Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared that he and his supporters were “the party of common sense.” In his Inaugural Address on January 20, Trump returned to this theme. With his flurry of executive orders, he said, “We will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense. It’s all about common sense.”

I agree. But what is “common sense”? At the beginning of his Discourse on Method, René Descartes said that common sense was “the most widely distributed thing in the world.” Is it? Much as I admire Descartes, I have to note that he was imperfectly acquainted with the realities of 21st century America. If he were with us today, I am sure he would emend his opinion.

After all, is it common sense to pretend that men can be women? Or to pretend that you do not know what a woman is? During her confirmation hearings, a sitting member of the Supreme Court professed to be baffled by that question.

Is it common sense to open the borders of your country and then to spend truckloads of taxpayer dollars to feed, house, and nurture the millions of illegal migrants who have poured in? Is it common sense to sacrifice competence on the altar of so-called diversity? To allow politicians to bankrupt the country by incontinent overspending? That’s the start of a list one could easily enlarge.

In the cultural realm, is it common sense to celebrate art that is indistinguishable from pornography or some other form of psychopathology? Is it common sense to rewrite history in an effort to soothe the wounded feelings of people who crave victimhood? Is it common sense to transform higher education from an institution dedicated to the preservation and transmission of the highest values of our civilization into a wrecking ball aimed at destroying that civilization?

Like most important concepts—think of love, justice, knowledge, or the good—common sense is not easy to define. But we know it when we see it. And more to the point, we instantly sense its absence when it is supplanted.

In recent years—indeed, at least since the 1960s—our culture has suffered from a deficit of common sense. That deficit has eroded a great many valuable things, from our educational institutions to our cultural life more generally.

These days, the revival of common sense is often opposed to the rule of that coterie of bureaucrats the media calls “the elites.” As a shorthand expression, it makes a certain amount of sense to speak of elites. The folks in Davos who want to vaccinate us into oblivion, encourage us to give up steak for insects, and keep tilting at windmills to battle the weather are members of that shiny, self-satisfied group. So are the products of our Ivy (and near-Ivy) League institutions—those whom the critic Harold Rosenberg called the “herd of independent minds” who all think alike, believe they were born to rule, and occupy nearly every perch upon the tree of societal privilege.

But rather than being a true elite—which suggests a quota of excellence, merit, and achievement—the apparatchiks we call “the elite” are really just the credentialed class. They are often clever and always politically correct. Eric Hoffer, the so-called “longshoreman philosopher” who was prominent in the 1960s, was right to observe that “self-appointed elites” will “hate us no matter what we do,” and that “it is legitimate for us to help dump them into the dustbin of history.”

Indeed, that exercise in large-scale institutional tidying-up is central to President Trump’s effort to bring about the “restoration of America” through the triumph of common sense.

It is worth pausing over the word “restoration.” The dictionary tells us that the verb “to restore” means “to bring back to good condition from a state of decay or ruin.”

There are essentially two parts to this process. The first is to acknowledge frankly the state of decay or ruin for what it is. The abnormal is not the normal just because it is prevalent. For example, the mutilation of children is not “gender-affirming care.” Anti-white racism is not “anti-racism.” Illegal migrants are not “undocumented ‘new neighbors.’” A bisected cow in a tank of formaldehyde is not an important work of art.

The second part of the ambition to restore American culture begins by rescuing vital examples of cultural achievement from the sneering oblivion to which the establishment elite consigned them.

As to the first, the state of decay or ruin, I suspect that we are all familiar with what the “long march through the institutions” wrought in American culture. The phrase is a bit of Marxist jargon popularized in the early part of the last century. Its basic idea is that the best way to achieve the longed-for revolution is through a process of co-option. Take over a society’s schools, churches, and other cultural institutions, marinate them in a broth of liberationist ideas drawn from Marx and other left-wing intellectuals, and pretty soon you have taken over the commanding social, moral, and political heights of that society.

And that, my friends, is the latest elephant in the room.

Roger Kimball is Editor of The New Criterion as well as President and Publisher of Encounter Books.