It was Winston Churchill who once said, “You can always count on America to do the right thing, after it has exhausted all other options.” I don’t know about all the other options, but when it comes to progressive ideology and its various manifestations — net zero environmentalism, Critical Race Theory, anticolonialism, DEI hiring programs — the country does seem to be gradually coming to its senses.
Signs of a recovery first showed up during Covid, when parents of school-age children got to see internet broadcasts of their kids’ classes and had to confront the extent to which a combination of woke ideology and low academic standards had come to substitute for a traditional K-12th grade education. It is not a coincidence that over the last two years, twelve states have passed universal school choice laws, which allow families to use tax dollars to educate their children far from the influence of progressive teacher unions. And in a further thirty-six states, homeschool collaboratives and small parent-run schools (so-called “microschools”) are booming.
After parents, the next to pull back from progressive ideology, according to the Wall Street Journal, were the CEOs of major U.S. businesses. Only a year after they had responded to the death of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter movement with a rush of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, many told their HR departments to play down the use of the term “DEI” while quietly opening such programs to everyone. At the same time, the annual reports from public companies significantly reduced their coverage of how the firms were addressing racial and gender issues.
More recently, it has become clear that a large number of voters have reevaluated just how much they want to sacrifice to end the use of fossil fuels. Not only has President Biden’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022 to provide hundreds of billions in electric car subsidies, failed to produce a demand for such vehicles, but is widely viewed as responsible for both the recent bout of inflation and the Federal Reserve’s unwillingness to lower interest rates. Tellingly few constituents complained in early June when Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin determined not to abide by California’s Clean Cars II standards, which require 35 percent of new passenger automobiles sold in 2026 to be either electric or hydrogen fueled.
Even some liberal journalists have begun turning against their own colleagues for excessively hyping a woke agenda. On April 9, National Public Radio’s senior business editor Uri Berliner wrote “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust,” in which he described NPR’s evolution from an institution founded to provide listeners with multiple viewpoints to an instrument of left-wing propaganda. And in May, former New York Times correspondent Nellie Bowles published Morning After the Revolution, which, among other things, details how young journalists are constantly pressured by their editors to attack conservatives and to treat any criticism of progressivism as “right-wing fascism.”
public schools to colleges and universities, means that millions of their graduates are still under its sway. Not that these Americans have actually been converted to a far-left worldview — only 6 percent of voters consider themselves progressive, according to Pew — but many still suffer from an academically conditioned fear of appearing too out-of-step with “enlightened” opinion. When intelligent.com conducted a 2021 survey of American college students, it found that 52 percent were already reluctant to express their honest views on political and social issues, not just to professors but to friends and classmates as well.
All of which raises the interesting question as to what conservatives can do to accelerate the country’s rebound from what economic historian Naill Ferguson has called the “bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents.” In other words, what can be done to help more citizens realize the public courage of their private convictions?
During the late twentieth century a remarkable group of Russian intellectuals — including novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, physicist Andrei Sakharov, mathematician Igor Shafarevich, historian Vadim Borisov, and art publisher Evgeny Barabanov — gave considerable thought to a very similar problem. Writing at a time when the flaws of Soviet Marxism were glaring enough to stir private doubts, but insufficiently debated to discredit the philosophy itself, they searched for a way to give average people greater confidence in their own growing skepticism.
The most effective tactic, they eventually determined, was for those at the forefront of anti-communist thinking to resolve never to allow any objectionable idea to pass freely in everyday conversation. Even at the risk of seeming impolite or disturbing an otherwise congenial mood.
Not that one had to be belligerent or confrontational to have a liberating impact. (Indeed, being too outspoken in the old Soviet Union could lead to arrest, a career demotion, or even a death sentence.) All that was necessary, Solzhenitsyn and his fellow writers believed, was to subtly acknowledge the other person’s own half-conscious doubts with a bemused smile, a blank stare, a cocked eyebrow, or some other gesture of disapproval. In effect, to magnify the authority of the unspoken against what was being said.
As Solzhenitsyn himself put it in “The Smatterers,” defeating a flawed ideology “doesn’t mean going around preaching the truth at the top of your voice.” It “doesn’t even mean muttering what you think in an undertone.” It simply means not allowing one’s passivity to imply consent. In other words, “don’t say or let stand what you don’t really think.”
If this psychological strategy seems a bit too nuanced to be effective in our own time, it is worth considering why today’s far-left intellectuals remain so obsessed with the politically correct micromanagement of everyday language and behavior. Their stated reason may be to prevent some aggrieved minority from ever feeling judged, unsafe, or — as they like to say — “triggered.”
But could it also be the knowledge that hearing one’s private reservations echoed by someone else has the tendency to strengthen their perceived legitimacy? Or as the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson famously argued in his essay on “Self-Reliance,” it is often true that the only thing differentiating a rejected thought from a firm conviction is having had the former confirmed by a thoughtful outsider.
If nothing else, the willingness to visibly recoil from progressive nostrums is a signal to the politically intimidated that not everyone is as fearful of contradicting fashionable opinion as they are. And given enough such signals, who knows what people will dare?
Dr. Andrews is president of the Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation. His latest book is Living Spiritually in the Material World (Fidelis Books).
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