For the First Time 50% of American's Think the US is Headed in the Right Direction Under Trump's Leadership!
by Al Perrotta, The Daily Signal.com, May 27, 2025
A majority of voters say America is headed in the right direction. That has never happened in the nearly 20 years Rasmussen Reports has been posing the question.
A Rasmussen survey taken May 18-May 22 and released Sunday said 48% of Americans say the country is headed in the “right direction,” while 47% say the U.S. is on the “wrong track.” Five percent are “Not Sure.”
Rasmussen’s Mark Mitchell put the numbers in context, saying, “In 20 years, the % of people who say the U.S. is headed in the right direction has never been higher than today.”
A majority of voters say America is headed in the right direction. That has never happened in the nearly 20 years Rasmussen Reports has been posing the question.
A Rasmussen survey taken May 18-May 22 and released Sunday said 48% of Americans say the country is headed in the “right direction,” while 47% say the U.S. is on the “wrong track.” Five percent are “Not Sure.”
Rasmussen’s Mark Mitchell put the numbers in context, saying, “In 20 years, the % of people who say the U.S. is headed in the right direction has never been higher than today.”
Fifty percent say America is headed in the right direction, including 31% of Democrats.
RealClearPolitics is also seeing a huge swing toward optimism. A November 2024 survey indicated 63% believed America was on the wrong track, with only 26% saying the U.S. was on the right track. A difference of 37 points. Today, 51% say America’s on the wrong track, with 44% saying we’re on the right track. A difference of seven points. That’s a 30-point improvement in a matter of months.
“Never thought I would see it,” Mitchell told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t think the Republican Party understands the gravity of the gift which [President Donald] Trump has given them. Unprecedented presidency.”
While not commenting directly on the polling that America likes what it’s seeing from his administration, Trump on Monday offered his own enthusiastic take on the nation’s direction. In a Truth Social post, Trump declared:
Our Nation is staging one if the greatest and fastest comebacks in history. In just 4 short months, we are respected again, respected like never before, and just wait, with many Trillions of Dollars of Investment in Plants and Factories, until you see the numbers on GROWTH. This is, indeed, THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA!!!
If Rasmussen and RealClearPolitics polling is accurate, Americans are starting to believe it.
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The clash within civilizations - a cause for Optimism?
Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered at The New Criterion’s gala on April 24, 2025, honoring Heather Mac Donald with the twelfth Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society.
I would like to thank The New Criterion for this generous honor—hugely undeserved, I would say, but who am I to question Editor and Publisher Roger Kimball?
Throughout 2024, you see, Roger spoke confidently about the outcome of the November election. He sounded certain; he was certain. And when his editors at The Spectator of London asked him whether he really wanted to go out on such a limb, predicting victory for the Republican nominee, his response was to double down: not just victory, but landslide victory! Roger is even rumored to have had the foresight to buy up magnums of Champagne before the tariffs were announced.
My own prediction record, by contrast, has been a disaster. I made four bets—steak dinner bets, no less!—on the November outcome, certain that the Democratic nominee would win decisively. Because, I thought, that is how life goes: just when things are terrible, they will get worse.
But since the election, I am wondering whether it is time to trade in my innate pessimism for something more optimistic, something more, shall we say, Kimballian. For the transfer of presidential power in January 2025 was not just an ordinary replacement of one administration with another, or one set of policy preferences with another. Instead, a worldview is being uprooted before our eyes, one that had seemed unshakably entrenched across mainstream society. This challenge to orthodoxy has unleashed ferocious opposition. Every daily assault on the political and cultural status quo triggers a furious counterassault.
Before assessing the likely outcome, let us recall what that prior worldview looked like. Consider a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show featured the Met’s extraordinary collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, that explosion of creativity that produced Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, Gerard ter Borch, and other masters. Were we to see beauty in those cloud-laden horizons, those serene compositions of domestic order, those haunting portraits of age and vulnerability? No, we were to see what was not there: “colonialism, slavery, and war,” which, the Met curators reminded us, were major themes in seventeenth-century Dutch history, but which were “barely visible” in the Met’s Dutch collections.
Or take the still lifes, a new genre that marked Northern Europe’s epoch-changing attention to empirical detail. What was a viewer to make of the dragonfly iridescence of ripe grapes, the delicate play of light on cut glass, the puckered skin of a lemon peel? Do not be taken in! the Met advised us. Dutch still-life paintings omitted the “human cost of colonial warfare and slavery” that underlay the bounty these canvases documented, the wall labels warned. Of course, by definition, a still life features inanimate objects, not human subjects, so any still life would be hard-pressed to portray colonial warfare and slavery. But never mind. The artists should have anticipated twenty-first-century concerns about racial justice and revised their subject matter accordingly.
