The Great American Cultural Revolution

Denizens of the political left are yearning for the Revolution. In some senses, Victor Davis Hanson explains (via Maggie’s Farm), they have it already. America is undergoing a cultural revolution, not quite as radical as the Chinese version, but destructive in its own way.

We note, without commentary, that China, having undergone its own version in the 1960s and 1970s is happy to sit back and watch America implode. While Gordon Chang, always wrong but never in doubt, proclaims that the Chinese regime is going to self-destruct, a brief glance at today’s America will tell him that his vision might have alighted on the wrong part of the world.

I take exception to one aspect of Hanson’s analogy-- aside from the fact that I am far from enamored with analogies-- but his prediction of a coming counterrevolution, something that will undo wokeness, does not quite do justice to what really happened in France after the Terror. 

With all due deference to Hanson, who knows far more about history than I do, I suggest that after the Terror France was in chaos. It was looking for a Savior, someone who would rescue it and would restore its greatness. The solution-- a Corsican by name of Napoleon Bonaparte, and a series of wars. Beware the arrival of a warrior savior, an emperor who will pretend to save us from our own follies.

Anyway, for now, Hanson declares that the nation has done a cultural flip/flop. Everything is upside/down, beginning with the effort to overcome merit.

One day SAT tests were blind mechanisms to allow the less privileged to compete on the basis of talent rather than parentage. The next day such tests were deemed counterrevolutionary, racist enemies of the people. Universities boast of rejecting 60-70 percent of those who scored perfect on SATs, as if their excellence was proof of their “privilege.”

We have flung open the jails and refuse to prosecute criminals-- because we believe that crime is in the mind of the beholder. Besides, criminals are merely expressing their oppressed state, taking what they could not earn from people who they believe have robbed them.

Of course, we are now living in a borderless world, overwhelmed by an invasion from South and Central America. You can drone on all you want about how these new invaders are seeking the American dream, but, ask yourself this, what is the average IQ of Central Americans. If the number is in the 70s, the truth is, they are not going to do anything but the most menial labor. 

And surely, they will contribute to the problem of homelessness. One likes to blame it all on an insufficient number of zealous social workers-- if that is not sick humor, I don’t know what is-- but the results are visible everywhere.

Public hygiene be damned, for being a bourgeois contrivance:

So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection were rebranded as mere lifestyle choices of the unfortunate, not to be judged wrong or unlawful by the victimizers who supposedly made thousands homeless. Ancient laws of hygiene and municipal cleanliness were thrown out as bourgeois, as cities reverted to the protocols of their medieval forebears.

And then, of course, there was the ultimate in gaslighting, the deviant notion that you can change your sex by changing your mind:

It was no longer enough to support civil rights for the transgendered. Suddenly any questioning of the wisdom of biologically born males competing in women’s sports or of teenagers with penises undressing among teenage girls in locker rooms, or of state-sponsored drag-queen shows with children in attendance condemned one as transphobic and worse.

Anyone with an ounce of rational thought could have predicted the results. Hanson summarizes them well:

In less than three years, our major cities became filthy to the point of unhealthiness. Violent crime and thievery drove businesses and commuters away. Subways at night became the domain of the homeless and criminal. Vacancy rates in San Francisco or downtown Portland shot up to 25 percent or more. Millions began leaving Jacobin blue cities and states, and headed for sanctuaries in more suburban and rural red states.

It gets worse:

The more the government printed money it did not have, the more the country was slandered as cruel and mean to its underclass. The more standards were dropped for admission, hiring, promotion, and retention, the more employers were deemed unfair and bigoted.

As the American Jacobin phase accelerated, the more it, too, seemed to pursue its own destruction. Few now trust that the graduates of the Ivy League and marquee universities know what they once did. And why not, when students are admitted without test scores, but are assured passing grades, watered-down classes, and graduation to be synonymous with admission?

The war against merit has flooded the system with mediocrities. This means that the nation’s educational establishment is not producing capable talent to run the businesses of tomorrow.

Didn’t we read, just the other day, that the chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor, now in the process of building a new factory or two in Arizona, has discovered that America does not have the talent to work in that factory. Thus, said chairman is looking for more visas for Taiwanese or even Chinese engineers. 

Consider that a footnote, a consolation we can indulge while we are awaiting the arrival of our very own Napoleon.