In a 1973 essay, “Utopianism, Ancient and Modern,” commentator Irving Kristol touched upon the conservative indifference to the claims of culture. “For two centuries,” he wrote,

the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.

Kristol was talking more about the humanities than about art. But his point applies equally to the attitude of the elites who manage the affairs of our society regarding art and culture. They did not think or care much about art—it was something that went on, as it were, behind their backs. But then one day they woke up and found the art world, including the formerly staid world of museums, was awash in sexualized garbage, postmodern inanity, and race worship.

This process was part and parcel of a larger cultural rebellion against bourgeois values that got going with the advent of modernism. Today, we are living in the aftermath of that avant-garde: all those “adversarial” gestures, poses, ambitions, and tactics that emerged and were legitimized in the 1880s and 1890s, flowered in the first half of the last century, and live on in the frantic twilight of postmodernism. Establishment conservatives have done nothing effective to challenge this. On the contrary, despite little whimpers here and there, they have capitulated to it.

From the moment Donald Trump was shot at a rally last July, people have been speaking about a “vibe shift,” a shift in the zeitgeist of American culture. That revolution in sentiment picked up speed with Trump’s election in November, and it began barreling down the main line with his inauguration. We always hear about the “peaceful transfer of power” when a new president takes office. The usual procedure is for the old crowd to vacate their positions while the new crowd slides in to take their places. The institutions remain inviolate. Nothing essential changes.

Trump’s ascension was the opposite. He was elected not to preserve the status quo but to remake it. On January 20, he moved quickly to show that his administration would not be a colloquy of words only. It would be a locomotive of deeds. Within hours of taking office, he had issued some 200 executive orders and proclamations, affecting everything from immigration and the border to taxes and the cost of living. He ordered that the U.S. withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization and directed that federal employees return to working full-time and in-person. With the stroke of his pen, he obliterated DEI operations throughout the government. The exhibition of energy and self-confidence was extraordinary.

Trump has repeatedly said that his common-sense revolution would usher in a “new golden age.” In the context of unleashing the economy and technological innovation, we can understand this to mean literal gold. But a large part of our new golden age will be aggregated under the rubric of normality. The return of common sense is also the return of the normal. What would that look like in the realm of culture?

Let me touch briefly upon three examples. One of the most popular and one of the best BBC productions was Civilization, a 13-part series that aired in 1969. Hosted by the eminent art historian and museum director Kenneth Clark, it was a masterpiece of studied deliberateness. Clark ranged widely among the monuments of Western culture, beginning in the dismal, barbarian-filled years after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and ending with what he called the “heroic materialism” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Clark frankly admitted that his cultural itinerary was “a personal view.” But it remains a refined, well-informed view. “What is civilization?” he asks in his first episode, standing on the Pont des Arts across from the Louvre in Paris. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I can’t define it in abstract terms,” but “I can recognize it when I see it.”

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.