Here is another manifestation of that prior worldview: the Metropolitan Opera’s new staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida, currently running at the Met (see the May 2025 issue of The New Criterion). Aida tells the story of a doomed love between an ancient Egyptian warrior and an Ethiopian princess. The opera’s director has added a frame around the work: a group of archaeologists who troop across the stage at random moments taking stock of the pharaonic tombs. During the famous triumphal march, that glorious brass-filled explosion of military hubris, the archaeologists cart away Egyptian sculptures and other trophies for their European collections.
The inspiration for these gratuitous images of plunder is Edward Said, the father of postcolonial theory and a key source of the anti-Western hate that animates today’s universities. Said viewed Egyptology as an act of theft and Aida itself as an act of imperial domination. Never mind that it was the Khedive of Egypt who commissioned Verdi in 1870 to compose an opera for the opening of Cairo’s opera house. Never mind that the construction of that opera house was itself an Egyptian, not a European, initiative. The magazine Opera (the successor to the Met’s house organ, Opera News) gushed over Edward Said’s interpretation of Aida in anticipation of the new staging, lest anyone miss the subtext. Said, by the way, taught at Columbia University for four decades before his death in 2003, which tells us much about the anti-Israel animus among some university members.
The Metropolitan Museum’s presentation of the Dutch Golden Age and the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Aida are emblematic of the philosophical disposition behind the prior worldview. The assumption is that the artifacts of Western civilization rest on the abuse of power, which it is the role of the critic and the curator to unmask. The twentieth-century French philosopher Paul Ricoeur called this adversarial stance towards our cultural legacy the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” The Metropolitan Museum’s current director, Max Hollein, has equated the museum with “what is defined as white supremacy,” as The New Criterion’s James Panero reported in the December 2020 issue, and has pledged to “bring race to the forefront of our discussion of five thousand years of art.”
The hermeneutics of suspicion applies only to the West, of course. The wall text for the Metropolitan Museum’s warrior plaque from the West African court of Benin says nothing about that city-state’s lucrative trade in slaves or its ruthless territorial conquests. Court paintings from China are not deconstructed as a fig leaf for imperial expansion.
This oppositional stance has leapt from the academy and our cultural institutions to the world at large. Self-critique has been a signal trait of Western thought—and an admirable one. But in the last half century it has become reflexive, based on ignorance rather than on the desire for enlightenment. American and European elites set themselves up as bulwarks against the allegedly toxic legacy of Western civilization and even more against the supposedly illiberal instincts of their less enlightened countrymen, creating a clash within civilization. The range of subjects that the outgoing regime subjected to deconstructive critique has been astonishing: science, mathematics, objectivity—all were portrayed as artifacts of sexism and white supremacy rather than as civilizational breakthroughs that liberated much of humanity from famine and disease. Equally astonishing, the spokesmen for these once noble professions led the critique against their own fields. The editor of the journal Scienceargued in a 2022 editorial that ending racial preferences in college admissions would make it impossible to correct the “systemic racism” in science. The New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross apologized in 2020 for writing about a world that is “blindingly white, both in its history and its present.”
Under the prior regime, the West’s self-hatred had reached a point of self-cancellation. According to the vast international network of government bureaucrats, media, and nonprofits, Western countries have no right to control who comes across their borders from allegedly oppressed lands. Irreversible demographic and cultural change is not a byproduct of open borders; it is their goal.
To live under the prior regime was to live under a set of fictions: The West ushered into world history colonialism, slavery, and xenophobia. Non-Western civilizations were peace-loving and egalitarian, before being invaded by Westen interlopers. Mainstream institutions in the United States discriminate against underrepresented minorities in admissions, hiring, and promotions. The biological difference between males and females is a petty convention that can be wished away as a matter of personal choice. To argue that solar and wind energy cannot at present replace fossil fuels is to wish for the annihilation of the planet.
We lived as well with Orwellian paradoxes. Destroy democracy to save democracy! So declared the elites in canceling elections whose outcomes they did not like, as in Romania, or in shutting out of government democratically elected parties that deviate from open-borders orthodoxy, as in France and most egregiously in Germany. Destroy free speech to save free speech! The international elites criminalize dissent in the name of safeguarding open discourse; here Britain provides some of the most striking examples. A British citizen can be arrested and imprisoned for speech that might, in the government’s view, stir up “racial hatred” or cause someone anxiety. Vice President J. D. Vance criticized such violations of liberal values at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025; the outraged response to his address seemed to prove his point. In the United States, the government merely pressured social media companies to silence heterodox views, though it did, for one shining moment, create its own Orwellian board of disinformation.
