Uncharted Territory: Conservatives Face Unprecedented Challenges

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. In that 1960s version of the original “Star Trek,” James T. Kirk—William Shatner—the captain of the Enterprise, remember, he went out to explore deep outer space. And the mission statement was, in part, “to go boldly where no one else has gone before.” And then, each week, you met weird things that no one had anticipated.

This counterrevolution is sort of like that.

All of the expert opinion hasn’t had a good track record, simply because they tried to apply old logic to new explorations that they weren’t sure what was happening or why they were happening or if they’d ever seen it before.

So, we were supposed to have a recession, a stock market collapse, poor gross domestic product, reduction in income. We didn’t have that, partly because we’ve never seen a tariff applied across the board to countries, especially that were running surpluses with the United States. And apparently, we can lower—and we never thought we could—this $1 trillion deficit.

We don’t know the implications on the budget. We don’t know the implications on the economy. Our secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, has announced that we may have $15 trillion in foreign exchange. We’ve never had anything approaching that number.

What are the economic implications of that, as far as job growth, new factories, new economic activity? We don’t know. We’re all worried that President Donald Trump’s inherited $2 trillion annual budget deficit will not be reduced, at least in the foreseeable future, if not raised by the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” But on the other hand, we’ve never seen anybody try to cut $200 billion, which may be actualized at the end of the year, from the federal budget.

Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, thinks there might be $300 billion in additional revenue. You get up to $500 or $600 billion taken away from the deficit and you’re almost, you know, at a $2 trillion—you’re almost over a quarter of the way there.

So, we’ve never seen anybody do that with that amount of tariff revenue. We’ve never seen anybody do that with that amount of federal cutting.

As far as the universities, we don’t know what the effect will be of taxing the endowments. Everybody’s shrilling and very shrill and saying, “This is terrible. It’s gonna wreck the universities. We don’t know the effect of reducing the surcharges on federal grants from 50% to 60% down to 15%. We don’t know the effect of saying to the universities, ‘You’re violating the civil rights statutes of the 1960s, and especially, the 2023 Supreme Court ruling by having segregated dorms, segregated safe spaces, segregated affinity graduations.’”

But what if we can’t expect, we can’t anticipate what might happen, and what might happen might be very good?

Maybe if you stop fixating on race, people will get along better. Maybe they’ll assimilate better. Maybe they’ll be integrated if they live together and race is incidental, not essential, to where they sleep every night or where they go on campus. You know, get rid of safe spaces.

Maybe the university will cut the legions of administrators, that big administrative bloat, if they cannot charge the government 55%. Maybe they’ll learn how to run their labs or their computer stations or something on 15%.

Maybe if we tax endowments, the universities will say, “Well, you know, our faculty, we’re 95% left-wing. The curriculum that we impose in the general education is all slanted. Maybe just to restore our tax-exempt status, we should try to be more enlightened, more disinterested.”

And the same thing, finally, on the border. There is no illegal immigration right now. And we were told that was impossible. The experts said, “You have to have comprehensive immigration reform.” But we’ve never tried it before, the way that Donald Trump did.

We’ve never said, “We’re gonna build a wall through the entire border space, from the Gulf to the Pacific.” We’ve never said that we’re going to stop catch and release, together with making people apply for refugee status before they get to the United States. We never said, “If you come across the United States, you will be deported.” We’ve never said, “Here are the incentives for self-deportation.” And a million people took it up.

What am I getting at? On the budget, on the economy, on the universities, on the border—and I could apply this as well to the radical changes in military recruitment, in DEI—no one has ever said, “We’re going to actually do what conservatives and Republicans have promised for a half-century.”

And when you do that, and you actually carry through your promises, you’re in unknown territory, you’re “boldly going where no one has gone before,” and traditional wisdom is not only correct in predicting what will follow.

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