During busy news cycles, it’s hard to write posts. Each story screams for attention, creating analysis paralysis. What struck me today, though, was that many of the stories we’re seeing are part of something much larger, which is what I call the “Great Sorting.” All the old patterns are broken, and people are rethinking their allegiances.

Before the 21st century, the world’s patterns were predictable. You could divide history into the era before the Soviet Union collapsed and after the collapse.

Before, the world was neatly split into totalitarian and free, with Europe trying to straddle the middle with its “soft” socialism. America was about freedom, and it bent its energies and wealth to maintain its hegemony in the “free” world. As part of this freedom, it had a free-market system that wrought extraordinary changes in the standard of living for those lucky enough to live in free (or free-ish) nations.

The Soviet Union stood for totalitarianism. Only brute force will work to force people to live up to Marx’s utopian demand of an economy that sees labor divvied up “from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.”

The rest of the globe served as a series of proxy battlefields for this epic struggle between the free and enslaved worlds.

Image: Red and Blue by freepik.

And then, literally overnight, the Soviet Union collapsed. Americans blithely assumed that the free world had won, and the hard work was over. They also assumed that American leftists, seeing the Soviet Union’s collapse, would slink away and never be heard from again.

Except that’s not what happened. In fact, when liberty lovers let their guard down, the American left came back with a new strategy. It had already spent decades denigrating America but always with an eye to imposing a socialist economy. Now, with America relaxed, leftists decided to take another look at her weaknesses. These were her racial history, her commitment to making a better world, and her naivete.

From these weaknesses, leftists began to lay the groundwork in the 1990s for Critical Race Theory, Climate Change madness, and gender madness. CRT played on American guilt about race, climate change worked with Americans’ guilt about affluence and their desire to make a better world, and gender madness exploited Americans’ growing belief in a “live and let live” philosophy and their abandonment of religion.

With these trends, the Democrat party went from being the working-class party whose members loved America to a hard-left institution that elected a president who promised he would “fundamentally transform” America. Obama “led” from behind, stirred up racial hatred, started to open the border, weakened the military, and presided over the break-up of the family, especially through the LGBTQ movement. When ordinary Americans elected Trump, their support for him was a response to this fundamental transformation.

For four years, Trump tried to reverse the changes. It was no surprise that the Democrat party blocked him at every turn. However, what left him incapable of making lasting changes and denied him the momentum he needed to win in 2020 (with or without Democrat cheating) was that the Republican party refused to support him.

Lastly, of course, there was the leftists’ highly political response to COVID, which divided liberty lovers from those with totalitarian instincts. At this point, many conservatives want nothing to do with the GOP.

All these trends have accelerated under Biden and are exploding at a rate that is impossible for Americans to ignore, whether in terms of border security, economic policies, national security, military readiness or, most significantly, the transformation of America’s very fabric (racial, sexual, the family unit, etc.). No wonder, then, that we’re experiencing a Great Sorting.

I’ve already posited that Tucker’s departure from Fox may have resulted from an internecine battle between the new conservatives and the GOP people. However, for a lot of these changes, you don’t need to speculate.

Glenn Greenwald, a staple on leftist media for years, became a staple on Tucker and mourns his departure.

Naomi Wolf, the feminist adviser to Al Gore in 2000, is a speaker at Hillsdale College.

Jennifer Sey, someone so leftist she supported Elizabeth Warren, now speaks of the left in the past tense after her opposition to school closures saw her driven from her prominent position at Levi’s.

Ordinary parents are increasingly horrified by the Democrat party’s push to warp their children’s minds and maim their bodies in pursuit of the fantasy of so-called transgenderism (“trans rights are unicorn rights”).

Transgenderism is also dividing gays and lesbians, and feminists (with J.K. Rowling, a leftist, taking the lead).

Blacks and Hispanics, once Democrat party stalwarts, after watching their economic gains collapse under the weight of Biden’s policies and their cities turn into hellholes, even as leftists mock their faith and family values, are slowly weaning themselves from the party.

What’s also a sea change is the way in which the COVID experience shook Americans’ faith in science and medicine, in public schools, and in academia. That support was normative in the 20th century.

These changes are accelerating. As always, I can only wonder which will come first: America’s collapse, thanks to Biden’s policies, or its resurgence, thanks to the Great Sorting.