Not in Kansas Any More

As America and the world deal with the phenomenon of Trump 2.0, with the Left slinging the ACLU at the court system and educated liberal ladies demanding HANDS OFF! and Standing up for Free Speech, and the rest of us wondering if our Democratic friends are really serious about flying to El Salvador on the taxpayers’ dime to advocate for helpless innocent Central American gang members. Of course, maybe traveling to the country named after The Savior during Holy Week is a brilliant and sophisticated pitch for the votes of Christians.

The rest of us are wondering if this is really the start of the promised Golden Age or just the descent into another recession.

The only thing we know for sure is the maxim of popular philosopher Dorothy Gale that we are not in Kansas anymore. Remember when the young Barack Obama was assuring us that the future was full of Hope and Change? Truth is, Mr. President, that Change is very seldom Hopeful. Usually it is terrifying, and it is especially terrifying if you have lived all your life in the liberal bubble and the only thing you know is that the liberal way is the only way.

I suspect that the most terrified Americans right now are educated women. As a profound sexist I believe that women are more inclined to believe the ideology they were taught in their education, and so are most likely to regard the election of Donald Trump as “inconceivable,” because it goes against everything they were taught in K thru grad school. It was they that put out the #WeBelieve signs after the election of Trump 1.0. And now they are out protesting the Trump agenda displaying the protest signs du jour. Of course, there is the dollar-and-cents aspect of this. Educated women are the most likely to suffer from the end of DEI and NGO grants from sea to shining sea.

I’ll bet that the Lawfare Industrial Complex is going crazy too. That’s why it is mobilizing Democratic federal judges into a World War I style Big Push to roll back the Trump agenda. The problem is, I think, that they might push Chief Justice John Roberts into a corner and force him — eventually! — to take a stand for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Eventually, I prophesy, he will find a case that makes the current domination and the hegemony of Democrat-nominated federal district judges seem unjust and absurd to everyone except educated white women with DEI jobs.  But that day is not yet.

Also terrifying to our liberal friends is the Trump Art-of-the-Deal culture. If you have been raised up through the curated hierarchical system of modern education, and then gone on to a lifetime career in academe or administrative government, you live in a very safe and very predictable world. The crazy world of Trump with his deals and bankruptcies, of Musk with his impossible startups, is utterly foreign and frightening. The very idea of upsetting the safe world of administration is unthinkable.

And now Trump is coming for Harvard. I learned about the culture of the university from Bryan Magee, the British TV philosophy popularizer. In Confessions of a Philosopher he advised the innocent that universities are not “student–centered.” Not at all. The academics are researchers and administrators, with numerous projects and vast budgets and mind-numbing hierarchies. The last thing on the list is teaching students. Imagine if Trump starts to make universities follow the law, pitching the comfortable academic insiders into his world of risk and turmoil!

We don’t know what is ahead of us in the U.S. We don’t know if Trump’s tariffs will work; we don’t know if he can beat the nationwide injunction culture in the judiciary or whether the system will get the better of him. We don’t know if he will get the better of the liberal activist/protest culture or if they will end up flooding the streets with a genuine “armed insurrection.”

The fact is that we are not in Kansas anymore.

Although fairy tales like The Wizard of Oz are often stigmatized as old wive’s tales, experts are starting to agree that there is something in there that is basic to the human experience, or at least the “lived experience” of women down the ages. One curious aspect of fairy tales is the preponderance of wicked witches and evil stepmothers. Oz has four witches, two wicked and two good. It is easy to see how this witch narrative applies to real life. In the U.S. today, it is obvious that the Wicked Witch of the West is Nancy Pelosi, and the Wicked Witch of the East is Hillary Clinton. The Good Witch of the South, now and forever, is Glinda. I nominate J.K. Rowling, from Scotland, defending women from men in the women’s bathroom, as the Good Witch of the North.

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Christopher Chantrill@chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifestoand runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get hisAmerican Manifesto and hisRoad to the Middle Class.