As schoolchildren, we were taught that history was the product and creation of great personages.  Leaders, innovators, thinkers, polemicists — all were individuals or groups of individuals.

The rest of us were backdrop, cannon fodder, or the ordinary people who followed the leads of those destined to direct us.

Of course, the people do have an impact, assuming that they follow through on the initiatives of their leaders — political and cultural — on ideas, trends, and patterns that end up having a pervasive effect on their societies.

Today, we might be witnessing the exception that proves the rule.  A group of individuals — academics, cultural, media, and political figures — has bequeathed onto their cultures "post-modernism," and the nihilistic impact of its destruction, or as they say, deconstruction, of the truth, of facts, of values, of absolutes, of roles, relationships, and traditions.

In other words, in the name of some undefined or even unconceived Utopian vision, the elites have ordained a dismantling of all that we have come to regard as the pillars and attributes of Western civilization.

We now live in a world where serious people are worried about what pronouns they should use, what gender they should adopt, and what victimization might have been inflicted on themselves or upon those they deem perennial victims.

We have enshrined the immutability of one's race or ethnicity as the defining characteristic of one's being.  And, as in the ancient world, we have assigned divine or near divine status to nature, with the twist that somehow we can appease and impact the gods of climate and nature through our submission and mortification.

If a modern-day Rip Van Winkle were to now emerge from a 20-year snooze, he would be blown away by the self-inflicted absurdity that we have allowed to be brought upon ourselves.

So how can the state of things today offer the hope that we might be seeing an exception to the rule of the determination of the arc of history?  The answer lies in the democratization of information, known as the internet.  If knowledge is power, the internet, in all its various permutations and expressions, has given all of us both instantaneous information and the ability to act on it.

Today, we are witnessing the harnessing of the lessons learned by tens of millions of Americans: the values, traditions of American history and culture.

While millions of these Americans, not so lovingly labeled "the deplorables" by Hillary Clinton in 2016, might have only a high school education, they have studied, learned, and assimilated the genius of the American system of respect for the individual, respect for opportunity, mobility, and the great ability of an individual to transcend the circumstances of his birth. 

They see in American history a flawed but magnificent effort to raise the level of the dignity and well being of the great swath of humanity that constitutes the nation.  They revere those who sacrificed to maintain that effort, those who saw that in defending America, they were defending some grand, glorious, humane, and decent.

And they are not willing to see it tossed onto the scrap heap of history alongside communism, socialism (national or otherwise), theocratic despotism, and other isms that wildly succeeded in ruining the lives of hundreds of millions around the world.

Today, the "deplorables" are steeped in a wisdom that has completely eluded their elite leaders: common sense.  They have also become the ultimate custodian of the mindset and motivation that birthed America: individualism.

These two attributes have the power to reverse the all too apparent tailspin that has beset America and much of the rest of the West.

The "deplorables" know they are not racist people; they know that America is not the fount of all evil; they also know they have individual rights, and just as a woman has a right to the integrity of her body, so do they.

We are witnessing the beginning of a highly unusual if not unprecedented — by history's metrics — bottom-up, grassroots uprising designed to restore American culture, rescue American history, and cherish American values.

Anyone of sound mind, who values the existence of America, not to mention its leadership of the free world, must want to cheer them on.  Their mission must succeed.  The alternatives are too frightening to contemplate.

Mr. Altabef is the chairman of the Board of Im Tirtzu, Israel's largest grassroots Zionist organization.  He lives in Israel and can be reached at dougaltabef@gmail.com.

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