I woke up one morning recently with a single thought in my head: The revolution is not starting, it's almost over. What we're seeing now is the consolidation stage – a mopping-up operation.
Let me explain. Visualize two major galaxies in the socio-political-economic universe. Galaxy A is characterized by things like (in no particular order):
Respect for tradition
Valuing one's family and ethnic heritage (but respecting other ethnic traditions)
Valuing Western culture
Respect and preference for classic forms of art and architecture
Preference for classic styles of poetry, drama, music, and literature (and, for music, that which has authentic folk roots)
Valuing traditional gender roles
Opposition to the corruption of language and the neglect of logic
A sense of place – of being anchored, rooted
A sense of community (in the traditional sense)
Patriotism (not to be confused with nationalism)
Religious faith, typically monotheism
Acceptance of natural hierarchies (in family, society, government, religion)
Belief in the rule of law
Emphasis on law and order, and individual responsibility
Respect for the Constitution (as written), including the Bill of Rights
A healthy skepticism as to the perfectibility of man
Valuing private property and property rights
Not being scandalized by differences in income and wealth
Loyalty to the land
Respect for hard work
Respect for the individual
Respect for life (from conception to natural death)
Belief in higher education as a conveyor of knowledge vs. political activism
Respect for history, vs. revisionism and erasing things from memory
Respect for science as independent from politics
Belief in small government and subsidiarity
On the economic side, belief in distributism, preference for self-employment
Support for strong, well-defended national borders
Belief in national (or even regional) currencies backed by something with intrinsic value
Preference for federalism
Preferring leaders to rulers
Reality-based politics, economics, government, foreign policy, etc.
Galaxy B is characterized by things like:
Militant atheism, or at the very least agnosticism
Hostility toward family and ethnic identification
Using language as a weapon to dominate the controlling narrative and neutralize opposition
Preference for degenerate, decadent, and deconstructionist forms of art, architecture, music, drama, literature, and poetry
Preference for the artificial and contrived
Opposition to gender roles and even to the concept of gender
Emphasis on “social justice” and collective, multi-generational guilt
Promotion of identity politics
Materialism
Humanism
Religious impulses (if any) directed toward paganism or polytheism
Belief in collectivism and totalitarianism
Support for eliminating national borders
Belief in world government, a world economy, and a world currency
Hostility toward individual rights and private property
Being “pro-choice”
Belief in science as primarily a political tool
Belief in the infinite malleability of the Constitution
Hostility toward capitalism and profit-making on any level
Belief in strict government programs and controls to insure equal social and economic outcomes
Belief in radical redistribution of wealth via taxation and confiscation
Moral relativism (preference for “ethics”)
Subjectivism
Preference for paper-based inflatable currencies
Preferring emotion over reason
Low opinion of rural people and rural life
Rootlessness
Authoritarianism
General alienation
Radical environmentalism
Utopianism
Philosophical utilitarianism
Fantasy-based economics, politics, government, foreign policy, etc.
These are long lists, but I'm sure they aren't comprehensive. And I'm sure there are people out there who will check off the points and say “Hey! I agree with some things on both lists! What about that?” Well, fine – I never meant to imply that everyone is a mindless robot with no free will who will automatically match every single point on one list and none on the other. I call these “galaxies” for a reason – a galaxy is big and broad, and seemingly chaotic on one level, but if you stand back a bit you can see a pattern, and see that is has a center of gravity. And I think there's a center of gravity to these as well; it would be quite difficult, it seems to me, to have equal weighting between the two. The points within each galaxy are, as can be readily demonstrated just by studying current news and commentary, highly inter-correlated. If a given person agrees with enough points in one galaxy, you can be fairly confident they will agree most of the others as well, and likewise to disagree with most, if not all, of the points in the other galaxy. (In fact, I would almost urge anyone who finds themselves half in one and half in the other to re-examine their lines of reasoning. This is assuming that consistency is a value in its own right.)
