The world is healing

For a while, many (not all) vaccinated people simply bullied those refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine, demanding that the unvaccinated lose their jobs, be banned from schools, be prohibited to travel, and even lose the right to live (by saying that the unvaccinated be refused treatment in hospitals).

But times changed: more and more reports are recently coming out pointing to COVID vaccines’ connection to increased myocarditis and “turbo cancer” incidences. With that, these same pro-COVID vaccine people now shamelessly claim they doubted the vaccines’ safety all along, with some even claiming to never have taken them at all.

And yet this craven behavior is not limited to the COVID vaccination instance. In politics, the not-so-distant past saw woke progressives — from the academe to government to business — strutting around as if the world issued them a blank check. Corporations turned to DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and (Environmental, Social, and Governance) frameworks, universities policed thought. Dissent was dismissed as hateful ignorant bigotry.

Nevertheless, the pendulum has swung and conservatives are winning and winning massively again. Worldwide, the progressive momentum has stalled and, in many places, reversed. And this happened through the sheer brutal force of reality asserting itself.

Predictably, the conservative rise was initially passed off as a mere passing fancy of ordinary citizens for populism, which has been described as ultimately undemocratic. Democracy being perceived as standing for institutions and the rights of the minority vis-à-vis the majority. But this is misleading.

What is conveniently ignored is that leftist politicians are very much populist themselves. How else can they win elections? Hence, you have Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jeremy Corbyn, Tarō Yamamoto, Hugo Chávez, and Evo Morales to name a few. These Leftists are classic populists — by the popular definition of the term in that they’re not great respecters of the institutions of property, speech, freedom of religion, and even the democratic process where the majority gets to set the political agenda.

And yet many a political commentator or member of the academe would disingenuously label rightwing politicians as populists simply because they have been winning recent elections, all the while forgetting the fact that these are precisely the leaders that have been upholding public institutions, inherent rights, and law and order — rather than burning down those same institutions as Black Lives Matter or Antifa have done.

Thus, one sees the welcome rise of France’s Le Pen, Italy’s Meloni, Netherlands’ Wilders, UK’s Farage, Japan’s Takaichi, and, of course, the US’ Trump. Then there is Switzerland’s SVP/UDC, Germany’s AfD, Austria’s Freedom Party, Chile’s Kast, Czech Republic’s ANO 2011, and Portugal’s AD.

Notably, Philippine social media is rife with increasing numbers of expanding conservative groups, mostly run and led by young Filipinos.

Thus, now the Left’s attempt — as the pro-COVID vaccine people tried — to coopt the increasingly prevailing judgment of history: that woke progressivism was utter nonsense and the rise of conservatism shows a world healing and unifying itself back with reality.

But any attempt by the Left to coopt the gains of the Right will fail simply because people will have nothing to do anymore with the Left.

The first reason is fatigue. Woke politics runs on constant drama. Every institution is “systemically” broken, every disagreement is violence, every compromise is betrayal. That level of hysteria cannot be sustained indefinitely. Ordinary people — workers, parents, business owners — eventually tire of being accused of being oppressors or bigots. They want stability and solutions, not rallies or slogans.

Second, woke ideology collapsed under its own contradictions and irrationality: claiming “equality” while obsessively categorizing people by race, sex, and identity; demanding tolerance while practicing ruthless exclusion; and celebrating “lived experience” but silencing actual lived dissent.

When an ideological movement cannot define what a woman is or explain why free speech must be curtailed to protect democracy or justify why criminals deserve more empathy than victims, it deserves to be trashed.

Third, economic reality broke progressive fantasy. Woke governance can only survive in times of abundance, as inefficiency can be disguised as compassion. Inflation, energy shortages, crime, and uncontrolled migration strip away that disguise. When groceries cost more, streets feel unsafe, jobs disappear, lectures about pronouns ring stupidly empty.

Fourthly, conservatives rightly insisted that progress must be real, not rhetorical. That words and the law must mean something. That rights come with responsibilities. More than sexual or racial identity, conservatives correctly intuited that families matter, work matters, order matters, and truth matters.

Finally, conservatives learned discipline. Not every insult deserves a response. The woke playbook relies on emotional escalation; conservatives have learned to engage as adults. Calm, reasoned insistence on facts and reason disarmed a wokeism addicted to drama, making the latter look superficial and theatrical.

Of course Leftism won’t vanish. It retreats, regroups, and rebrands. But the woke era of unquestioned dominance is over. Conservatives are ascendant because they reconnected politics to reality, morality to self-responsibility and humility, and power to accountability. They rightly declared the truth that politics is not performative but existential.

Jemy Gatdula is the dean of the UA&P Law School and is a Philippine Judicial Academy lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence. The views expressed here are his own and not necessarily of the institutions to which he belongs.