RICH LOWRY: The age of whispered conversations

We live in an age of whispered conversations. There are aspects of American life that nearly everyone knows are absurd, but that they are too afraid to speak out against and feel powerless to reverse.

It used to be said that if someone looked over his shoulder, he was about to tell an insensitive joke. Now people are worried about being overheard making what should be commonsensical observations.

Below are the kinds of conversations that are happening all the time.

■ The maternity-ward nurse in a low voice: “Where the form says ‘birthing parent,’ that means mother. They just changed it. It’s crazy.”

■ The staffer in a medical office explaining that the ethnic boxes need to be checked on another form even though the categories make no sense and confiding, “Maybe I should have checked ‘Hispanic’ myself at some point — I think we had a relative from Spain somewhere along the line.”

■ The group of moms together at the local coffee shop, making sure that no one else can hear from a nearby table: “Did you see what happened in the high-school track competition? Why are guys competing against girls?”

■ The staffer at a bank to a friend he or she can completely trust near the water cooler when it is absolutely certain no one else is around, “That training was ridiculous and a waste of time.”

It’s a little like what it must have been like in, say, East Germany when no one believed in the system, but no one dared let on what they were really thinking.

This phenomenon surely had an influence on the outcome of the election. As the Financial Times has documented, progressive elites “hold views often well to the left of the average voter — and even the average Democratic voter — on cultural issues.” The paper went on: “America’s decades-long progress toward racial and sexual tolerance and equality has been a gradual shift, led by progressives with the center and right quickly following.”

The new cultural shifts are different. Largely driven by “the activists and nonprofit staffers that surround the Democratic Party,” they “have been abrupt and are leaving the majority behind.”

For the longest time — national elections from 1948 to 2012 — the Democrats were considered the party of the working class and the poor. But now they are “seen primarily as the party of minority advocacy.”

Importantly, as the Democrats have traveled left, effectively making the center of American politics also further to the left, people who were in the middle might find themselves right-of-center without really moving.

Properly understood, Donald Trump’s opposition to trans surgeries for inmates and illegal immigrants, and to males playing in female sports aren’t right-wing positions. They’ve become perceived as such only because progressives have embraced ideas that would — from the perspective of a decade ago or so — been considered unthinkable and been a matter of universal assent.

When Republicans have raised objections to these ideas, they have been portrayed by the Democrats and the press as the “culture warriors” and extremists. Most people don’t buy this construct, though. They know how wokeness has been pushed into their lives as a deliberate choice by authorities — HR departments and the like — who don’t care what they think or, worse, will punish them for thinking the wrong thing.

Surveys show that Americans are now afraid of speaking their minds, and for good reason. Livelihoods and reputations can be destroyed by an ill-considered comment or social media post, so the vast majority of people keep their heads down, even if they are mystified or appalled by what they are witnessing. Hence, the whispered conversations.

But the voting booth is private. No one can overhear you voting, or punish you for how you vote. And this surely is one of the reasons that Trump won.

His candidacy was a rare opportunity to register an audible dissent from woke impositions that, otherwise, have had to be suffered in silence.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.