A little more than 40 years ago, the esteemed editor-in-chief of this journal, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., penned an instant classic titled The Liberal Crack-Up. It was the most accurate and most devastating critique of liberalism since James Burnham’s Suicide of the West. And it was a lot funnier. It began with a chapter on the hapless Jimmy Carter, who Tyrrell dubbed “the Wonderboy” and “the worst president of the twentieth century,” and ended with identifying liberals’ “one sublime goal that unites all the diverse enthusiasts: … to disturb their neighbors.” Yet, Tyrrell presciently warned that, despite their idiocy, if the liberals’ “dominance of the cultural and intellectual life of the Republic is not broken,” we would share the fate of the Greeks and Romans, i.e., civilizational decline. (RELATED: The Liberal Crack-Up) In the book, Tyrrell examined in a serious but sometimes hilarious way Liberalism’s devolution from the Age of Roosevelt to “New Age” Liberalism, which sought an escape from the normal. He described the liberals’ journey as beginning with a “concern for society and progress” and ending “with petty personal indulgences,” “diminished freedoms,” and “expanded absurdities.” Our government, he wrote, “became a hectored, driven nanny, ministering to a host of louts, all of whom were ingrates and some of whom were obvious morons.” The liberals “botched” civil rights and welfare as part of what they called the Great Society, Tyrrell explained. Our government, he wrote, “became a hectored, driven nanny, ministering to a host of louts, all of whom were ingrates and some of whom were obvious morons.” (I told you it was funny). Affirmative action quotas replaced equal rights. Feminism disdained motherhood and male masculinity. Victimhood became all the rage, usually followed by a demand for federal dollars and special preferences. The federal government assumed the duties of fatherhood for generations of the underclass. The liberals’ foreign policy was no better. The Vietnam War, Tyrrell noted, was the liberals’ war deliberately fought to indecision by Robert McNamara and his whiz kids. Tyrrell characterized liberal foreign policy as a “combination of Wilsonian fustian and he-man bellicosity.” And then the liberals blamed it on Nixon. And when Nixon, who understood the world, was chased from office, we ended up with the insufferable and amateurish Carter administration, and the “correlation of forces” shifted in the Soviets’ favor until Ronald Reagan put an end to that. The Liberal Crack-Up described in Tyrrell’s book included environmental extremism, anti-nuclear apocalypticism, extreme feminism, enthusiasm for the Third World, the so-called “peace movement” that always, to borrow Jeane Kirkpatrick’s phrase, blamed America first, economic illiteracy, and egalitarianism. Tyrrell’s book was a damning indictment of 60s, 70s, and early 80s liberalism. But compared to the liberalism, or should I say, the progressivism, of today, the first Liberal Crack-Up seems almost quaint. Today’s Liberal Crack-Up includes enthusiasms that Bob Tyrrell would never have imagined 40 years ago. The Liberal Crack-Up 2.0 includes a preference for illegal aliens over American citizens; the promotion of transgender lifestyles; the proliferation of previously unimagined genders; drag queen shows for kids; the widespread use of he/she, they/them pronouns; the redefinition of marriage; the hatred of American nationalism and traditional Christianity; the promotion of political violence against conservatives and actual political violence against conservatives; Trump Derangement Syndrome; politicized science; institutionalized Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and worshipping wokeness. (RELATED: A Passionate Defense of Christian Nationalism ) The first Liberal Crack-Up reached its nadir with the presidency of Jimmy Carter and resulted in the corrective Reagan presidency. Liberal Crack-Up 2.0 manifested itself in the Obama–Biden presidencies and resulted in the corrective Trump presidency. But, as Bob Tyrrell warned more than 40 years ago, the liberal/progressive dominance of our cultural and intellectual life still threatens civilizational decline. Conservative political restorations will only be episodic until the liberal/progressive cultural/intellectual dominance is brought to an end. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: National Review Turns 70 Trump Revives the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine Armistice Day on the Western Front and in Russia