A close reading and critique of Roger Kimball’s “Restoring American Culture^[1]”
(quoted here in the black font, with my comments in red font)
Rick Garlikov

THROUGHOUT HIS presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared that he and his supporters were “the party of common sense.” In his Inaugural Address on January 20, Trump returned to this theme. With his flurry of executive orders, he said, “We will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It’s all about common sense.”

I agree. You shouldn’t agree, because common sense is often wrong, and often just refers to adhering to original customs and ideas despite later evidence something is wrong with them.  Common sense says the world must be flat, not round, and certainly not round with people and objects on the bottom side not falling off or having to be upside down.  Common sense says you could not have something that weighs more than 100,000 tons, is nearly four American football fields long, carries 75 or more airplanes and 4500 people, which will float on water; yet there are aircraft carriers like that.  Common sense says you could not step out of a vehicle moving 17,000 miles per hour attached to it by a rope without being jerked in the wildest water ski type ride imaginable; yet “space walks” (that is, exits from space crafts flying that fast or faster) are possible without that even remotely happening, or, as one person teased while watching a broadcast of the first American space walk “I guess Newton was right.”  Common sense says there is no way to cool the interior of a building on a very hot summer day without using ice of some sort that will soon melt.  Common sense says there is no way to communicate sound and visual images over large distances not in one’s line of sight or within one’s range of hearing, or land vehicles safely on the moon or Mars, or fly people through the air at near or above faster speed than sound can travel – or even fly people through the air at all in a maneuverable way, at any speed, in a vehicle that is heavier than air.  Common sense says if you simultaneously drop a bowling ball and a feather from a great height, even in a vacuum, the bowling ball will hit the ground much, much sooner, and yet in actuality they will hit at the same time.  In short, much of the history of civilization involves overcoming the errors and limitations of common sense, whether in science, philosophy, morality, art, mathematics, logic, economics, and many, if not all, other things.   But what is “common sense”? At the beginning of his Discourse on Method, René Descartes said that common sense was “the most widely distributed thing in the world.” Is it? Much as I admire Descartes, I have to note that he was imperfectly acquainted with the realities of 21st century America. If he were with us today, I am sure he would emend his opinion.  Descartes was talking about the inborn basic ability to reason, not its correct results in each person or each use, and not the same speed or ability with which different people do it.

After all, is it common sense to pretend that men can be women? Or to pretend that you do not know what a woman is? During her confirmation hearings, a sitting member of the Supreme Court professed to be baffled by that question, asked her by Senator Marsha Blackburn.  She was not “baffled”, but simply said she could not answer the question in the context of which it was being asked, which was for some sort of precise, airtight legal definition that would stand scrutiny in unusual cases or not have fairly clear counter-examples, even in normal life or in unusual medical cases.^[2]  As Kimball himself points out further in this essay, it is not always easy or possible to define a word one can know, or believe one knows, generally how to apply in normal situations. That portion of her testimony is in this clip.

Is it common sense to open the borders of your country and then to spend truckloads of taxpayer dollars to feed, house, and nurture the millions of illegal migrants who have poured in? 1) If the borders are legally opened, the immigrants are not illegal.  2) Whether borders should be open, and to whom, is a moral issue that may or may not be properly addressed by law, as when desperate innocent refugees fleeing from heinous conditions are not permitted legal entry even though there is room for them and even though they could be helped to contribute far more to the country than the short term resources they might need, if any, to begin with.  3) #2 seems particularly relevant when a country is willing to spend far more to keep out or expel immigrants who are highly likely to become contributors than to help them assimilate and become contributing members of the society.  Obviously, one doesn’t want to let in violent immigrants, but we don’t want to have violent citizens by birth either, and we don’t want to make being born in America illegal, even though proportionally there are more violent people born here than immigrate here.  If immigrants do more good than even citizens born here do, it is only xenophobia or racism that makes people want to keep them out.  Is it common sense to sacrifice competence on the altar of so-called diversity?  “Diversity” is not intended to sacrifice competence, but to increase the pool of competent people by giving them opportunities otherwise denied to them to become competent when they have demonstrated highly likely potential to be competent, productive contributors.   To allow politicians to bankrupt the country by incontinent overspending? That is very rich (no pun intended, of course) coming from conservatives who just passed the largest deficit increasing bill in history while also eliminating money for healthcare and food for the poor.  That’s the start of a list of MAGA false and/or immoral grievances one could easily enlarge.  

