The period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. The final cause of death was the reelection of Dona

How Liberal America Came to Its Senses

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2024-12-29 18:30:03

The period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump.

A decade ago, cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn. Professors would get disciplined, journalists fired, ordinary people harassed by social-media mobs, over some decontextualized phrase or weaponized misunderstanding. Every so often, I would write about these events or the debates that they set off.

But I haven’t written about this phenomenon in a long time, and I recently realized why: because it isn’t happening any more. Left-wing outrage mobs might still form here or there, but liberal America has built up enough antibodies that they no longer have much effect. My old articles now feel like dispatches from a distant era.

The beginning and end of any cultural moment is difficult to pin down. But the period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. None of the terms or habits will disappear completely; after all, anti-Communist paranoia continued to circulate on the right for decades even after the era of McCarthyism ended in 1954. Nonetheless, the hallmarks of this latest period—the social-media mobbings, the whispered conversations among liberal onlookers too frightened to object—have disappeared from everyday life. The era lasted almost exactly 10 years. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump.