LET'S FIND A HAPPY MEDIAN.

Matthew Continetti asks, "Who will speak for ordinary Americans?"  You've got the Pillage Party, the Freakshow Party, the Fundamentalist Party, and the Laissez-Faire Party, and those four clusters are incompatible in some way with each other.  Let the fun begin!

The most radical experiments burned themselves out. Countercultural theorists feathered their academic nests. Hippie attitudes and aesthetics proved compatible with consumer society. Crime, welfare dependency, and divorce receded. This integration of "bohemian" and "bourgeois" reached its apogee in 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

The year is worth noting. Just as it looked like one set of problems were solved, other crises appeared on the horizon. The Black Lives Matter movement grew during the protests in Baltimore over Freddy Gray’s death in police custody in the spring of 2015. Caitlyn Jenner appeared on the cover of the July 2015 Vanity Fair, heralding the next debate over sexual identity and mores. That autumn, high-profile incidents on the campuses of Yale and the University of Missouri marked the arrival of "cancel culture." And Donald Trump crisscrossed the land on his circuitous route to the White House.

Suddenly, the modified orthodoxy of liberal, "Bobo" democracy—what’s come to be known in some quarters as "neoliberalism"—faced a countercultural challenge of its own. Liberal principles of free markets, internationalism, democratic government, individual rights, and the rule of law trembled under pressure. What made this latest countercultural rebellion unique was its pincer attack. There used to be one counterculture. Now there are two.

Loosely, those are the Freakshow and Fundamentalist Parties.

Our two countercultures, separately and together, correctly identify weaknesses and flaws in twenty-first century liberal democracy. But they mistakenly view these problematic conditions not as discrete challenges but as totalistic indictments. They marry disinterest in empirical reality with utopian expectations from politics. They collapse the distinction between private and public that guarantees political, economic, and religious freedom. As they consolidate control over their respective institutions, they silence dissent and promote victimhood, hopelessness, paranoia, and fear.

Ordinary men and women are caught in the crossfire of this three-front war between the left counterculture, the right counterculture, and the rest of America. Facing the curse of inflation for the first time in decades, the American who fills up the tank or buys groceries must experience something like despair as he watches the attempts to cancel Dave Chappelle, remove statues of Thomas Jefferson, promote quackery about the coronavirus, and pledge allegiance to a flag carried in the battle of Capitol Hill. Who will speak for normal people, for Americans who love their country, who desire nothing more than ordered liberty and the opportunity to better their conditions and raise their families in stable environments? Who can triangulate between the countercultures of left and right and the real silent majority of Americans, who would like nothing more than the extremes to go away?

It might be as simple as stop making everything a national issue, and let people sort things out among themselves.  Perhaps, Mr Continetti continues, seasoned with the bourgeois virtues.

As religious affiliation declines, and as some orthodoxies enter into concordats with nationalists hostile to democratic capitalism, the priority must be the vigorous and nonsectarian promotion of what were once called "middle-class values"—moderation, civility, empiricism, prudence, humility, restraint, and reverence for the law—and the families that transmit these values to the next generation. Only a sober and reflective defense of the constitutional order and sustained attention to the priorities and aspirations of everyday, nonideological men and women will allow us to resist the two countercultures. Before they bring America down with them.

That's going to take true believers of all the factions emulating the lightbulb.  Whether there will be enough realism among sufficiently many true believers for each faction to back away from the abyss remains to be seen.