inverted. Now it is the status of progressive elites and their failed policy agendas that are at risk of decline, along with their influence across government, media, and the culture. Hence the progressive elites’ overheated rantings about a Hitlerian Trump, which correlate precisely with “Hofstadterian” status anxiety. As essayist Lee Siegel recently observed:  

Hofstadter’s words perfectly describe the liberal response to Trump and Trumpism. . . . Hofstadter’s description . . . [of twentieth-century right-wing paranoia] applies, with almost eerie precision, to the caricature of a diabolical Trump that has run through the mainstream media for four years and counting. . . .  

Today status anxiety and paranoia are entrenched on the liberal side. It is the status anxiety of young editors, reporters, and producers, working in a collapsing profession, that is behind the generational combat that has driven the media to the far Left. . . . [and fuels] an established sensibility in liberal circles . . . [that] Trump and his followers will lead the country into . . . an authoritarian state, concentration camps, [and] nuclear or climate-change holocaust. 

Given Hofstadter’s progressive pedigree, it is likely that were he alive today, he would bristle at the use of his twentieth-century populism research to explain the reactionary mania of twenty-first century progressives. Yet this inversion compellingly illustrates the great irony of today’s so-called “progressive” movement, namely: its pervasive illiberalism shares far more in common with the past century’s anti-progressive reactionaries than with the sober post-WWII liberalism that built a modern, prosperous, multi-racial America. 

TDS Remedies

Is there a remedy for TDS? There are at least two contexts in which to answer that question. One is the immediate present and the current TDS pandemic; the other is the longer term and the risk of similar opinion pandemics. 

To abate the current TDS pandemic, the most effective approach would be a policy agenda that addresses the neglected concerns of working- and middle-class voters, while treating with fairness and dignity, those who stand to lose jobs and benefits under such policies. Whether that will happen remains to be seen. The first month of Trump’s second term displays a determined effort to address those neglected concerns, which bodes well for likely success. Notably, the administration’s commitment to an energy-led economic expansion raises the likelihood of more widespread prosperity, which often reduces political polarization. 

How things work out for those who stand to lose under Trump’s policies poses a more problematic question. Firing large numbers of government employees without meaningful advance notice and time to pursue other employment raises questions of fundamental fairness, and if done in this way, will needlessly invite further opposition and litigation. At the same time, as DOGE has compellingly revealed, there are several entrenched government initiatives that either have gone off-mission or no longer serve their intended purpose, and these should be phased out. 

As for preventing future outbreaks of TDS-like phenomena, the foregoing analysis points to one overarching causal vector as the lead target for reform: the progressive left monoculture that dominates universities, the media, and now also permeates K-12 education. That same monoculture is reinforced by the non-profit and think tank sectors, as well as the teachers’ and public employee unions.  

From that assessment comes the necessary remedy: disrupt and loosen the iron grip of the dominant progressive left monoculture across those critical opinion-shaping institutions. How to do this? Five remedial steps come to mind. The discussion here focuses mainly on the college environment, but the recommendations would also prove useful in the media, NGO, and corporate sectors.

I. INTRODUCE VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY

Despite endless pledges from college administrations to promote “diversity,” those same bureaucrats have built an iron wall of non-diverse opinion conformity across their campuses. In response, Florida recently enacted a viewpoint diversity law that mandates the state’s higher education agencies “to conduct an annual assessment of “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” on each campus. While a good first step, little will change as long as progressive left professors control the vetting and selection of faculty hires. The key change requires shifting ultimate hiring authority away from departmental faculty and into independent panels appointed by the Board of Trustees – with an explicit mandate to bring viewpoint diversity to each department. The Manhattan Institute has published a comprehensive guide for Trustees to accomplish that. For state-sponsored universities, this could be efficiently achieved by state legislation.  

 II. ADOPT VIEWPOINT NEUTRALITY

In recent years, several universities have adopted “Viewpoint Neutrality” policies, pledging to “refrain from making statements on controversial political and social issues that do not directly impact the university or its mission . . . .” The purpose here is to “allow for an environment where students and faculty feel comfortable discussing these issues.” This is not a new concept: it follows a prominent policy statement issued by in 1967 by the University of Chicago, known as the “Kalven Report.” More recently, several state legislatures either have passed or are now considering neutrality mandates for state-sponsored colleges. 