In the cultural realm, is it common sense to celebrate art that is indistinguishable from pornography or some other form of psychopathology? The fact there are idiots in the art world who might extol egregious and/or stupid works (like the piece of rope in a frame that sold for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars) does not make liberals in general such idiots.  Nor does it mean there is no justification at all for any kind of erotic art or art involving nudity or sexuality of any sort.  Is it common sense to demand simplistic answers to complex questions or to say conservatives believe there are no complex questions.  Is it common sense to rewrite history in an effort to soothe the wounded feelings of people who crave victimhood or to do it, as it seems to be being done, to soothe the wounded feelings of those who are being recognized for victimizing people, or soothe the wounded feelings of those now recognized as having benefited from the advantages of accumulated wealth and privilege resulting from their ancestors’ unfair treatment of the ancestors of the victims?  Is it common sense to deny that no harm has been done to the descendants of generations of slaves who, once freed, faced generations of social, educational, and economic discrimination that generally prevented the accumulation of knowledge and wealth over time?  Is it common sense to transform higher education from an institution dedicated to the preservation and transmission of the highest values of our civilization into a wrecking ball aimed at destroying that civilization? I think there is ample evidence that conservative politicians want to do that far more than liberal ones by their banning of legitimate books in school and public libraries and the prohibition of certain accurate history and science teaching.

Like most important concepts—think of love, justice, knowledge, or the good— common sense is not easy to define. But we know it when we see it – no, we don’t, not always;  and maybe not even usually.  And too few people have it or recognize it.  The original U.S. Constitution allowed slavery, made slaves count for ⅗ of a person in the census, and did not give most legal rights to women.  It was hardly an example of justice, of readily recognizing injustice, or of common sense.  At best we recognize very clear cut cases of certain concepts, such as easily distinguishing a loving husband or parent from an abusive one or distinguishing correct simple sums from incorrect ones, but not distinguishing correct answers to math word problems in algebra from incorrect ones.  There are clear cases of many opposites, but borderline cases are notoriously difficult to distinguish one side from the other.  And more to the point, we instantly sense its absence when it is supplanted.  It is probably more accurate to say many people lament the supplanting of their beliefs by others, even when the new beliefs are accurate and the previous ones are not. 

In recent years—indeed, at least since the 1960s—our culture has suffered from a deficit of common sense. That deficit has eroded a great many valuable things, from our educational institutions to our cultural life more generally.  There have been a large number of cultural belief changes, probably with many more to come; but some of those changes involve reasonable evolution, not irrational erosion.  The trick is to distinguish the good changes from the poor ones, and conservatives, particularly reactionary ones, do not seem to be particularly good at doing that.  Liberals are not always much better at recognizing problems with their proposed changes, but they are at least generally trying to be fair and just to all people even if sometimes overly idealistic or misguided.  Seeking to be fair to everyone has not generally been a hallmark of conservatives who tend either toward keeping a status quo or who focus on utility much more than on fair distribution of benefits and burdens, or who have a very limited view of who deserves benefits and who should have to bear the burdens.

These days, the revival of common sense is often opposed to the rule of that coterie of bureaucrats the conservative media and conservative politicians call[...] “the elites.” As a shorthand expression, it makes a certain amount of sense to speak of elites – not the way the term has been misappropriated, as Kimball goes on to do here, using it to mock people who conservatives believe have undeserved political and cultural power based on their liberal educations at institutions conservatives believe to be undeservedly revered and influential and who arrogantly and mistakenly consider themselves to be a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society, rather than an actually elite (i.e., superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society).  While there are snobs with delusions of superiority, that does not mean everyone with a good liberal arts or science education is a snob, delusional or otherwise.

