Greater than that, in conservative states the anti-woke rollback has achieved some massive and surprising victories for the proper. I don’t simply imply showy battles like Ron DeSantis preventing with Disney and Elon Musk shopping for Twitter. I imply extra structural adjustments — from the large growth of faculty alternative in right-leaning states to the makes an attempt to construct conservative beachheads within the public college methods in states like Florida and Texas. In a way, the age of wokeness is midwifing a extra self-conscious mode of red-state cultural governance than heretofore existed. We’ll see whether or not it lasts and the way far it goes, however for now, it’s a method during which the bottom of cultural battle has arguably shifted in conservatism’s favor.
Blue America might have greater issues than crimson America. All through the Obama years, there was a liberal narrative that forged America’s bluest bastions as future-oriented fashions and the reddest states as dysfunctional cautionary tales. However most of the emergent crises of the Trump and Biden years — the teenager psychological well being disaster, the decline of American birthrates, the escalating value of housing, the post-Covid squalor of sure main cities — can appear extra like liberal issues than conservative ones, typically extra obvious in bluer areas and amongst left-leaning populations, even when they lower throughout regional and ideological strains.
The Fergusonian narrative on the proper tends to emphasise these deteriorations as intimations of an ever-darkening future, in an “as goes San Francisco, so goes America” spirit. However conservatives particularly ought to acknowledge that America is quite a bit greater than the streets of San Francisco or Portland, Ore., or Washington, D.C. — and the place blue-state governance appears to fail, crimson states can reply and profit.
I don’t see a lot that’s late Soviet, as an example, within the sprawling boomtowns of the American Southwest or the quickly increasing skylines of cities like Nashville and Austin or the inhabitants increase in DeSantis’s Florida. (When Musk’s rockets rise over Brownsville, Texas, or Waymo’s self-driving automobiles hit the Phoenix highways, what’s the Eighties Soviet equal?) Neither is migration from different states and climes turning the Solar Belt socialist: Trump is at the moment polling higher in Georgia, Florida, Nevada and Arizona than in Rust Belt states like Michigan, suggesting that dynamism and (a sort of) conservatism can nonetheless go hand in hand.
And that dynamism is the deepest motive, impartial of the precise ambitions of American conservatives, for everybody to be skeptical of an excessive amount of Fergusonian gloom. I made this case earlier than, so I gained’t belabor it, however it’s necessary to not let the problem America faces from our great-power rivals proper now — on which topic I are likely to agree with Ferguson and different alarmists — blind us to the possible aggressive benefit we take pleasure in over the subsequent 50 years.
