Is America in a Revolution or a Counterrevolution?

Americans hear of revolutions and counterrevolutions in foreign lands but never consider they are happening inside the United States. Victor David Hanson says that America has “been in aggressive revolutionary cycle for about 50 years.” He explained that “most of the Democratic Party, and now the radical elements” have been striving for revolution. 

Hanson says that they are now accelerating their efforts “to accelerate that efforts as emblemized by the democratic socialists to take control of government, expand it, redistribute income so that many people in blue states especially are paying over 10% of their income, in addition to 38% of their federal tax or two or three percent in Obamacare tax and other add-ons.” Hanson continued as follows.

… And the welfare state, which has distributed over twenty trillion dollars since this started under the Great Society, is getting bigger and bigger, at least until Donald Trump.

And this progressive revolution doesn’t believe in borders. It has let in – we have now 53 million people that were not born in the United States, and in California, it’s over a quarter of the population. It’s all-time high percentage-wise, 16% foreign-born….

And so, the progressive project has given us a real revolution. We never imagined that there were going to be more than two genders or sexes. We never imagined that they would try to normalize biological men taking over women’s sports or dressing among young teenage girls. We never imagined that.

We never imagined that prosecutors would let out career felons who had committed violent acts the same day they were arrested. We didn’t know we were gonna empty the prisons because we felt that punishment, penal punishment was too mean.

We never really felt that our only real democratic country and ally in the Middle East, Israel, we would try to disassociate ourselves, and we would try to romanticize terrorists like Hamas.

But what I’m getting at, this was the progressive project. It was anti-American, it was anti-Western, and it glorified other modes of civilization, so to speak: socialism, communism, anarchism. And it was very critical of the very society who had enriched most Americans.

I say most – the middle class of America is the largest middle class in the world and the most affluent, and our poor are better off than most middle class and upper middle class in other places.

It’s important to remember that there has not been a counter-revolution. Ronald Reagan was the first and really last Republican president that had an economic counterrevolution. It was quite successful. He lowered the tax rate. He deregulated the economy, and by 1983-84, he was growing the economy at 7% GDP growth.

And then, of course, that was watered down in subsequent years. But the two Bushes, candidates like John McCain, Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, their agenda was to slow down the revolution, but not to try to overturn it….

And then came Donald Trump.

He was not – he’s surely not a revolutionary. We were in the middle of a revolution, but he was not a trimmer either. He was a true counterrevolutionary.

The first term, he was not familiar with Washington. He made appointments with people who did not agree with him – not just they did not agree with his methodology, but they didn’t agree with his counter-revolutionary agenda.

But it was still in places working. And what was the result? The result was COVID-19 and the COVID-19 lockdown, and it was aborted.

The second time he came around, he tried to finish the counterrevolution. So he pretty much demolished the subsidies for green energy and re-emphasized oil and gas production, and we became the greatest producer of oil and gas in the history of civilization.

[Trump] sort of said, “We’re not going to regulate AI and robotics, cryptocurrency, genetic engineering, drone. We’re not gonna legislate them out of business. We’re not gonna have antitrust and complete investigations of all these people. We’re gonna promote it. We’re going to promote these new innovations and new technologies.”

And lo and behold, we’re ahead of the Chinese in almost all of them now….

[Trump] did away with DEI [in the military] …. All of a sudden, we have met all of our recruitment figures….

[Trump] said, “I’m going to finish the wall [on the border]. I’m not gonna let anybody stop me. This time there’s going to be a wall, and we are going to deport people. We’re gonna deport a million people in my first year, and we’re gonna make sure a million others self-deport, and we’re gonna go after 500,000 with criminal records.” …

[Trump] went down and basically threatened Panama that we would take over the canal unless they honored our Panama Canal treaty and expelled the Chinese from trying to control the entry and exists of the canal.

[Trump] said to [Nicolas] Maduro, “You better stop because you’re exporting terror and communism and bullying your neighbors.”

[Maduro] didn’t, and Trump extradited him and ended that threat.

And now as we look at Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, I could go on, they’re mostly center right.

So, [Trump] staged a strong counterrevolution by reinforcing the Monroe Doctrine that had been rejected by the Left, and he made South America and Central America now a free market and, for the most part, a society that’s pro-American, with some notable exceptions.

For example, in Nicaragua, a beleaguered Daniel Ortega and a beleaguered Castroite government in Cuba that are both now for the first time in years isolated.

In addition to that, [Trump] made our allies stronger. He used unorthodox methods….

But nonetheless, he said to our allies, “We’re not gonna be in NATO unless you’re real NATO members. You’re not NATO members. You’re not arming yourself. You’re not abiding by your commitments.”

Same held true to Canada. And lo and behold, now we have much stronger allies, and the alliance is stronger than ever.

What am I getting at? Donald Trump is not a revolutionary. He’s a counterrevolutionary. And what is he trying to do? He’s trying to undo the entire half-century progressive project within four years. That’s an impossible task. And yet he’s trying to do it.

[Trump is] the first authentic counterrevolutionary since Andrew Jackson.