Tag: AMericA

Former Trump official William Wolfe recently lamented the neglect steadily encroaching his local grocery store. “Let me tell you: I’ve never seen stores in such bad shape as they are now,” he wrote. “No one staffing the main check out lines, massive line for the self check outs, stores messy, items unstocked. … It’s like watching a country decline in real time.”

Wolfe’s tweet resonated with many Americans, garnering interactions from nearly 1 million people. Here were two of the responses: “I said nearly those exact words today to my husband when I came home from my local Kroger market” and “The fall of an empire happens gradually, and then all at once.”

Christopher F. Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution is a landmark study of America’s radicalization since the 1960s. It is a carefully constructed work full of insights, which confirmed for me the conclusions that I had reached while studying some of the same topics. Rufo shows convincingly that certain radical thinkers, most of whom were American born, affected deeply and perhaps irreversibly American institutions starting in the 1960s. This study clearly avoids an interpretive perspective that I have repeatedly mocked, exemplified by those who pretend that American culture and politics were generally sound up until quite recently, perhaps until the point when LGBT enthusiasts turned from gay marriage to gender transitioning.