Why aren't good results translating into enthusiasm for Trump?

A lot is going right.

Numbers for housing sales, jobs and the stock market are all heading in the right direction, and at a robust clip. There is a new seriousness in foreign policy, most recently encapsulated in Trump's very fine speech in Seoul. He is the first president to outline, in the kind of forum in which he spoke (the South Korean legislature) in full, horrifying detail what a human-rights nightmare and economic basket case North Korea is. He balanced the invitation for the North to reverse course and join the normal-people nations of the world that has been extended by previous presidents with an unprecedentedly stern assertion of resolve to do what's necessary if the North chooses to continue posing a threat. The results of trade and security talks in China are not yet in, and Trump still has stops in the Philippines and Vietnam to make, but given the success of this trip so far and his track record for behaving much better abroad than he dies in Washington and New York, it's likely going to go well.

So why is a consensus shaping up that the off-year election results of Tuesday night signal a renewed zeal on the part of the nation's Left, a zeal the intensity of which may portend seismic shifts in November 2018?

Culture, people.

I can't stress this enough.

There are several levels of cultural factors at play here:

1. Leftists love their identity politics. Virginia now has its first transgendered state representative. The linked article is a CNN piece crowing about that and other demographic firsts it considers significant.
2. This love if identity politics extends to portraying any right-of-center bristling at it as bigotry. The most obvious example in the just-concluded campaigns is the Latinos for Victory pickup truck ad trying to tie Ed Gillespie to fringe exclusionary ideology.
3. The ineptitude of a Republican congress that can't get the "A"CA repealed, can't come up with a simple, uniformly pro-freedom tax reform package, and take the initiative on anything else of significance because there is always some special-interest group that will lobby it to death. There is clearly an absence of the spine requisite for dealing with that.
4. Polls show that educational rot has yielded its results. Significant percentages of millennials think socialism is preferable to a free market.
5. The Trump base will not jettison its delusion that the ill-defined populism it touts is the wave of the future.

I harbor no illusions that the tide is with the principles this blog defends daily. They must be defended nonetheless.

Donald Trump sure as hell isn't going to do it. He's not up to the task. Neither are any of his boot-lickers.

It starts with acknowledging that a sovereign God ultimately rules this universe. Out of that comes a respect for the way he has designed His creation. Out of that ought to come an understanding that freedom is the second most precious gift a human being gets after his or her life. From that, it follows that freedom only thrives and endures if it's exercised for godly purposes.

Tuesday turned out as it did because Trump is correctly perceived as a narcissistic blowhard with no set of guiding principles beyond self-aggrandizement (Ralph Northam won 95 percent of the voters who disapprove of Trump's job performance), because our most influential cultural institutions hate God, and because people have become scared of their own freedom.

Reversing this is the task before us.

Not easy, but essential.