During the past 20 years in America, a great contest has been waged over what the nation will become in the twenty-first century. Those on the political Left—progressives, statists, academics, and secularists—insist that America was always fundamentally flawed. They say we must become something other than what we have been. For their part, conservative Americans—workers, traditionalists, religious believers, and constitutionalists—hold that America is becoming something they don’t recognize. They claim the Left has betrayed the nation’s founding principles and has rejected the habits and traditions that once defined our national identity.

In short, the political battle between the Left and Right is best understood as an existential fight over what America will be. The Left pushes for a metanoic transformation, while the Right tries to catalyze an epistrophic one.

Metanoia is a forward-looking change—a recognition that one’s past way of life was flawed in some fundamental way. Regret precipitates a self-rejection that drives the transformation, which is a deliberate turning away from one’s previous identity. In contrast, epistrophe is a backward-looking change—a realization that at some point one betrayed the true self and embraced a false mode of being. Epistrophic transformation, then, is a return to one’s essential identity—a return to a previous (and more authentic) way of life.

Under the second Trump Administration America will be transformed—and it will be an epistrophic transformation. The citizens of the country have unmistakably rejected the Left’s claim that our traditional identity was morally untenable. This election was Americans’ announcement that the nation’s founding and way of life are good things. They affirmed that, in some existential way, the Left betrayed American ideals and turned the nation into something it’s not. Voters have given the new administration a mandate to return to who and what we were. In a great negation of the Left’s promise that “we are not going back,” Americans have replied, “Oh, yes we are.”

Mapping a trajectory for this return depends on understanding how the battle over our national identity unfolded—and how the war was ultimately won.

The story began in earnest on September 11, 2001. Economic and technological forces were already driving a profound transformation in American life, but there was still a consensus about who we were as a nation. 9/11 inflicted a great trauma on the national psyche: until we watched that spectacular catastrophe unfold live on television, we believed we were untouchable. Our misjudgment called for action: we had to make sure we would never suffer such an attack again. For better or worse (from the perspective of 2024, it seems like the latter), that action took the form of the Global War on Terror, a conflict that bitterly divided Americans in the second term of George W. Bush and ironically weakened America rather than strengthened it. As the conflict dragged on, citizens had to grapple with the possibility that we were the bad guys, an idea not entertained since Vietnam. And so, the final wound inflicted by 9/11 was a crisis of American confidence—specifically an identity crisis that centered precisely on who we are.

That crisis fueled the rise of Barack Obama. He was undeniably a leftist—a community organizer molded by some of the most radical thinkers of the ‘60s revolution. But our media sold Americans a false vision of Obama as a “little-D democrat,” a center-left uniter—a rationalist who wanted to fully realize the guiding ideas of the American Founding. In truth, he wanted to abandon them. His covert aim was to overcome the constitutional limits on power, to encourage Americans to embrace a notion of “global citizenship,” and to liberate the nation’s consciousness from the shackles of tradition.

He used the language of the American tradition to conceal these aims. But even with his great oratorical skills, he occasionally spoke the quiet part out loud. On the eve of his presidency, he explicitly stated that his goal was to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Indeed, we regularly disappointed him by resisting that mission. When we did, he would chide us with the reminder that “that’s not who we are.” But we cannot forget that his core project was to change “who we are.”

In short, Obama’s legacy was an attempt to force a metanoic transformation. Achieving it required a cultivation of American shame and regret. By fixating on the country’s flaws and failures, he prepared citizens for a reinvention of national identity. From now on, America would “lead from behind.” We would abandon the idea of American exceptionalism, recognizing that from the perspective of its own citizens every nation is exceptional. The logical implication, of course, was that American exceptionalism was untrue. The people’s goodwill toward our first African American president meant that Obama had a free hand to reform the nation. He overhauled health care, fomented racial unrest, and coerced non-governmental institutions (media, Big Tech, academia, corporate America, and Hollywood) to carry out his cultural revolution. And he was remarkably successful.

The 2016 election of Donald Trump was never supposed to happen. Democrats were drunk on the “demographics are destiny” canard. The ethnic makeup of America would ensure Democratic rule (of the left-progressive variety) in perpetuity. The fundamental transformation of the nation would continue apace with Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory. Trump’s candidacy was a last-gasp of the old America—one that was supposedly too white, too nationalist, too individualistic, too committed to self-reliance, too bigoted, and too cold-hearted. “Make America Great Again” was roundly mocked as a slogan. America, the Left told us, had never been all that great. Recriminations of this sort were necessary—a metanoic transformation depends on a complete rejection of past identity. If America was to be fully reconstituted, its citizens needed to be humiliated: they must accept that the nation is fundamentally flawed, and they must be shamed if they persist in believing otherwise.