Unfortunately, many conservative politicians and commentators like Kimball, misconstrue, misinterpret, misunderstand, or even purposely misrepresent or distort and twist the views of their opponents or, at the very least do what too many liberal writers and politicians also do – point out the worst mistakes of their opponents without acknowledging their good points, and without acknowledging their own worst points pointed out by their opponents.  Too many liberals and conservatives exemplify the flaw pointed out in Matthew 7:3-5 in the parable of the mote and the log which cautions against hypocrisy and self-righteous judgment, and which highlights how readily people notice flaws in others (the "mote" in their brother's eye) while overlooking much larger issues in themselves (the "log" in their own eye).     The folks in Davos who want to vaccinate us into oblivion – hardly the goal of vaccinations or medical scientists who advocate them (despite rare bad, even fatal, reactions to them) in order for people generally to avoid the much more prevalent serious harms of the diseases they prevent.  Moreover, medical science quits giving vaccines once it is known harm from the vaccine is a greater risk than harm from the disease, which is why smallpox vaccination was ended decades ago – encourage us to give up steak for insects – can’t say I’ve ever heard that recommendation before and even if I did, would not heed it any more than I heed any advertising, and keep tilting at windmills to battle the weather – apparently confusing touting windmills (rather than tilting at them) with battling weather itself rather than with battling the increase in number and severity of extreme weather events by replacing as much fossil fuel energy production with cleaner methods, such as windmills where feasible, in order to slow or stop the further increase of unnecessarily produced greenhouse gases – are imaginary members of that shiny, self-satisfied group – like their actual but unimaginative self-satisfied conservative critics. So are the products of our Ivy (and near-Ivy) League institutions—those whom the critic Harold Rosenberg called the “herd of independent minds” who all think alike, believe they were born to rule, and occupy nearly every perch upon the tree of societal privilege.  The fact we normally want the “best and brightest” to at least advise, if not actually rule or dictate, doesn’t mean we always are able to distinguish them from those with undeserved or meaningless degrees or credentials or that the best and brightest will always be right if we do put them in charge or follow their advice.  

But rather than being a true elite— which suggests a quota of excellence, merit, and achievement—the apparatchiks we call “the elite” are really just the credentialed class – not always, but yes, too often true; but not only in politics or government.  Who among us hasn’t had a boss, supervisor, or manager that wasn’t worthy of their position of power or influence! They are often clever – not that often – and always politically correct – which is simply a pejorative phrase that mocks people for beliefs one does not believe to be correct but are mistakenly accepted or required as being correct.  Clearly not everything considered to be correct is actually correct, but that is just as true of conservatives and reactionaries as it is of liberals – except that no one calls the biased or bigoted beliefs “politically” correct even when they agree with them and harbor them themselves.  Eric Hoffer, the so-called “longshoreman philosopher” who was prominent in the 1960s, was right to observe that “self-appointed elites” will “hate us no matter what we do,” and that “it is legitimate for us to help dump them into the dustbin of history.”  That is more the problem of them being self-appointed elites rather than their being actually the best and brightest.  Or it is more a problem of the best and brightest thinking they are infallible and refusing to consider evidence they are mistaken about a particular belief.

Indeed, that exercise in large-scale institutional tidying-up is central to President Trump’s effort to bring about the “restoration of America” through the triumph of common sense.  But it is hardly done correctly by the chainsaw carnage of mass firings, indiscriminate department and agency closings, wholesale deregulations, and the automatic arbitrary eliminations of laws passed by liberals and automatic rejections of their proposed bills.

It is worth pausing over the word “restoration.” The dictionary tells us that the verb “to restore” means “to bring back to good condition from a state of decay or ruin.”

There are essentially two parts to this process. The first is to acknowledge frankly the state of decay or ruin for what it is. The abnormal is not the normal just because it is prevalent. For example, the mutilation of children is not “gender-affirming care.”  But that is not “prevalent” either; and it at least addresses a problem that conservatives refuse to recognize gender stereotypes that severely hinder and limit the opportunities and well-being of a not insignificant portion of the population.  Anti-white racism is not “anti-racism.” But leveling a previously tilted playing field in order to give disadvantaged people more of an opportunity is not (reverse) racism.  The mistake is keeping the opportunities open to people much fewer than the number of people who could benefit society by having them, not by trying to fairly distribute whatever opportunities there are.  Educational and career opportunities should be expanded to serve all in the most fair, reasonable, and deserved ways.  But insofar as those opportunities are limited, giving them only to the most previously advantaged people is not itself necessarily fair.  People with the most potential are not necessarily those with the best previous performance – not if their previous performance was under seriously limiting circumstances.  Illegal migrants are not “undocumented ‘new neighbors.’”  But maybe they should be, particularly if they are good, productive, decent people fleeing desperate circumstances and are only “illegal” due to morally wrong arbitrary laws.     A bisected cow in a tank of formaldehyde is not an important work of art.  Probably not, but perhaps it would be if it were the best way to show people brutality about our treatment of animals who cannot seem to see it if depicted in more subtle ways.  Art can be used to portray awful things that need to be known and addressed or corrected as much as it can be used to portray beautiful or otherwise wonderful things.

