RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Dusk or Dawn?

American presidential activities have become increasingly important since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, ushering in a period of U.S. dominance occasionally referred to as The End of History. The Reagan victory marked a moment when the key battlefield in the struggle to determine the future of humanity shifted from the superpower competition between East and West to the simple control of the institutions of the West, following the collapse of the USSR.

Gone was Che Guevara and Mao’s strategy of surrounding the global cities from the Third World countryside. Back was Gramsci’s plan to infiltrate Western institutions and culture from within. If the enemy walls were impregnable from without, they were vulnerable from within. The left accepted the West would be conquered by coup. To this task they set forth with might and main.

But something happened that Gramsci did not expect. As the march through the institutions progressed, the “progressives” — so confident of their intellectual superiority — did not sweep all before them. Rather they found the resistance stiffening unexpectedly. Unlikely coalitions rooted in the “Working Class” and even among formerly left-wing sympathizers began to multiply. The surprise setbacks of 2016, Trump and Brexit, grew rather than declined, as one might expect of the last-gasp resistance in the inevitable tide of history.

Today the Reagan castle the progressives captured by coup is in shambles. They are in possession of a ruin. The Global World has not only shattered but is breaking out in war. The only answer to inflation is price control. Worse, the political opposition to progressive ideas has become assertive and even respectable. Things have come to a head; that is what makes November 2024 so special.

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