I, for one, will be relieved when the Trump administration ends. Here's why.

From where I sit, aside from the theatrics, it has been no worse than the Obama administration and, in some few ways, quite better. But, that's not it at all.

Rather I will be happy at the refutation of a theory, and that theory is that the march of the Left must, and can, be stopped by the good offices of the presidency, should we just elect the right candidate. Whether Trump was the right candidate is a matter of opinion, but ultimately irrelevant to the impulse which elected him. That genesis of that impulse takes manifest forms not the least of which are the march of the Left through the institutions, whether academia or the Fourth Estate.

The theory is that, as stated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

"The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."

The populist wing of the Republican party has ironically adopted the latter half of that axiom, which may be why the Left and Democrats got themselves all worked up about an impending Trump authoritarianism which never in fact materialized. Not just cynics observe that is how the Left itself is most prone to rule, and would do so were it in Trump's place.

There's not a paucity of evidence the Trump administration had any effect upon the culture war, which we may assume will now be reinvigorated, there's no evidence. It was thought that turning the Court over to a conservative majority could right past wrongs and while that may be so, the Court's wheels grind exceedingly slow.

With the departure of the Trump administration—and it'll take the most loyal of Trumpists at least a few months to realize it not only really is over, but that it's not coming back—we're left to acknowledge that conservatives of all stripes, though especially the believers in the sun god Trump, were wrong in their diagnosis of the problem, whether that problem was collegiate indoctrination, immigration, or any of myriad other issues of varying importance. Winning elections means nothing if the hearts and minds of the electorate are not won first and along with those elections. That has not happened, and Trump's contribution has, if anything made matters worse, if also more obvious.

We have now a $27.5 trillion federal debt, not counting the approximately 48 states which are upside down on the social contract, most of which is due to nothing other than spending upon ourselves, mostly in the provision of health insurance, the vast bulk of which is provided by Medicare. The Trump election merely made obvious that we're all advocates for big government now, so long as it pays our own bills for us. We're now Bailoutistan.

There's something disconcerting about seeing small business now rattling the tin cup for their bailout from the effects of the "public health" policies enacted by the nation's governors, all of whom expect the federal government to cover the attendant costs thereof. Disconcerting because there is no community of people more opposed to big and otherwise intrusive government than is the small business community, and once they've been bought off—oh, it's only a loan—what hope can there be for the rest of the electorate to see the virtues of small government?

Regardless of political affiliation there can be no disagreement that government failed the COVID-19 epidemic challenge in comprehensive fashion. The CDC bungled it from the start, despite an already $8 billion budget, while the states ensured the results would be economically catastrophic by adopting an untested policy that was co-opted directly from the People's Republic of China, in trying to lockdown entire states, historically regarded as absurd.

The willfully denied fact within the American electorate is not that the nation is threatened with socialism, but that it has enshrined the welfare state as, somehow, a constitutional right. The same-sex marriage argument was won upon the basis of fairness. It wasn't won upon the basis of marital state, for all one really needed, within a nation of self-reliant people, was a suitably progressive minister to accomplish that. No, it was a fair share of the spoils of the welfare state upon which was the premise of gay marriage fought and won. There were legal issues of inheritance, but those could always have been achieved by a simple civil union law of the kind already increasingly common. No, it'd require marriage to tap into the sharing of benefits designed for, well, the married.

We need no regard it as a gay issue, and indeed should not, for the rest of the public is infected with the same disease. Government exists to bail us out and, when perfected, to pay for that which we find troublesome or inconvenient the assuming of its full costs. Never mind that health care is so expensive in the first place because government has made it so, by removing all the mechanics of the free market, we've got bills to pay. Try to get elected via either major political party advocating the abolishment of Medicare.

The ending of the Trump administration is merely the acknowledgment that there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the two political parties upon the primacy of maintaining the social welfare state at all costs. And those costs are the largest short term debt increase in world history, some $6 trillion in but four years, most of it within one year. Before anyone says I'm wrong, tell me your plan or any plan you've heard about for repaying that cost. There is none. We taxed ourselves to pay for WWI and WWII, and paid off the debts incurred. Within a few years we were running budget surpluses. Normally we'd say, if incorrectly, COVID-19 was a similar event requiring similar accounting. We haven't and we won't.

The stillborn plan to turn back the Left and win the culture war is dead, simply because the Left has already won to a large extent, we're all carriers of that virus now, and god help anyone who moves our cheese. We're not going to win any culture wars until we win the war for our own hearts and minds. Most of us are inclined to staying bought off. We don't know any different.