But Democrats remained blind to the implications of “Make America Great Again,” a mantra that announced an epistrophic counter-revolution. Not only did millions of citizens believe that America had been great and exceptional—in some important way, they felt that it no longer was. Trump’s candidacy was an invitation for people to disavow Obama’s metanoic fundamental transformation and work to recover the national identity that had been lost along the way. Of course, Trump won. And the feral panic that gripped the Left grew out of the awareness that perhaps Obama’s transformation was built on sand—perhaps his vision for a changed America wasn’t inevitable. The fact that so many of Obama’s reforms had been achieved through executive orders meant that they could be undone in the same way. Some were, but by and large, elites’ determined “resistance” to Trump’s epistrophic agenda limited the impact of his first term. Having learned the lesson of 2016, Democrats understood that they could very well lose in 2020. So, they pulled out all the stops.

The incendiary character of Obama’s revolution—which had remained implicit until Americans stopped cooperating—came into full view as election season began. The first sign was the pandemic: a worldwide disruption of life for a virus that 99.9% of people survived. Masks and vaccines became de facto requirements. To resist them was paranoid delusion, all at once a rejection of the secular god of Science, an intolerable defiance of government authority and expertise, and a selfish expression of the individual liberty that fuels Americans’ irrational devotion to the nation as it was.

George Floyd’s death gave us nationwide riots that lasted months—and a renewed insistence on the inherent evil of America and its people. Like Obama years before, the New York Times’ 1619 Project advanced the metanoic itinerary through revisionist history: the Left moved the nation’s founding from 1776 to 1619 (the year the first ship of captured Africans arrived on American shores). The pandemic, the riots, DEI, CRT, gender insanity, the partisan weaponization of government bureaucracy, open borders, and the blatant hypocrisy and contradictions that came with all of it were a Herculean effort to convince Americans that the nation they had known was fundamentally corrupt. And for a while, it worked.

Biden won the presidency, if under very questionable circumstances. His narrow victory enabled the Left’s costly delusion that Trump’s election had been an aberration: it was an accident, a momentary bump in the road that delayed the fundamental transformation of the nation—but one that hadn’t derailed it. With Trump’s defeat, Democrats were convinced that voters had come to their senses. The party claimed a mandate to continue their grand metanoic project of dismantling the nation. At bottom, “wokeness” was a coordinated effort to humiliate, intimidate, and exhaust regular Americans. The goal was to force their surrender to the inevitable metanoic “arc of history.” Social justice hysteria seeped into every corner of American life. Saying the wrong thing could get you canceled. Resisting the vaccine could cost your reputation and livelihood. Merely voicing skepticism of the new (false) truths earned you social opprobrium—and even disrupted lifelong relationships with loved ones.

The new order required people to lie to others, about others, and to themselves. Individuals had to pretend they couldn’t tell the difference between a man and a woman. They were pressured to go along with the fiction that being white meant a person was spiritually irredeemable. They had to agree that illegally letting in tens of millions of unvetted immigrants could only be a good thing for America, and then, despite all evidence, they had to pretend it wasn’t happening. Similar dynamics unfolded in relation to inflation, the economy, crime, punishment, history, and almost every other salient issue.

But at precisely the moment the Left stood poised to complete their reinvention of America with a win that would ensure one-party rule in perpetuity, safeguarding the fruits of their revolution…well, Americans looked around. We were tired of lying. Tired of pretending that we don’t live in one of the fairest, most tolerant, most decent nations in the history of the world—tired of all of it.

In the end, 2024 was a referendum on identity. Who are we? Which nation do you prefer? The one that we inherited from our American ancestors? Or the one that disavowed our traditional identity and culture, “dismantled” it, and demanded your false contrition? We were offered two choices. One candidate promised to consolidate the achievements of 2020’s revolution and complete the fundamental transformation announced by 2008’s “Hope and Change.” The other promised a restoration—a return to who and what we were. For most, the choice was obvious. We would return America to its former greatness. We would end the self-recriminations. And while we would still strive to improve where we failed, we would embrace our history rather than reject it—if for no other reason than because a rejection of our history can only be a rejection of ourselves.

Four years after the crushing defeat in 2020, Americans chose to return to Trump. By doing so, they chose to return to our heritage and its vision of who we are, how we live, and what we cherish. The win in 2024 was massive, and the explanation is simple—Americans prefer a positive vision for the nation rather than crippling, chiding, moralistic self-flagellation. Americans said they want a nation. And not just any nation—the one we’ve always had. The metanoic model for transformation—embodied by Obama’s “fundamental transformation”—was unmistakably relegated to the dustbin of history. Instead, we will have an epistrophic embrace of who we were (and will be once more). The American return can now commence. We will make America great again.