Victor Mentality
1776 > 1619
I am not a Republican. I never voted for Donald Trump. I don’t really want to say anything about him or politics in the narrow electoral sense. I want to say something about America because something big happened this week. It isn’t replacing one party with another or one orthodoxy with another. It is the end of an era that demanded orthodoxy.
The old progressive orthodoxy has two major components — cradle to grave welfare socialism and post-Christian antinatalism. You could support it or acquiesce to it but were not allowed to voice any overt rejection. The first idea was to detach people from the consequences of their economic activities, for better or for worse, by penalizing success and rewarding failure. This part of the progressive orthodoxy was stupid.
The second part was antinatalism — punishing families through confiscatory taxes and overregulation that made it increasingly difficult to afford large families. This was the evil part of the progressive orthodoxy. Combining the stupid part with the evil part formed a civilizational suicide pact. It was a death cult in service to an elite utterly insulated from its consequences for regular people.
The latest permutation of progressive orthodoxy put a spin on both the socialist and antinatalist orthodoxies. It offered a race-based instead of class-based form of socialism in which favors and punishment were reallocated based on racial grievances. And it offered abortion maximalism as an almost sacramental offering to antinatalism. Minorities were expected to support the left in return for a grievance apartheid. Women were expected to support the left in return for abortion maximalism. Both get a permanent victim status. The elites get to manage the resulting decline.
What went wrong? The size and breadth of the rejection of progressive orthodoxy makes it hard to explain with any trite explanation. Progressive Tourette syndrome — blaming white supremacy, misogyny, and the electoral college — is not up to the task. Non-whites moved right. Women moved right. The electoral college reached the same conclusion as the popular vote with huge movements in still blue states. So something bigger happened. Either the losers will double down or learn a lesson. They’ll have to go outside of their own orthodoxy and vernacular to find it.
The groups that Democrats tried to reach didn’t just reject their policy preferences. They didn’t just reject the issues that they were supposed to vote on. They rejected their very group designations and the progressive orthodoxy of appealing to them as cogs in such groups. Hispanic voters moved far to the right — voting in ways similar to other Americans. Voters who favored legal abortions were split down the middle. Neither group accepted the left’s premise for this election.
Practical concerns represented by the spike in inflation were mocked. Insulated elites don’t care if your ground beef costs too much for you to feed your family. In their mind, you probably shouldn’t have so many kids and shouldn’t eat beef anyway. That isn’t important (and if you’re wealthy enough, food inflation really isn’t that personally important).
In the progressive orthodoxy, a 24/7 HR department monitoring speech codes is far more important. You must accept that race is a permanently fixed characteristic. Sexes, on the other hand, are social constructs. Insulated elites were visibly irritated at people who were more worried about the price of meat and eggs than pronoun etiquette. Surely, the progressive elites thought, minorities and women would get behind sophisticated fictional priorities instead of grubby, frankly embarrassing, non-fictional ones. They didn’t.
The election rejected the small win of racial and gender ghettos where groups get paid off to perpetuate a progressive orthodoxy and manage a national decline. Voters were fed up with elite condescension. They rejected the New York Times’ construct that we are the country of 1619, slavers in a perpetual loop of apology and victimhood. We are still the country of 1776 — messy, rough, sinful, fallible revolutionaries who despite our faults can still be patriotic and proud of who we are. And all kinds of Americans want the big win — they want to be victors not victims.
2026 is the 250th anniversary of America. It is the perfect time to revive our pride in our country and its frontier spirit. We are again at the beginning of something new. It is exciting, unknown, technologically audacious, and ultimately multiplanetary.
One specific potential step to mark the occasion: bring back supersonic commercial aviation. It is symbolic of our decline that we have lost it. The joyless declinist nags banned it because it is fast but also loud and unnecessary. We have held ourselves back at the demand of such people who hate us and always will. Now is time to once again unleash our potential, unshackle our strength, and let them hear the sonic boom.
