What a difference half a decade makes. This summer’s prevailing ethos, zeitgeist, vibe — call it any fancy name you want — was sharply different from the summer, just five years ago, of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter.
Such sudden changes in the moral atmosphere seem to occur every so often. The year 1776, the 250th anniversary of which we are scheduled to commemorate next year, was perhaps one such occasion, when the English-speaking world saw the publication of the Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Another break in general consciousness, from Victorian stricture to Bloomsbury Group fluidity, was announced 101 years ago by the novelist Virginia Woolf. Around December 1910, she wrote, “Human nature changed. All human relations shifted, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.”
And it has happened again in the great contrast between the notoriety most conventional media outlets gave to the eight-minute tape showing the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis in May 2020 and the almost total blackout by the same media outlets of the surveillance footage of the stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a released felon in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Aug. 22 of this year.
Floyd’s death was taken as proof that police in the United States routinely killed unarmed black men, and that racism was as central to American life as ever. It inspired a series of “mostly peaceful” urban riots that caused billions of dollars in damage.
It sparked a revival of the Black Lives Matter group, whose Democratic congressional leaders in Kente cloth bowed in the Capitol and whose name was emblazoned on the pavement of 16th Street outside the White House.
Floyd’s death also sparked a sudden upward spike in violent crime, attributed incorrectly to the COVID-19 pandemic, which started months earlier, resulting in far more deaths of black Americans than any police malfeasance.
Contrast that with the nonresponse by most media outlets and Democratic politicians to Zarutska’s murder in Charlotte. Plainly, they did not want voters coming to the obvious conclusion that liberal policies, such as cashless bail, release violent men onto the streets and public transit.
Other evidence of the change in vibe came from bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell’s confession that he lied during a 2022 MIT panel when he said he supported transgender women (that is, biological men who present themselves as women) competing in female sports.
That was the year when the press gave wide publicity to Lia (formerly Will) Thomas’s swimming records against female competitors and teammates, who were ordered by athletic and university authorities not to protest or complain about Thomas’s presence in the locker room.
For many liberals, this was just another case for showing acceptance of a previously scorned minority. Some may have regretted that they didn’t come out earlier for gay rights or same-sex marriage and saw this issue in the same light.
But most Americans believed physical differences between the sexes matter, just as weight divisions are appropriate in wrestling and boxing. As journalist Josh Barro reminded his fellow Democrats, Americans oppose biological men in women’s sports by a 66% to 15% margin.
Gladwell’s confession of error and columnist Megan McArdle’s previously unreported recollection that in 2022 “people were terrified to talk” freely about the issue suggest that, in Woolf’s words, “human relations shifted” sometime in 2023 or 2024.
Some of this may just reflect the success of President Donald Trump’s comeback. In 2022, he was beleaguered by lawsuits, discredited by Jan. 6, and scorned by many Republicans. In 2024, he was triumphantly elected to a second term.
But the shift in Trump’s approval ratings, from 45.9% in 2016 to 46.8% in 2020 to 49.8% in 2024, wasn’t overwhelming. Something more fundamental happened. Not just Democratic politicians but also leaders of liberal-dominated institutions discredited themselves:
Teachers unions that kept schools closed; university administrators who tolerated violent speech suppression; Biden administration officials who claimed to have no alternative to the open borders policy they enforced for 3 1/2 years; public health mandarins who lied about mask and vaccine effectiveness and secretly conspired to discredit the lab leak theory of COVID-19 origin; top media outlets, led by the New York Times, that routinely suppressed inconvenient truths about former President Joe Biden’s debility; Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Russia collusion hoax.
All these eminences squandered their credibility and forfeited their trust, just as Woolf thought the Victorians squandered and forfeited theirs.
“The summer of 2020 was legitimately insane,” wrote the critical liberal Thomas Chatterton Williams in his recently published Summer of Our Discontent. America is recovering its footing, though there’s always a danger of wobbling off to another side.