The second part of the ambition to restore American culture begins by rescuing vital examples of cultural achievement from the sneering oblivion to which conservatives believe their perceived establishment elite consigned them.

As to the first, the state of decay or ruin, I suspect that we are all familiar with what the “long march through the institutions” wrought in American culture. The phrase is a bit of Marxist jargon popularized in the early part of the last century. I am unfamiliar with the phrase, but the way Kimball goes on to explain it is a highly likely distortion based on a kind of Russell declension or conjugation^[3] that uses words with different connotations to color how people perceive what might otherwise be the same things.   Its basic idea is that the best way to achieve the longed-for revolution is through a process of cooption. Take over a society’s schools, churches, and other cultural institutions, marinate them in a broth of liberationist ideas drawn from Marx and other left-wing intellectuals, and pretty soon you have taken over the commanding social, moral, and political heights of that society – all of which more likely would be stated as ‘bringing about improvements in knowledge and culture normally would be facilitated by improving schools, getting the word out in churches, businesses, movies and television, social media, and other institutions.   

In a 1973 essay, “Utopianism, Ancient and Modern,” commentator Irving Kristol touched upon the conservative indifference to the claims of culture. “For two centuries,” he wrote,

the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.

That seems to be simply pointing out that sometimes the next generation disagrees with some or many of the ideas of their elders and in some cases even ‘rebels’ against them, sometimes throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but sometimes making improvements and ‘passing the torch to a new generation’.

Kristol was talking more about the humanities than about art. But his point applies equally to the attitude of the elites who manage the affairs of our society regarding art and culture. They did not think or care much about art—it was something that went on, as it were, behind their backs. But then one day they woke up and found the art world, including the formerly staid world of museums, was awash in sexualized garbage, postmodern inanity, and race worship.  Again, one generation’s ideas are not necessarily the same as the next’s; and the next generation’s can be for better or worse – often both, by being better in some ways and worse in others.  Seeing that some beliefs are wrong or problematic does not guarantee the replacement beliefs will be right or even better.  Just consider the phenomena as simple as Monday morning quarterbacking.  Having seen that a particular play failed at a crucial time simply shows that was a bad call, but doesn’t mean your call would have done any better.  It is easier to point out and criticize an obvious or fairly clear failing than to perfectly correct it.  It is quite normal to think you can improve things you see as problematic.  Sometimes you will be right; other times, wrong; and still other times, both right in some ways and wrong in others.

This process was part and parcel of a larger cultural rebellion against bourgeois values that got going with the advent of modernism. Today, we are living in the aftermath of that avant-garde: all those “adversarial” gestures, poses, ambitions, and tactics that emerged and were legitimized in the 1880s and 1890s, flowered in the first half of the last century, and live on in the frantic twilight of postmodernism. Establishment conservatives have done nothing effective to challenge this. On the contrary, despite little whimpers here and there, they have capitulated to it.  Meaning only that changes often occur piecemeal and slowly if at all, sometimes in spite of protests if any, sometimes more dramatically or abruptly as with the VietNam war protests or the civil and voting rights movements.  But giving them names such as postmodernism or avant-garde, etc. doesn’t really add anything of value to the discussion any more than distinguishing baby boomers from gen-Xers, from millennials, and Gen-Z, lets you know what the differences are or whether they were better or worse or both or neither.  Surely, growing up in the Great Depression gives one different values from growing up in an affluent society, but that doesn’t make Depression values totally better or worse than one’s developed under less harsh and more favorable conditions.  

From the moment Donald Trump was shot at a rally last July, people have been speaking about a “vibe shift,” a shift in the zeitgeist of American culture. I think that began long before the shooting, including Trump’s first election.  But it is not a new phenomenon that one party’s run ends with an election that sweeps them out of office. That revolution in sentiment picked up speed with Trump’s election in November, and it began barreling down the main line with his inauguration. We always hear about the “peaceful transfer of power” when a new president takes office. The usual procedure is for the old crowd to vacate their positions while the new crowd slides in to take their places. The institutions remain inviolate – only in certain ways or to certain extents. Nothing essential changes – that is not necessarily true.  