American elites preserved the hegemony of these fictions and paradoxes through stigma, casting into the wilderness anyone who dared to deviate from the official line. Anyone who believed in the traditional American narrative of vitality and progress, who thought our history was not entirely disfigured by slavery, was a racist in need of bias training. Careers have been ruined for failure to toe the pro-diversity line, even in private conversation. Self-censorship reigned on college campuses, even as those institutions held themselves out to the public as the font of free inquiry. Members of the University of Pennsylvania female swim team had to hide behind anonymity to protest the unfair advantage enjoyed by a male teammate.
The elites defined what we may call the default state of affairs—that is, the normal way of doing things, which required no justification. By contrast, it was those who challenged this new default who bore the burden of proof and who were accused of “waging a culture war.” There was no change to millennia-long understandings of social relations so outlandish that it was not treated as a timeless feature of human reality.
The New York Times illustrates the power of the default in its running tab of the new administration’s most outrageous actions. Here is one of what the Times deems “radical changes across the policy spectrum”: “Avoiding such phrases in federal documents as ‘pregnant persons’ and ‘assigned female at birth.’” The Times grouses that this order is a “remarkable shift in the corpus of language used in the federal government.” Another “remarkable” change, in the Times’s words: “Picking one language out of 350 as official for the U.S.” The idea that a nation might have a cultural identity tied to a particular language is a dangerous rejection of the elite understanding of post-national reality.
Even foreign media outlets seize the prerogative to reset the default. After the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, met with Trump in April, Germany’s public television outlet complained that Meloni had engaged in a “Kulturkampf” by decrying the Left’s attacks on her much-abused countryman, Christopher Columbus.
The White House has characterized many of its current efforts as eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. That is partly true but also misleading. Something more profound is going on. Even if government employees and nonprofit recipients of federal aid operated with maximum efficiency, many would still have to go. It is their worldview that is the problem, not their management. The most shocking message behind the changes since January 20 is this: America is not at present an inequitable society. It does not need hundreds of workers in the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights to root out the bias in America’s schools. (Of course, it does not need the doe itself!) America does not need thousands of diversity bureaucrats to protect minorities from abuse. It does not need countless advocacy groups to monitor banks, landlords, medical schools, law practices, construction firms, science labs, museums, orchestras, faculty hiring committees, and college admissions offices for discrimination.
The scandal of the present moment is that someone with outsize visibility has said: No more. The race hustle is over; the gender hustle is over. The denigration of traditional values and American history is over. The demonization of law enforcement: over. Being black or female will no longer be treated as an accomplishment. The only thing that matters in employment is excellence. And to realize that principle, the White House on April 23 banned the greatest enemy of meritocracy: disparate-impact analysis.
Joe Biden began and ended his presidency with an apology for the enduring stain of racism on white Americans’ souls. Donald Trump’s inaugural address celebrated the “explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers who turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic.” At this point in the speech, women’s- and ethnic-studies professors were seeking a safe space.
We can be grateful to the Left for providing occasion for so much innocent merriment, such as the bioethicist at Columbia University who complained that the Trump Administration is trying to “control the language that people working in universities can use.” These are the same people who have been generating lists of proscribed terms for years and demanding loyalty oaths to “diversity.”
For the Left, however, the matter is not amusing; it is existential. Their identity is based on the notion that they alone stand between everyone who is not white and the reborn Ku Klux Klan, otherwise known as Trump supporters. Discredit that notion and the Left has nothing to live for.
The elites abroad are also terrified that America’s declaration of freedom from inherited guilt will undercut their own power, so they, too, are busily weighing in. The UN Human Rights Commissioner, speaking before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in March, denounced the dismantling of anti-discrimination programs in the United States. This “fundamental change of direction triggers fear and concern in many,” said Volker Türk. But the only people who are fearful are the globalists who might be losing their monopoly on officially approved public opinion.
And so the question arises: After decades spent dismantling bourgeois norms and traditional values, is the progressive revolution really over? Will the counterrevolution succeed and will it last?
In my newly optimistic guise, I find myself thinking that all it will take to break the spell of the racial spoils system will be for one very prominent man to say, “You cannot scare me by calling me a racist. I don’t care.” Others will follow and refuse to put their necks back in the yoke of assigned opprobrium. All it will take to dispel the patent fictions around biological sex will be for a critical mass of voters to reject them. Others will follow and demand a return to unpoliticized science.
