So — Trump was supposed to lose big — and now with his victory there is discussion among some that we might be moving into a Post-liberal era. Elections sure matter. Here is Michael Brown writing at The Stream:
In his December 9th article “Has the Trumpian Revolution Begun?,” long-time conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan dared to say that, with the Trump presidency, “we may be entering a post-liberal era.” Could it be true?
According to Buchanan, “Liberalism appears to be a dying faith. America’s elites may still preach their trinity of values: diversity, democracy equality. But the majorities in America and Europe are demanding that the borders be secured and Third World immigrants kept out.”
But it is not just political liberalism whose demise Buchanan is tentatively predicting. He also suggests that moral and cultural liberalism could be on the wane as well. He writes, “As Hegel taught, in the dialectic of history the thesis calls into existence the antithesis. What we seem to be seeing is a rejection, and a counterreformation against the views and values that came out of the social and political revolutions of the 1960s.”
What? A counterreformation against the radical cultural shifts and moral changes that came out of the counterculture revolution of the 1960s, a revolution that birthed radical feminism, gay activism, and sexual anarchy?
For years we have been told that liberalism had triumphed and that conservative morality was a thing of the past.
For years we have been told that “progressivism” owned the future and that traditionalists were a dying breed, soon to be replaced irrevocably by a younger, enlightened generation.
Could it be that America’s future is not as set in stone as we have been told? Could it be that the Trumpian triumph is part of a much larger social and cultural shift?
Read more: The Stream
Image credit: Cartoonist H. Payne.
