A yard sign near my house captures two huge areas of cultural conflict in which conservative forces are starting to push back against the Left. Ordinary people once retreated before the advance of big government, but now, they’ve had enough.
The sign depicts Anthony Fauci on a gerrymandered American flag. In the blue corner is the winged staff of Hermes entwined in a double helix of serpents, which is used as a symbol of medical science. Fauci wears aviator sunglasses and looks like the coolest dude you’ll ever meet. Above him are the words, “In Fauci We Trust.”
Praise for the top epidemiologist signals virtuous adherence to “science” and to authority. The sign is a self-admiring declaration of membership in the “fact-based community” and also insults President Trump, whose critics falsely accuse him of denying the coronavirus as a hoax.
The Left arrogated science to itself about 20 years ago to dismiss people skeptical of climate alarmism. Ironically, climate alarmism is now more a religion than a rational policy solution, which brings us to the other key element of the Fauci lawn sign, which is that it adapts “In God We Trust.” This is the quintessence of aggressive, modish, left-wing secularism, rejecting our traditional understanding of Americans’ place in the cosmos — endowed by their creator, etc. — and seeks to replace them with a mechanistic and utilitarian politics inimical to natural rights and patriotic myths.
Secular leftists are not, however, having things all their own way, which is one reason they’ve become so aggressive recently. Traditional forces of freedom, which are naturally less united than those of coercion, are gathering. Battle is about to be joined as rarely before. Just as the incoming Biden administration, urged on by the socialist wing of the Democratic Party, signals a new offensive against traditional values, preeminently religious freedom, the Supreme Court’s new originalist majority is signaling back that it will be staunch in defending those freedoms enshrined in the Constitution, as the most important ones are.
The court has blocked New York’s and California’s efforts to shut down churches and synagogues. The majority of the justices saw that secular state governments were “singl[ing] out houses of worship for especially harsh treatment” and slapped down their arbitrary and capricious restrictions (which deemed bicycle repair, liquor stores, and casinos as essential but the Bill of Rights-protected free exercise of religion as disposable).
Notably, the court didn’t opt to avoid the substantive issue, as Chief Justice John Roberts timidly wished, and instead issued a ringing declaration of principle in favor of religious freedom. Trump’s three brilliant nominees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, showed that they are in the culture war’s trenches to protect the nation and its principles against the gathering secular storm.
But it’s not only with the court, nor only on the issue of religious freedom, that the contours of a titanic battle between the rights of individuals and the authority of government is emerging. Like the plaintiffs in New York and California, individual citizens are increasingly willing to speak up against government decrees that are arbitrary and capricious. And like Supreme Court justices, those citizens are making it plain that they’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
A Los Angeles restaurateur’s video went viral this month when she showed tented outdoor picnic tables, which the mayor had allowed a movie company to set up to feed its workers, right next to her eatery’s tented outdoor picnic tables, which had been banned from opening for business. The restaurant owner, Angela Marsden, articulated the rage of every small-business owner who is being hemmed in and, in many cases, ruined by clumsy, illogical, pointless, and cruel restrictions. Weeping into her face mask, Marsden shouts, “I’m losing everything. Everything I own is being taken away from me. And they set up a movie company right next to my outdoor patio, and people wonder why I’m protesting and why I’ve had enough.”
All across the country, people are enraged that governments at all levels are going too far, are imposing restrictions that the Constitution does not grant them the power to make. They voted for Biden in the hope that he’d bring moderate government and a modicum of political peace. But their vote wasn’t permission for Washington, or state or municipal governments, to treat the whole public as a mass of deplorables clinging (to coin a phrase) to their livelihoods and religion.