III.  CLOSE DOWN THE DEI-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX 

Along with ideologically imbalanced faculty, a central driver of leftist campus monoculture are the ever-expanding Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI) departments. As one recent study reported: 

Not only is DEI hostile to the traditional truth-seeking and knowledge-dissemination functions of higher education, it is a direct offshoot of critical race theory . . . . Where DEI takes hold, universities are transformed into lavishly funded political action centers that are more interested in rewriting the country’s history and training partisan activists than in delivering a truly liberal education or advancing scientific understanding.  

A 2021 Heritage Foundation study found that the average American college employs forty-five full-time DEI administrators. At a reported average salary of $81,800, this army of DEI staffers costs the average college $3.68 million annually.  

Yet research increasingly demonstrates that DEI programs actually worsen race relations, by fostering what social scientists call “hostile attribution bias.” A study with over a thousand participants found that DEI trainings “led people to perceive racism where none existed.” A comprehensive investigation of the University of Michigan’s enormous DEI program, which cost a quarter of a billion dollars over ten years, found that “in striving to become more diverse and equitable,” the University had actually “become less inclusive” (emphasis added). The program left both “students and faculty . . . more frustrated than ever.” 

Dismantling these entrenched programs would help open the necessary cultural and political space for genuine viewpoint diversity to re-emerge on campuses. 

IV. RE-BALANCE THE TEACHING OF AMERICAN AND WESTERN HISTORY

Another driver of leftist monoculture is a shift in how American and Western history are presented in K-12 schools. “[H]istory content in today’s classrooms is largely taught from a partisan viewpoint – that of the left and often the far left.” Political science Professor Wilfred Reilly notes that “[w]ithin the secondary schools, two popular curricula currently in use come from the 1619 Project and Dr. [Howard] Zinn . . . .” Both curricula convey highly imbalanced accounts of our history.  

The 1619 Project claims that the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality was a lie, that the America was actually nothing but a slavocracy, and that a core motive of the Revolution was not freedom but the preservation of slavery. Despite that latter claim having been debunked by the 1619 Project’s fact-checker, the curriculum has been adopted by thousands of American schools.   

Howard Zinn was a Marxist historian whose best-selling history of the United States declares virtually every act of America’s political leaders to have been driven by capitalist greed and racism. While Zinn presents America as a font of evil, he absurdly portrays Maoist China as “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government . . . .” 

The point here is not to deny America’s flaws, or the flaws of other Western countries, but rather to address them within a balanced context. Virtually every society in human history practiced slavery; what distinguishes countries like America and Britain is their having taken the lead in seeking to eradicate the evil of slavery – which they did at great loss of lives and treasure.  For a far more balanced American history curriculum – objectively covering the good, the bad, and the in-between – Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope would be an excellent start.

V. EXPOSE THE INTER-CLASS HARMS OF PROGRESSIVE POLICIES

As noted, an array of progressive policies draws their main support from high-income, high-educated voters, while inflicting material harms largely upon working- and middle-class citizens. Among those harms are inflation, crime, energy poverty, wage stagnation, failing schools, and elevated risks of foreign wars. Stein’s Law holds that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop” – but things like bad public policy only stop when their harms are exposed and addressed. This is why rising non-legacy media platforms are absolutely essential for correcting the many dysfunctional policies that both harm and polarize our society. 

The foregoing remedial steps are just a beginning, but they point in a needed direction. As long as an intolerant left controls the leading meaning-making institutions across America, there will continue to be counter-movements like Trump and MAGA that seek to disrupt such illiberal hegemony; and the left will continue to respond with intolerant TDS-like rage. Bringing ideological balance to our leading institutions would do much to moderate and reduce this pattern of political polarization.  

And with a bit of luck, such efforts just might bring “We the People” closer together once again to a place where we discuss our differences, not with apocalyptic disdain, but with mutual respect. 

Henry Kopel is a former U.S. federal prosecutor and the author of the book War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom. Kopel is an honors graduate of Brandeis University, Oxford University, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and is an annual guest lecturer on prosecuting hate crimes at the University of Connecticut Law School. He serves on the global advisory board for the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.