For several years it’s been popular to lament America’s irrevocable slide into the anti-Christian “negative world.” Prognostications of this sort have led some to speculate that, if something doesn’t change soon, a “Protestant Franco” may be inevitable; not because it would be desirable, but because the alternative would be an anti-Christian tyranny. Yet despite how grim things seemed for roughly a decade after Obama endorsed same-sex marriage in May 2012, the astonishing victories conservatives have enjoyed the last few years call into question just how doomed the current order truly is.
Despite the appeal of postliberalism, integralism, and Christian nationalism to many young conservatives, the existence of a populist “silent majority” and an emerging “vital center” of educated professionals opposed to the left should give pause to anyone prophesying a radical rightward shift in U.S. politics. Though the fusionist “dead consensus” that defined the American right for decades is gone, a coalition of traditional Republicans and former leftists, now alienated from the progressive mainstream, is newly possible. No individual so embodies the latter category, the new vital center, as American journalist Bari Weiss, founder of the Free Press and formerly of the New York Times.
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