Opinion | Why Conservatives Shouldn’t Be Doomers
More than that, in conservative states the anti-woke rollback has achieved some big and unexpected victories for the right. I don’t just mean showy battles like Ron DeSantis fighting with Disney and Elon Musk buying Twitter. I mean more structural changes — from the big expansion of school choice in right-leaning states to the attempts to build conservative beachheads in the public university systems in states like Florida and Texas. In a sense, the age of wokeness is midwifing a more self-conscious mode of red-state cultural governance than heretofore existed. We’ll see whether it lasts and how far it goes, but for now, it’s a way in which the ground of cultural conflict has arguably shifted in conservatism’s favor.
Blue America may have bigger problems than red America. Throughout the Obama years, there was a liberal narrative that cast America’s bluest bastions as future-oriented models and the reddest states as dysfunctional cautionary tales. But many of the emergent crises of the Trump and Biden years — the teen mental health crisis, the decline of American birthrates, the escalating cost of housing, the post-Covid squalor of certain major cities — can seem more like liberal problems than conservative ones, often more apparent in bluer areas and among left-leaning populations, even if they cut across regional and ideological lines.
The Fergusonian narrative on the right tends to emphasize these deteriorations as intimations of an ever-darkening future, in an “as goes San Francisco, so goes America” spirit. But conservatives especially should recognize that America is a lot bigger than the streets of San Francisco or Portland, Ore., or Washington, D.C. — and where blue-state governance seems to fail, red states can respond and benefit.
I don’t see much that’s late Soviet, for instance, in the sprawling boomtowns of the American Southwest or the rapidly expanding skylines of cities like Nashville and Austin or the population boom in DeSantis’s Florida. (When Musk’s rockets rise over Brownsville, Texas, or Waymo’s self-driving cars hit the Phoenix highways, what is the 1980s Soviet equivalent?) Nor is migration from other states and climes turning the Sun Belt socialist: Trump is currently polling better in Georgia, Florida, Nevada and Arizona than in Rust Belt states like Michigan, suggesting that dynamism and (a kind of) conservatism can still go hand in hand.
And that dynamism is the deepest reason, independent of the specific ambitions of American conservatives, for everyone to be skeptical of too much Fergusonian gloom. I made this case before, so I won’t belabor it, but it’s important not to let the challenge America faces from our great-power rivals right now — on which subject I tend to agree with Ferguson and other alarmists — blind us to the likely competitive advantage we enjoy over the next 50 years.