Trump’s ascension was the opposite. He was elected – by just under 50% of people who voted – not to preserve the status quo about certain things (particularly immigration and inflation) but to remake it. On January 20, he moved quickly to show that his administration would not be a colloquy of words only. It would be a locomotive of deeds. Within hours of taking office, he had issued some 200 executive orders and proclamations – many of them illegal, some even unconstitutional – affecting everything from immigration and the border to taxes and the cost of living. He ordered that the U.S. withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords – he has a history of violating agreements and commitments, like paying his workers for services rendered or fidelity in marriage.  If you want to praise him for breaking commitments no matter the consequences or fairness of that, go ahead; but don’t expect that to make him seem honorable to those who believe in the value of the particular commitments he broke or the constitutional articles and democratic principles he violated  – and the World Health Organization – yes, even his first term showed he was not devoted to health care or medical science; and he has only accelerated and increased that lack of concern, which didn’t pay off so well during COVID – and directed that federal employees return to working fulltime and in-person – full time and in person are not necessarily the same thing; one can waste time at work and be very productive at home.  Eight hours spent in an office doesn’t necessarily mean one worked those eight hours; and staying home doesn’t mean one won’t work more than eight hours. With the stroke of his pen, he obliterated DEI operations throughout the government – not necessarily something to be praised except in the minds of conservatives who equate DEI with unfair hiring of unqualified or less qualified people. The exhibition of energy (not so much energy as volume of orders prepared by others, such as the Project 2025 people) and self-confidence or rashness and arrogance was extraordinary.

Trump has repeatedly said that his common-sense revolution would usher in a “new golden age.” Well, he is fond of gold.  In the context of attempted unleashing the economy and technological innovation, we can understand this to mean literal gold – but we are not on the gold standard any more, in many cases neither literally economically nor in pursuit of money as the ultimate priority . But a large part of our new golden age will be aggregated under the rubric of alleged normality. The return of common sense is also the return of the normal – or past norms. What would that look like in the realm of culture?

Let me touch briefly upon three examples. One of the most popular and one of the best BBC productions was Civilization, a 13-part series that aired in 1969. Hosted by the eminent art historian and museum director Kenneth Clark, it was a masterpiece of studied deliberateness. Clark ranged widely among the monuments of Western culture, beginning in the dismal, barbarian-filled years after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and ending with what he called the “heroic materialism” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Clark frankly admitted that his cultural itinerary was “a personal view.” But it remains a refined, well-informed view. “What is civilization?” he asks in his first episode, standing on the Pont des Arts across from the Louvre in Paris. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I can’t define it in abstract terms,” but “I can recognize it when I see it.”

One of the hallmarks of Civilization is its absence of chatter. Clark is a gracious historical guide, but he does not go in for small talk. He is genial but also serious. An abundance of glorious music often commandeers the audio. Clark says his piece and then lets the camera pan slowly over the art, architecture, and landscapes he has assembled for our enjoyment and edification. “Throughout,” as one reviewer noted, the show “maintains a majestically slow pace. Luxuriously long moments where the visuals are completely unencumbered by any commentary whatsoever.”

Prominent in his first episode is Skellig Michael, the craggy, windswept island off the southwestern coast of Ireland. Named for St. Michael the Archangel, it was there, between the sixth and eighth centuries, that Gaelic monks took up residence and helped preserve the guttering embers of Western culture against the rising tide of barbarian invasion. The fragility of that culture is a leitmotif of Civilization. The first episode is titled “The Skin of Our Teeth.” It was by such a slender margin that those monks and a few other scattered groups managed to preserve the intellectual deposit of the West.

All the artists Clark names in his wide-ranging tour are male. Most if not all are white. Are these things deficiencies? Today’s BBC clearly thinks so. When they broadcast its successor in 2018, they were studiously multicultural and accommodating to feminist sensibilities. One of the three presenters is female. Another hails from Nigeria. When the current King Charles was still Prince of Wales, he said that he looked forward to being “Defender of the Faiths,” plural, unlike those fuddyduddies of yore who styled themselves Defender of the Faith, singular. By the same token, the successor to Clark’s program was called Civilizations, plural, to show that no special claims were being made for the West.

The original Civilization was pitched at a high level. It was also meticulously accessible. The treasures Clark toured were allowed to speak for themselves, and so speak they did. The elites didn’t much like Civilization, partly because they found it insufficiently multicultural (from what you have described so far, wasn’t it?  Or shouldn’t it have been called “Western Civilization” if it was just about that part of history?), partly because they objected to Clark’s unstudied air of competence and cultural mastery – I don’t know what objections you are referring to here or what “unstudied air of competence and cultural mastery means; was he not a student of cultural history; was he not competent about it or how he presented it, or what? 