Needless to say, these “galaxies” are highly correlated with the two major political parties of our time in the U.S. But it goes way beyond our borders and, in fact, back in history at least as far as the French Revolution. These two world views have been fighting it out for at least that long. Galaxy A, often termed traditionalism or conservatism, has been on the defensive more often than not, and Galaxy B, often termed liberalism or progressivism, has been on the offensive. Revolutions are invariably started, and fought, by members of Galaxy B, and counter-revolutions by members of Galaxy A.
Another point is that revolutions, unlike revolts or coups, are not just about power but about ideas. The French revolutionaries may have had plenty of grievances against the Ancien Regime, but their banners were all inscribed “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite”, not things like “Raise the Minimum Wage” or “Increase Farm Price Supports”. And where, in turn, do ideas begin? Where are they birthed? Not among the proletariat or the peasantry, who may be dissatisfied and oppressed but who are unable to conceptualize or describe the basic issues. No, it always starts with the intelligentsia – either within the world of formal academics or within the world of philosophers, economists, writers, lecturers, and activists. These are the people who mobilize the “oppressed masses” and thus make revolution possible – and the oppressed masses don't even have to agree with all of the ideas and theories; all they need to have is grievances. (How many in the mob storming the Winter Palace had read Das Kapital? Please.) (You might say that a notable exception is China's Cultural Revolution where everyone had a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. But please note that he was already in power, and that what he was overseeing was, in effect, a third Chinese Revolution – a revolution from above. More on this point later on.)
So to return to the home front – I say that the revolution is almost over. But when did it start? Well – and one might say ironically – the groundwork was laid at the beginning of the Republic, when the United States was founded on ideas first and foremost. Ideas, that is, as opposed to things like race, religion, ethnic group, tradition, blood lines, and the land – in short, the things that had sustained cultures, nations, and civilizations from the dawn of time, and had, in fact, contributed to their survival. (If you can find a nation, culture, or civilization anywhere in history for which things like race, religion, ethnic group, tradition, blood lines, and the land were not of vital importance, let me know. The ones who failed in these areas were overrun or self-destructed, so we don't hear about them – and the ones that succeeded were the ones that valued all of these things and used them as sources of energy and inspiration. They only failed when they stopped believing.)
But those considerations were not good enough for the Founders; in fact, they may have considered those things as stumbling blocks when it came to realization of Utopia on earth. After all, isn't it an affront to human dignity to claim that purely accidental factors like race and religion (and gender, for that matter) should be allowed to dominate a society in its values and actions? And it's not that those things were not in evidence, or correlated to some degree with the vision of the Founders, but ideas and their realization were job one. The U.S. was founded by idealists and intended to be an ideal society. Compared to which, the – what I call – “eternal verities” – the tangible, visible features of human society and culture – were secondary. Not necessarily to be suppressed, but certainly never to be allowed to carry much weight. They would be tolerated up to a point, but never allowed to predominate – and, in our time, not even tolerated.
All well and good, and it worked, more or less, for a good long while. But then other notions started to intrude and get people's attention, and the “marketplace of ideas” shifted into high gear. Socialism was invented in Europe, but it didn't take long before it was imported into the U.S. Eventually communism – hard-core socialism – came along as another import. (Fascism came a bit later, and never quite took hold, at least not as originally conceptualized.) And thus the seeds of Galaxy B were planted in the hearts and minds of Americans – certainly not all, but enough so that when Progressivism came along it was an instant hit. And that was also the point at which home-grown intellectuals like Woodrow Wilson started to exert themselves in favor of socialism on the home front, although it was the Soviet Union that stole the march on us when it came to spreading socialism (AKA communism) world-wide. And thus was born the admiration – nay, worship – of the Soviet Union among American liberals. If they can do it, why can't we? (You'll notice the same thing is said these days, by the same people, about Cuba.)
