Here’s a question that I do not know the answer to: “Is the Left on the Cusp of Permanent Triumph, Or Is It Committing Suicide?”
Menton points out that the sudden acceleration of “cancel culture” and social media “de-platforming” are only two arrows in the left’s quiver of intimidation.
Another weapon—more bludgeon than arrow, perhaps—ratchets up the left’s “coercive suppression of dissent” to new, Soviet or Chinese communist levels of ferociousness.
One main tactic is the universalization of diversity imperatives. The whole “diversity” gambit was always noxious because it never had anything to do with fostering genuine diversity—which requires a sedulous fostering of dissenting opinion and open debate about contentious issues.
On the contrary, the diversity racket was always about enforcing conformity and ideological purity.
The difference now is that what had been confined to a few administrative proclamations and particular “consciousness-raising” classes has metastasized and is poised to dictate the emotional and ideological weather of entire institutions.
This development was possible only because of the left’s “long march through the institutions.” It began in the 1960s with a handful of outside agitators.
Bureaucratic Instruction
They didn’t necessarily look like radicals. Many of the examples that Menton adduces are just ordinary academic administrators who, in embracing the poison of woke ideology, have trampled all over the ideals of individual rights, due process, and fostering an atmosphere where substantive, fact-based argument, not racial grievance-mongering, could thrive.The catastrophe can sometimes appear almost innocuous because it’s typically promulgated in the rancid soporific syllables of bureaucratic instruction.
Jacobson cites the case of Martha Pollock, the wretched president of Cornell University, who last summer not only recommended Ibram X. Kendi’s truly egregious book “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” but went on to designate, with enthusiastic approval of the faculty Senate, that the book be an official Cornell “Community Book Read.”
Nor was that all. The central message of Kendi’s book is that whites are bad and that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Pollock apparently agreed, for she declared that “we must embed anti-racism” across all aspects of life at Cornell.
‘Permanent Triumph’
Menton is undoubtedly right that the people pushing this toxic (and, by the way, deeply anti-American) ideology believe that they are “on the cusp of permanent triumph in America.”They control (if but narrowly) all the levers of official power in Washington.
They are not so well-positioned in state legislatures, but Washington is in the midst of a huge push to federalize, well, everything: elections, border control, and education at all levels.
Sure, there are remaining pockets of dissent. But it’s disorganized and, more to the point, its partisans lack the single-minded fanaticism of the left.
Those dissenting from the dictates of “critical race theory” and the rest of this garbage mostly just want to get on with their lives.
The left is determined to get on with everyone’s life.
Hence, the rituals of humiliation and excoriation that have become such a prominent feature of campus—and, increasingly—of corporate life and governmental overreach.
Menton ends by wondering whether it’s all hurtling toward a reductio ad absurdum that is tantamount to suicide.
We have already reached the point where the dictum “silence is violence” is enforced on many campuses.
‘Dance of Death’
The French dealt with such implicit counter-revolutionary activity through the “Law of Suspects,” promulgated in 1793.It required all citizens to carry certificates of “civism,” attesting that the bearer was a citizen in good standing.
Perhaps we will start in this country with a Fauci Vaccine Voucher, attesting to the bearer’s vaccination status, and hence, by implication, his subservience to the whole government program.
It won’t stop there, of course. Robespierre and his colleagues famously defined “suspects” as “those who have done nothing against freedom, also have done nothing for it.”
That could easily be dusted off and reformulated in terms of one’s support for Donald Trump, couldn’t it? Aren’t we almost there?
“All suspect people who are to be found on the territory of the Republic, and who are still in freedom, will be put under arrest.” How many innocent people has he rounded up and incarcerated?
Some estimates put Robespierre’s catch of people who had failed to “consistently demonstrate their commitment to the Revolution” at some 500,000. Maybe it was not quite so many.
Wray and his colleagues in the corrupt DOJ have a ways to go if they are to catch up. But they have all the time in the world and the entire apparatus of the U.S. government at their disposal.
I believe that Menton is probably right that they are engaged in a sort of dance of death that will result in its implosion. Eventually.
The trouble is, no one can say exactly when. I suspect there will be a lot of damage to individual liberty and what we used to be able to call, without irony, the American way of life between now and then.
