The recent barrage of executive orders has put some conservatives in a triumphalist frame of mind.  From reverse racism, to gender madness, to the cancerous growth of the administrative state, to the arrest of pro-lifers and the intimidation of people of faith, I keep hearing “The election changed all that.  It’s all coming to an end.”

No, it isn't.  Exhilaration is good, hope is necessary, but triumphalism is naïve.

Don’t misunderstand me:  The new executive orders ameliorate some of the most grievous excesses of the previous administration, and I have been delighted to see them.  They are also being rolled out with great cleverness.  The generals seem to realize that there is no need to begin with new legislation, because so many of the odious things the agencies do are not backed by any law whatsoever.  First, carefully strip the agencies of all these unauthorized functions; this builds a constituency for further change.  Then repeal or amend the law itself, something much more difficult and time consuming.  I might wish that our legislature weren’t so feckless, but it is.  If it weren’t, the agencies couldn’t have got away with all these things in the first place.

This is obviously a well-planned war.

But unless there is a change in how people think about these matters, the next administration could reverse the reversal.  Even now, too many people either don’t grasp what has been going on, or remain in denial.  Keep in mind that many of these executive orders merely reverse lunatic executive actions of so-called progressive administrations.  In another four years, conservative shock and awe could be succeeded by new shock and awe waged by yet another wave of lunatic progressives.

After all, promoters of the various lunacies are deeply entrenched.  Many of those who remain in the federal bureaucracies will quietly resist.  Those who do leave federal government will find plenty of other opportunities to go on doing what they do, whether in state government or the vast ecosystem of non-governmental organizations and pressure groups.  The craziest people continue to be attracted disproportionately to the places in which they can do the most harm, including the public schools, and they still dominate most of our other opinion-forming institutions.  And everything could be derailed by the courts.

In the meantime, the lunacies themselves persist, and this is especially true of gender, sexual, and identity lunacies.  Rampant sexual dysphoria among adolescents and young adults is fueled more by social media than by federal policy.  An executive order declaring that there are only two sexes won’t end “What are your pronouns?” exercises in local public schools.  If you are waiting for the media to stop calling surgical mutilation of young people "gender-affirming care," don’t hold your breath.

The reasons why these lunacies persist have to do less with politics than with profound shifts in how we think about right and wrong, life and death, truth and falsehood -- about God and man, men and women, adults and children – and about the nature of our bonds with each other.

These shifts have been going on for a long, long time, and the dirty secret is this:  Milder versions of the lunacies of which progressives are so fond are widely accepted among conservatives too.  They want to embrace lunatic premises, without coming to lunatic conclusions.  They want the poison apple, without the worm.

The culture wars didn’t begin overnight, and they won’t end overnight.  The lunatics are in for the long haul, and those who don’t fancy lunacy had better be in for it too.