Once upon a time in America, there was a political movement that saw the adversarial relationship between Washington and Moscow as misguided at best, nefarious at worst.  It asserted that the United States government only pursued such an antagonism as a way of feeding the military industrial complex that enriched its elites and the politicians who did their bidding, to such an extent as to send American men and resources abroad in pursuit of meaningless wars.  It argued that America disguised its violent greed with cynical professions of fealty to ideals such as “freedom,” “democracy” and “human rights.” It saw the FBI and CIA as tools of this elite to suppress political opposition and maintain control. It viewed even apparently benign manifestations of American foreign policy such as USAID and the Voice of America as, at best, meaningless farces and, at worst, tools of ideological manipulation. It claimed that the American justice system was corrupt, a racist, imperialist system designed to defend the rich and powerful and oppress the common man. It wanted the United States government to stop funding scientific research on college campuses and was willing to use any means necessary to do. It argued that American institutions, built by slave-holding founders who valued private property rights above all, could not be reformed and needed to be destroyed.

Though the left in the 1960s and 1970s failed to achieve its revolutionary aims at the time, it turns out that it won the argument in the long run.  It would take many decades, but the “long march through the institutions” that many of its leading adherents pursued would ultimately bear fruit. Eventually, once they had come to dominate the commanding heights of American political and culture discourse at Harvard, in Hollywood, and at The New York Times, adherents of views like these would convince large swathes of the American people that indeed American ideals were never meant sincerely, that American foreign policy, despite the highfalutin justifications given by its practitioners, was never anything more than a cynical means of lining the pockets of the elite, and that the United States had been a force for evil, rather than good in the world. They convinced the American people that American institutions were corrupt and untrustworthy, that meritocracy was a lie, that racism was endemic, that politics had never really been anything but a means for the powerful to take what they could. This sort of cynicism was taken for wisdom and insight, and anyone who argued against it was seen as either hopelessly naïve or a shill for the powerful.

What the left did not anticipate was what would happen when they did win the argument. Instead of doing a full mea culpa and joining the wretched of the Earth to overthrow capitalist imperialism and usher in a global socialist utopia, the American people decided that if their ideals were meaningless, their institutions were corrupt, and naked self-interest was the true currency of politics, then it was time to be done with the farce. As Steven Bannon put it in the New York Times, “America is not an idea. It’s not! It’s a country with a border and a group of citizens.” He might have added, paraphrasing Theodore Herzl, that America was just a nation like all the others. If an interventionist foreign policy did not immediately benefit the average American, then to hell with all that “making the world safe for democracy.” Why should the average American bear the burden of world leadership? What’s in it for them? After all, it’s not like foreign leaders had ever even bothered to say “thank you.”

It turned out, however, that many on the left did not really believe in everything they had been saying.  Sure, there were some hard-core ideologues who truly believed that the United States was an imperialist colossus that needed to be brought low for the sake of global revolutionary justice, as their erstwhile supporters and sympathizers in Moscow, Beijing, Hanoi, and Havana believed (or at least once did). But the vast majority had just wanted to give the system a push, and wanted to let off a little steam the way teenagers do when fighting with their parents (and many of course were teenagers when they started).  They called for the destruction of something they did not think could ever be destroyed, they tried to change something they did not really think could change, and perhaps did not even really want it to. But the system turned out to ultimately be far more vulnerable than they thought. The American people could actually be convinced that their system was corrupt to its core, and they could even be made to turn against it, or at least view its deconstruction with a combination of studied ambivalence and not a little glee. The “great silent majority,” whose silence would be transformed into the great chaotic din of social media, could in fact be persuaded. And like a child who counts on his parents to remain calm during his wildest tantrum, the sudden shift of supposed certainties scared the purported rebels most of all.

So what is the left to do now that it is learning the truth of the ancient curse: “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it”? It might finally be time for those who mostly believed in the American story all along to come clean. Admit that American hegemony was actually good for the world. Admit that maybe the United States really did seek to defend self-determination in South Vietnam and sow democracy in Iraq. Admit that though American institutions have always had their flaws, they have also always been better than most, and that the United States really has been a land of opportunity for countless millions. Admit that therefore meritocracy and even color-blindness are ideals worth pursuing, even if they are difficult to achieve. It might already be too late to reverse the tide. But if you believe in the American experiment, you are running out of time and options to save it.

This essay was contributed by a historian and policy professor at a major academic institution who has chosen to remain anonymous due to professional considerations.