So not long after, there was a meeting of the minds between the American intelligentsia and the propaganda apparatus of the Soviet Union, and the effect extended into the highest reaches of government under the New Deal (recall the term “brain trust” – that was the successful intellectual assault on the federal government). At the same time, the Depression (whether it just happened or was engineered is a topic for another day) made formerly self-reliant Americans hunger for rescue and salvation from the government, and along with that inevitably came the ideas behind it. (You want a CCC job? You also have to listen to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.) In other words, some forms of overt, unambiguous socialism became the norm, and accepted by the majority of Americans – not just as a stop-gap temporary measure but as a part of new, improved government – government which would take care of people rather than simply leaving them alone to take care of themselves. Thus we have a thread: European intellectuals – American intellectuals – American government – American people. And in terms of my model, Americans who had, overwhelmingly, belonged in Galaxy A started to drift into Galaxy B, in most cases having no way of knowing where it would ultimately lead. (And it could be said that the current generation is paying the price for their grandparents' innocence and naivete.)
Now was this a revolution, strictly speaking? Some have called it a “revolution within the form”, i.e. the Constitution survived, the basic structure of government survived, but a new layer of government activism and involvement in the lives of the citizens was added. The social, economic, and political dynamics of the country changed drastically – much more, in fact, than they would have changed in the case of an old-fashioned revolt or coup (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”). Things changed because ideas changed, in other words – ideas, and expectations as well, and levels of tolerance for government involvement in more and more aspects of everyday life. (Recall that the income tax was applauded when it applied only to millionaires. But when it started to impinge on ordinary middle-class folks, people started to think they'd been conned – which they had.)
And if the point of revolutions is to implement ideas, then the New Deal was a revolution, even if the things we normally associate with revolutions (war, armies, battles, fighting in the streets, public executions, etc.) were largely absent. The New Deal was a revolution for which the Progressive Era laid the groundwork and planted the seeds – but the groundwork for the Progressive Era was laid at the Founding, and augmented a little at a time by things like Jacksonian Democracy and the Civil War and its aftermath (and, by the way, by an increasing zeal for empire building, which inevitably increases the size of government, which in turn leads to an increase in government supervision of the citizenry).
So a society can be “revolutionary” without having a revolution in the traditional sense. But the results may be at least as dramatic, or even more so. It's been said that much of the New Deal was a way to stave off revolution – I would say it was the substitution of a revolution from above for a revolution from below. The government met the proletariat half way – more than half way, in fact. But the urge for revolution didn't start on the streets, it started in the halls of academe and spread to the White House and Congress. And thus, it was more readily controlled and directed by the people already in power than a peasants' uprising would have been. No true revolutionary really wants “power to the people” – to the proletariat or the peasantry. Heaven forbid! The revolutionary uses those people as proxy warriors and cannon fodder in order to put himself into position to seize power. Lenin did this, and so did Mao. (To see how much they valued the peasantry one only has to observe that soon after taking power they proceeded to exterminate as many of the peasantry as they could, even to the extent of creating artificial famines.) (And what's wrong with peasants, you ask? They are naturally conservative because they are tied to the land and to the cycles of nature. The urban proletariat is more malleable because they are merely chained to their workbenches and assembly lines. And the revolutionary is attached to nothing. He is rootless and has no loyalties to anything but ideas, i.e. his own. This gives him great flexibility, mobility, and power.)
So if the New Deal enlisted a large portion of Americans in the socialist cause, it was still based on need – on desperate times. The war of ideas – of deep convictions – had just begun, as had “the long march through the institutions” – a phrase coined by a communist activist in the 1960s, but after the process was well under way. And this phenomenon can almost be used as a metric for the degree of shock and violence involved in any given revolution. There have been revolutions in which the revolutionaries basically just took over. They stormed the palace, imprisoned and then exiled or executed the king or dictator, threw the high-level government workers in prison or exiled them to a gulag, and assumed total power without having to go through a long drawn-out process of persuasion (to say nothing of holding elections). In that case, the ideas that were fed into the revolution to facilitate its consolidation were, in turn, enabled to spread throughout, and dominate, the culture. This was certainly true in Russia and China; my bet is the vast majority of the populace didn't know what hit them. So once the revolution was a fait accompli, the long process of “persuasion” had to begin – except that use of tools like prison, exile, and execution tends to shorten the time span and make things more efficient. One might say that in those cases fear took over from ideas until a new generation came along that had never heard any other ideas, so the fear factor could be toned down a bit (but never completely eliminated).
