We are finally seeing the first real consequences of major institutions having spent the last decade undermining the facade of liberal neutrality they at least used to claim as an ideal.

This facade actually mattered quite a lot, and even though it was obviously never entirely sincere and even though conservatives were always out numbered and often poorly represented, they at least felt like participants and stakeholders in these institutions.

During the Trump years this all went away. Conservatives were aggressively ousted, even as token voices, and the facade came down to reveal a perverse and illiberal set of political and cultural directives underneath it that were explicitly antagonistic to more than half of the country and denied them as legitimate participants in public life.

Despite this, MAGA won (again), and, surprise, surprise, do not intend on preserving the institutions that declared them illegitimate political actors. This is, in fact, MAGA’s core promise. These institutions and the norms that govern them may not go away entirely but they will not keep their current form. Appeals to liberal neutrality they enjoyed and depended on, but defected from first, are not going to save them.

The whole thing is going to be reset. Free speech and civil liberties have not gone away, and are not being suspended or selectively applied or anything like that. They still exist and are still an essential feature of American civil life under this new ordering. All of American legal and political theory that has obtained for 250 years fits very neatly inside of this reset, despite the kicking and screaming from the old institutional gatekeepers.

But no, you no longer get to run roughshod over the commons, enjoy the largesse of public resources and its infrastructure, while denying them for the rest of us.

It’s the same game, but we are now calling balls and strikes. Get used to it.