COMMENTARY It’s the Culture, Stupid!
Biden and the elites fail to grasp that the country has moved to the center right.
F BY SALENA ZITO
or over a decade, pat romano drove past the former Mallard Motel on his way to and from the construction business he owned in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania.
The more he saw the motel fall into disrepair, the more
he wanted to buy it — which he admits was a bit crazy. Romano, a hardcore Philadelphia native who grew up
with a steady diet of cheesesteaks and attitude, decided he’d go with crazy. Despite opening at the height of the pandemic in 2020, Romano has not just impeccably redone all of the rooms in the old motel, but he has turned the former motel lobby into a delightful diner overlooking Philipsburg’s lake with two of the rooms converted into an expansive bar. In his own way, Romano has
created a community — something people want to join, to be part of. It is that shared aspiration Alexis de Tocqueville admired so much about the spirit of American exceptionalism: the instinct to form associations with one another that draw us together. For the past few decades, the people in power in our
country who also have the loudest voices in our culture (corporations, entertainment, institutions, media, government) have decided they can accumulate more power by dividing people using race, gender, vocation, educational achievement, and geography as their means of division. That is part of why Romano is no longer a Democrat, a
party he so identifi ed with in Philly that he once worked to get Democrats elected. “At some point, you start to look at what’s going on with
the politics in the areas. And to me, I just had an epiphany. I was, like, ‘I’m on the wrong team,’” he said. Today, the new Republican is an elected offi cial in his
new hometown and serves as the chairman of the board of supervisors in Rush Township. Cultural attitudes have changed in the past few years.
It began when the pandemic went from something we should be mindful of to a power that we should succumb to, making people question other power moves they
58 NEWSMAX | MAY 2022
never questioned before. Because President Joe Biden won in 2020, people missed
how center right the country moved down-ballot. In 2021, when many states went center-right, Democrats
and those cultural curators in corporations, media, institutions, and Hollywood responded by calling voters racist.
And, of course, they said it was because of former
President Donald Trump. People grew weary of having everything they thought,
did, bought, and wore being called racist. That goes for Blacks, whites, and Hispanics who are deeply frustrated that our politics and culture are constantly trying to pit them against each other — people are simply just done. Ask any suburban parent who has spent hours driving back and forth to swim meets and soccer practices for their daughters how they feel about women’s sports today that have biological males crushing females in meets and tournaments. If you think that hasn’t pushed
them center-right, you haven’t listened to them. If you think the violent crime
ROMANO
epidemic in our cities hasn’t pushed people center-right, then you haven’t paid attention to the diversity of new
gun owners who purchased their fi rst guns in the past two years to protect their homes and their families — or have moved out of those cities. This is not about Republicans getting things perfect or
even semiperfect or even partially perfect — they haven’t. It is about Democrats overreaching so wide and so far
that they can’t see the forest for the trees. When corporations and the media amplify this overreach
in their advertisements, tweets, or social justice positions or opinions, they just push people even further away. People will calculate that the midterm elections this year
will be about a lot of things: Trump, racism, and not getting Build Back Better passed. They will be wrong. It’s the culture, and had they just spent some time
listening to people, they would have known. This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner.
Salena Zito is a national political reporter who has spent her entire career covering elections from the viewpoint of Main Street. Her reporting appears in The Atlantic, New York Post, The Hill, and The Economist.
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