But in lieu of violent revolution there was, indeed, a long march through the institutions in this country, and it started, as already stated, in the universities and colleges, and among free-range intellectuals turning out books, pamphlets, magazines, and even films. Film, in fact, presented an outstanding propaganda apparatus for progressive ideas starting prior to World War II and accelerating thereafter – reaching escape velocity in the 1960s. Television lagged behind, and it was only with the advent of cable TV that its propaganda influence became an essential part of the cultural substrate, although the potential value was well-known and appreciated way before that. (The rap on TV in the 1950s was that it was the new opiate of the masses and “a vast wasteland”. Now that it's a leading propaganda tool, that's hard to remember or even believe.)
But if Galaxy B was ascendant prior to World War II, the war necessitated a pause in the proceedings, after which we – predictably – regressed to a more conservative mode, also known as the 1950s. And you'll notice that popular culture in the 1950s is always presented by the current “woke” crowd as an object of abject horror, like, how could anyone have ever thought that way – lived that way? Lawrence Welk? Ozzie and Harriet? “I like Ike”? Cocktail hour? Kidney-shaped swimming pools? Please. How un-hip can you get? But – the seeds were being sown for the next revolution. Yes, we had the beatniks, but they were outliers and proud of it. They screeched and wailed and complained but they never tried to actually convert the “squares”; that would have been considered a lost cause and a waste of time that could be better spent in smoky jazz clubs smoking marijuana and beating on bongo drums. But they morphed into the hippies, and showed up at the front lines of many protests that took place in the 1960s.
Ah, the 1960s. When idealism came back into vogue and our youth became as fervent as their forebears who formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and made their way over to Spain to fight for the communists and against the Catholic Church. But this time the war was on the home front – against the war in Vietnam, against the draft, and against oppression in general by all the tight-assed, character-armored white men who were in control of the government and big business. And – not to forget – one of the main energizers was the burgeoning drug culture and the reaction to it on the part of the authorities. So it all provided a huge boost – in membership and influence – for Galaxy B, and huge losses of cultural territory for Galaxy A. This was the point at which, as I see it, the culture war which had been building up steam for generations finally reached the tipping point. (And I note that we're talking about the 1960s, i.e. 50-plus years ago. Anyone who thinks we're at the tipping point now has been asleep and dreaming all this time. Or, they're too young to remember, which is what I'm here for.)
But again, it was not a revolution in the strict sense. Once again, the structures of government remained intact, and – truth be known – white males stayed in charge, no matter how fervent the cries for black power, woman power, “peace and love”, etc. were. In fact, the establishment fought back on many fronts, most successfully in the program to disarm and neutralize the black power movement by means of drugs and incarceration. Supply the inner city with drugs, then throw anyone in jail who falls for it. A perfectly marvelous strategy, and the pity of it is, it worked. (The drug part of this is still going strong after all these years, but the jail part is tapering off, and if that doesn't sound like a recipe for trouble I don't know what would.)
But in the meantime – camouflaged, if you will, by the spectacle on the streets (as exemplified by the riots during the 1968 Democratic convention, when Galaxy A and Galaxy B met toe to toe) – the long march, capitalizing on the chaos and disorder, began to metastasize. I've already pointed out the academe-intellectual-government thread, and this remained alive and well with things like Kennedy's “best and brightest”, who were inherited by Johnson and whose advice and the Vietnam debacle eventually led to his decision not to run for re-election in 1968. (Were they revolutionaries? Not intentionally, but their notions and policies were so provocative that they may as well have been.) But there was another, more insidious threat, namely from academe to teacher's colleges to teachers to the public schools, i.e. to America's youth. And eventually – the time frame depends on what part of the country you're talking about – Americans woke up one morning to find that their grade-school children were being exposed to materials formerly available only in sleazy “adult” movie houses frequented by men in trench coats, or at stag parties, or in gynecology textbooks. Imagine the shock and surprise when “Miss Pringle” of Norman Rockwell paintings turned out to be a radical leftist with moral anarchy on her/his/its mind. And this was followed quite swiftly by a mini-revolution in the public libraries, where simply walking in the door now may constitute a moral hazard. (And it wasn't only about “sex ed”, of course. It was also about all forms of political correctness. But sex ed was the point of the spear. If people would put up with that, they'd put up with anything.)