But Civilization is a good example of what it might look like to restore culture in an age that has abandoned common sense. If it seems old-fashioned and out of-date to a generation weaned on social media, special effects, and incessant lectures about the evils of capitalism and the West, that tells us more about the quality of our times than it does about Clark’s achievement in this series.  Why can’t something be good, even exceptional, for its time but now somewhat out of date for ours?  Biplanes were pretty innovative and extraordinary machines in 1920, but not likely to replace 747s for most air travel today.  The original Star Trek TV series is still philosophically exceptional, but many of the production values have clearly been surpassed, except possibly for the transporter sequences.

Something similar can be said about Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. Bernstein began the concerts in 1958, just two weeks after he took the helm of the New York Philharmonic. These marvelous concerts—with commentary by Bernstein—aired on television, first in black and white and then in color, until 1972. Bernstein organized each concert around a theme—the meaning of music, musical modes, orchestration—drawing on the orchestra’s current programming for suitable illustrations. In 2005, a new nine-disc selection of the concerts was released, some 25 hours of music and commentary.

As with Clark’s Civilization, there was no small talk. The music was central. Bernstein not only introduced a new audience to classical music. He also introduced a number of fledgling musicians to their future audiences. The pianist André Watts was just 16 when he made his debut in 1963 at one of the concerts.

Unexpectedly, the Young People’s Concerts were a huge popular success, in Europe and Asia as well as in the U.S. For three years, CBS broadcast the concerts during prime time on Saturdays and the series eventually garnered more than 20 million viewers. Parents scrambled to sign up their newborns for concert tickets a few years down the road. Despite Bernstein’s success as a conductor and composer, some commentators judge this long-running concert series to be his greatest musical achievement. He might have agreed. Looking back on the concerts years later, he said they were “among my favorite, most highly prized activities of my life.”

One can point to other triumphs of cultural common sense from the recent annals of American history. The Book of the Month Club, brainchild of the ad man Harry Scherman, debuted in 1926. Beginning with 4,000 subscribers, the operation grew to nearly 900,000 by 1946. But the club was as much an educational success as a commercial one. As described by Scherman, the club “establishe[d] itself as a sound selector of good books and [sold them] by means of its own prestige.” This was true. Subscribers were introduced to novels by Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Mitchell, J. D. Salinger, and John Steinbeck, and histories by Barbara Tuchman and William Shirer. Bertrand Russell’s History of Philosophy was a Book of the Month Club Selection, as were two big books by the philosopher George Santayana.

The point is that all these initiatives bore witness to a culture at one with itself. It was a culture innocent of the self-loathing that has been such a disfiguring feature of elite American culture since the 1960s. From our perspective in early 2025, it is a culture of common sense—affirmative, forward-looking, and normal.  If the point here is that cultural and educational standards were higher then than now, I concur with that, but I don’t see that as a function of self-loathing or of ‘elitism’ of any sort other than in the derogatory sense of calling people who successfully market trash or dumb down schools and markets the “elite”.

Throughout Civilization, Kenneth Clark hailed “energy” and “confidence” as hallmarks of a vibrant civilization. In his last episode, he identified “lack of confidence, more than anything else,” as that which “kills a civilization.” The spectacle of Donald Trump’s boundless self-serving energy, and the energy he calls forth from others to do his bidding or suffer harsh consequences, is heartening – not to all of us….  Some of us think that energy can be expended toward bad ends and terrible results.  A tornado has a lot of energy, but that doesn’t make tornadoes a good thing.  Same with bombs; and making them have greater energy doesn’t make them necessarily better things.  Among other things, it makes us appreciate how his “revolution of common sense” might not only spark a political restoration, but also a new cultural golden age – as in his taking over the Kennedy Center?  As in his interest in Kid Rock, Lee Greenwood, professional wrestling, NFTs of himself as a superhero, and selling $60 autographed Bibles and $400 gold sneakers, etc. will spark a new golden age?  You think attacking and defunding Harvard, Columbia, and other major universities, defunding medical research, clean energy research and innovation,  banning books about history, hiring incompetent people to run government, shredding the Constitution, and giving speeches with the vocabulary, mentality, and knowledge of an eight year old raised by apes in a jungle, will all usher in a new intellectual and cultural Renaissance?  Seriously?