“A Tectonic Election?” By Sydney Williams
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
Today, as we celebrate Martin Luther King, we will also inaugurate our 47th President. Mr. Trump is only the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms. As Professor Guelzo indicated in the interview quoted above, this election might represent a tectonic shift in the alignment of the two parties. Personally, I suspect that shift is already upon us. A month ago I wrote an essay entitled “Political Parties are Dynamic.” That essay argued that Democrats failure in 2024 was due to their having ignored middle-class, working Americans, while adopting a bar-bell approach to the electorate – coastal, monied elites offset by those dependent on government. On December 2, 2024 I wrote an essay titled “End of Identity Politics?’, which argued that economic class had mattered more, in the November election, than ethnicity, race, or gender. In speeches, ads and literature, Democrats claim to represent working, middle-class America, but they have abandoned them. Consider education and the poor testing results of students in our public schools, and look at the rising cost of food, electricity and housing – all up more than 23% over the past four years. According to Monster’s 2025 Work Watch Report, 95% of workers say paychecks failed to have kept up with the cost of living. Is it any wonder that working-class Americans opted for change?
Professor Guelzo did not say that 2024 was a “tectonic” election, only that it might prove to have been. He cited three past elections as tectonic: 1800, when John Adams’ loss to Thomas Jefferson spelled the end of the Federalist Party; 1860, when Lincoln’s victory established the Republican party as a major party; and 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt’s win created the modern Democratic party.
Even before the election, people had grown weary of sanctimonious virtue signalers: politicians who use the Justice Department to investigate political opponents, government bureaucrats who call out policy disagreements as either dis-or-misinformation; news organizations who use “fact checkers” to muzzle free speech; university professors who censored opinions that did not adhere to a proscribed orthodoxy; high school administrators who permit boys into girls’ bathrooms; “influencers” who are blind to counter-arguments; open borders that let in migrant criminals; citizens being told they will have to give up their gas stoves; and big businesses that claim merit is less important than diversity.
Over the past year, companies like American Airlines, Boeing, Caterpillar, John Deere and Walmart have shut down or scaled back DEI initiatives. Recently, Amazon and Meta joined the list. Investment companies have begun to abandon the concept of social or environment-friendly investing in favor of the proven “prudent man” rule. Showing support for the argument that the election was tectonic, Mark Zuckerberg announced on January 8th that Meta will “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on their platforms.”
Change is in the air. The use of social media by the “anxious” generation may be peaking. Is it not possible, with the Supreme Court banning China-owned TikTok, in the U.S. with its 170 million American users, that social media may have reached its zenith? Concerns about personal privacy may well subsume public displays of self-expression. Is it not possible that some of that generation may conclude that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World may be upon us? At a future nuptials dinner how many men and women would want mementos of their college escapades be shown to family members? Can a twenty-something imagine him or herself, two decades hence, before a Senate sub-committee that displays social media-secured inculpatory evidence from their teen years?
From my perspective, it is less important when or what caused this change, than the fact that extremism seems to be making an exit, and that common sense and, more important, common decency appear to be making an appearance. Of course, the final determination as to whether that trend continues is up to Mr. Trump – if he is successful in addressing the illegal migrant problem, inflation, reducing the deficit, increasing economic growth, reinvigorating the armed forces, while limiting the size of government. If retaliation becomes his cause célèbre then all bets are off.
Despite overall economic growth having been sluggish – averaging about two percent – a small number of people have grown very rich over the past two and a half decades, leaving a sense of dissatisfaction, as wealth and income gaps widened. Despite technology-driven productivity gains, high inflation caused by excessive government spending has left America’s working people worse off. The Left blames the Right and the Right blames the Left. In truth, both bear guilt. Identity politics have divided us. Certainly, in a country of 335 million people, there are racists, misogynists, Islamophobes, and xenophobes. Just as there are supercilious elites who claim to know what is good for us, whether it is using public funds to pay for sex changes or housing illegal migrants in hotels. Buying votes by rescinding student debt is not the same as cutting regulatory hurdles for small businesses.
Nevertheless, and at the risk of sounding Panglossian, most people are decent and law-abiding. They love their families and want to live quiet, productive lives. Perhaps we are all exhausted from the childish antics of politicians and the willful bias of mainstream media, but it seems to me that a positive change is in the offing. If 15-year-old Anne Frank, while hiding from Nazis intent on killing her and her family, could express optimism about human nature – “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”[1] – then we should be able to see through the censorious negativism that has enshrouded our culture for the past two decades.
Mr. Trump has an opportunity to be a catalyst for positive change. His two predecessors failed their opportunities. Mr. Obama could have put racism to bed. Instead, he made race a bigger issue. Mr. Biden could have governed, as he promised, from the center. Instead, he governed from the far left. Should Mr. Trump decide on retribution, or should he fail to address people’s concern regarding the border, inflation, free speech, lawfare, and the economy, or should he fail to strengthen America’s public schools and resurrect America’s defenses, then he, too, will have failed. We know that claims of “diversity and inclusion” are no substitute for merit and the values embedded in our Judeo-Christian heritage, including love, tolerance and mutual respect.
The future is in your hands, Mr. Trump. Make the most of it. Show us that your win was tectonic.
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