The case of the tech titans and corporate ceos is illustrative. These leaders are now blithely discarding the racial preferences that just five years ago they declared essential to combating the bigotry of their own employees. Back then, the ceos could have been mistaken for ideologues. It turns out they were only spineless conformists.
In my traditional pessimist’s mode, however, I must note that the proponents of the prior worldview are not going away. Indeed, they are mobilizing and fighting back. Diversity apparatchiks in taxpayer-funded schools are busily rebranding themselves so as to remain in place. Case Western Reserve University replaced its old “Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Engagement” with a new “Office for Campus Enrichment and Engagement.” That new Office for Campus Enrichment and Engagement is led by the same diversicrat who in his previous guise as Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusive Engagement promoted the book You Sound Like A White Girl: The Case For Rejecting Assimilation.
Some schools are skipping the rebranding entirely. In April, Harvard College’s dean of students announced that the school would be making no changes in its “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” entities. The University of California at Berkeley recently elevated its Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Equity and Success to the even more exalted status of Interim Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion, as if Trump had never issued any executive orders against such positions at all.
Besides this bureaucratic retrenchment, the curriculum remains steeped in the hermeneutics of suspicion. The faculty will continue churning out graduates who see America and the West as the world’s main problems. Turning off the geyser of federal tax dollars to recalcitrant institutions should be an enormous lever, whether against K–12 schools that indoctrinate students in victimology, or against research universities that have rerouted science funding to diversity sinecures. But that strategy, too, is being shut down via preliminary injunctions and outright defiance.
At present, the resistance is focused on the federal courts, but it will spread into the political arena. Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois was ahead of the curve in March: “Americans are experiencing the cruelty that comes with authoritarian rule.” Not coincidentally, Illinois joined Maine in challenging a federal order barring male athletes from competing in female-only sports. Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland urged in April that a “rally a day keeps the fascists away.” David Brooks calls for a “comprehensive national civic uprising.”
So we must be ready. The goal of positive regime change and the antidote to backsliding are the same: the truth. We need to declare the truth about America and about Western civilization, as often and as loudly as we can.
To the postcolonialist acolytes of Edward Said, we must say: Western knowledge was not theft. It was not motivated by contempt for the “Other.” It was motivated by love of discovery, curiosity, and passion for intellectual mastery. Those interpolated Egyptologists at the Metropolitan Opera, symbolizing the illegitimate appropriation of ancient Egyptian culture by marauding Westerners, might be countered with the words of an actual Egyptologist: Jean-Francois Champollion. Champollion decoded the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone, one of the great intellectual feats of the nineteenth century. As a young student in 1806, he wrote his parents:
I want to make a profound and continuous study of this ancient nation. The enthusiasm brought me by the study of their monuments, their power and knowledge filling me with admiration, all of this will grow further as I acquire new notions. Of all the people that I prefer, I shall say that none is as important to my heart as the Egyptians.
These are not the words of a bigot.
To Max Hollein and other museum directors, we must say: You have one duty and one duty only—to pass on an inheritance with joy and gratitude. You are not called to oversee an “antiracist institution”; you are called to preserve beauty and to trace through your halls that greatest of all human dramas: the evolution of artistic style. Another Burke Award honoree, Philippe de Montebello, was guided by that imperative during his exemplary tenure at the Met.
To the critic Alex Ross and other spokesmen for the European music tradition, we must say: To define classical music as “white” is absurd. The classical tradition represents the opposite of narcissistic identity politics. The classical musician subsumes his own identity in order to trace the movement of the composer’s soul into regions of longing and sublimity that we would otherwise never know.
To the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy, we must say: Democracy depends on free speech, and it requires respect for the popular will. You suppress the former and deny the latter. The people demand their sovereignty back, whether with regards to national borders or the ability to speak their minds, and they will have it.
How would Edmund Burke have assessed the chances of the current counterrevolution, coming as it does after so much destruction? Burke had a canny intuition of the risks of revolutions. He foresaw the lustful vengeance of a mob that can only tear down, not create. Would Burke have been optimistic that Western culture can return to its roots and show what he called “implicit reverence to all the institutions of our ancestors”? I’ll leave it to the editors of The New Criterion and others to answer that difficult hypothetical.
Admittedly, there is much that is not reverential in the current administration. Its strategists might recall a Burkean insight: Norms and traditions are precious things. Stretch the limits on constitutional government to the breaking point, and they may be impossible to restore. Moreover, the expanded power that you have put to a salutary cause will be used against you when the tables turn.
At its core, however, this White House does understand how much we owe to the giants of our past. Because of that, in the end I am optimistic that this counterrevolution just might succeed.
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