Institutions? Colleges and universities were long gone by now. Movies were long gone, and TV was soon to follow once cable took over. Then the public schools fell, along with public libraries. What was next? The most prominent answer was the Internet, which was, ironically, originally developed by the Department of Defense as a way to make communications more efficient within the military. But it soon became an instrument – the primary instrument, perhaps – for “agents of change”... “culture warriors”... the newest generation of revolutionaries.
A parallel phenomenon was the rise in “political correctness”, which I date to the opposition to Reagan and Bush I, and which has birthed, among other abominations, “cancel culture” and censorship by the social media. Now we see that we are closing in on the ideal totalitarian society – again, without the “benefit” of sudden and violent revolution.
At one point, not that long ago, I found myself asking “What's left?” All of the traditional cultural institutions were now occupied territory – and yet there seemed to be some holdouts here and there, and most of them were characterized by, let's say, masculinity. Oh hell, let's face it, they were dripping with testosterone. And I'm talking about professional sports – baseball, basketball, football, hockey, etc. And then – shazam! – almost overnight, these too fell by the wayside. Players were kneeling, uniforms were plastered with mini bumper stickers, and the pressure was on for team owners to do away with mascots and change team names. Some of them held out for a while, but when the networks and sponsors (not the fans, note) entered the fray it was over with. Now we have spectacles of billionaire team owners debating, in public, as to whether they should change the “Redskins” to the “Cute Widdle Bunny Wabbits”. It's all too grotesque.
And yet there was hope! Or so I thought. Surely NASCAR – the most adrenaline- and testosterone-laden enterprise on earth – would never capitulate. Wrong! They too have gone the way of all impotent flesh.
Next up for being led to the gallows – the NRA. We'll see how that works out. As of now, I would estimate that the “deplorables” are armed to the teeth and intending to stay that way, and I can hardly blame them. (And by the way, if a civil war begins in earnest before long, my money is on it starting in Virginia. Oh the ironies of history!)
The next stage – policing up the battlefield. Nothing is too trivial, too inconsequential, for the revolution to focus its laser-like sights on. So we are treated to the sight of CEOs of large corporations down on their knees, their heads pressed to the earth, blubbering for forgiveness by the mainstream media, the Twitterverse, and Antifa for having been so “insensitive” as to use the same racist/sexist/whatever product names and symbols for, in many cases, over 100 years. (“Please, please keep buying our products (sniffle)!”) And so good-bye to the smiling faces of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. The absurdity of it all belies its deadly seriousness.
Now we're in the territory of obliterating not only ideas, but also symbols. Symbols, and language – since virtually any word or phrase, any inflection or accent, can be seen as some sort of “dog whistle” by the insanely hypersensitive. It's to the point where the smart thing to do is to simply remain silent, lest one become censored, fired, or “canceled”. Like the Soviet officials of old who were air-brushed out of the pictures of the May Day parade standing on Lenin's tomb, every citizen runs the risk of being turned, in a heartbeat, into a non-person... a pariah... an exile. This is, as much as anything else, an essential feature of totalitarianism. There is no escape, no shelter, no mercy. The most one can hope for is a place in a not-too-crowded cattle car on the way to the gulag.
But to be a prisoner of conscience is preferable to being a slave whose mind and will have been sapped and extinguished by the State. This is a choice we may all have to make, and sooner than we would like.
There are many more issues to deal with, and questions to ask, and I intend to do so in subsequent posts – questions like:
Who's really running the show? (And no, it's not the losers dressed up like ninjas starting fires and destroying businesses in our large cities.)
Who benefits? (in the short or long run)
What happens next?
Will there be a counter-revolution (and if so, how will it begin and who will be in the front lines)?
The object of this post was simply to demonstrate that the revolution is in its final stages, and I believe I've done that.
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