The Battle AheadThe next two or three election cycles will determine whether America will retain liberal democracy, or will become a woke soft totalitarianism
Megan McArdle says the loony leftists who think the woke Berkeley law professor took Sens. Hawley and Cornyn to school are living in dream world. Excerpts:
The whole thing quickly became a Rorschach test. Many progressives cheered to see Professor Bridges school a reactionary Republican. But conservatives also cheered, because they see a gift to Republican election campaigns.
Unlike a Rorschach test, however, this one has a right answer, and the progressives have it wrong. Moreover, the fact that they can’t see just how badly this exchange went for their side shows what a big mistake it was to let academia and media institutions turn into left-wing monocultures.
More:
When I was reporting on the story of transgender college swimmer Lia Thomas, I noticed a curious disconnect. If you read newspapers, watched television or listened to academic experts, you might have thought that most people supported Thomas, with some dissent from a few reactionaries or jealous competitors. Yet the overwhelming majority of people I actually spoke to thought it was unfair for her to compete in women’s events, even though most of them were liberals who would never dream of voting Republican.
They were, however, a fearfully silent majority, which meant Thomas’s supporters never had to come up with good arguments. Instead, many of my questions got essentially the same answer as the one Bridges ultimately gave to Hawley: Even asking the question is transphobic and dangerous.
Within a narrow set of media and academic circles, this was a devastatingly effective tactic that made it impossible for opponents to organize an effective response. Outside those circles, however, it failed utterly; the swim federation swiftly made new rules to bar Thomas, along with other athletes who transitioned after puberty, from participating in future races.
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I am significantly more to the Right than Andrew Sullivan, yet I invite you to look at his second paragraph above as a characterization of wokeness-in-power as a radical distortion of a liberal society. Sullivan believes that the Democrats today are the enemies of a liberal society — and he is correct. The question in my own mind is whether or not it is possible to restore a liberal society, or if we are compelled to choose between left-illiberalism or right-illiberalism. If we are going to have any kind of shot at a restoration of liberal society, wokeness must be destroyed. It has burrowed very deep within the institutions of American life, and extricating it will not be easy. A conservative government attempting to do so would need to be fearless, ruthless, and focused like a surgeon.
This might well be our last chance. We know from survey after survey that Millennials and Zoomers are far to the Left on cultural issues, and are eager and willing to use authoritarian measures to silence dissent and curtail other liberties (James Poulos’s “Pink Police State”). As members of that generation take over institutional leadership, they are probably going to cannibalize those institutions from within, and set up even more stringent gatekeeping policies to ensure ideological conformity for those who seek entrance into the Inner Ring. America will be more polarized, and more fanatical at the top. And we certainly know that the Left has no problem using the security state and civil unrest against perceived threats to their preferred order. Donald Trump freaked them all out, but we know that he was never a meaningful threat to them, because he is so undisciplined, and the kind of people who rallied to his standard were those easily conned by grifters and mountebanks. As appalling as the January 6 events were, there is zero chance that that ridiculous mob could have overthrown the US government.
The far more serious threat to our democracy is in what Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley might have said and done during the MAGA Gotterdammerung. I’m not trying to downplay the ugliness of January 6 — you will remember that I supported at the time impeaching Trump over his behavior in those days — but rather to say that January 6 was nothing compared to the woke takeover of our institutions, vis-à-vis preserving American democracy. Think of it: the President of the United States wants the government to stand between parents and their minor children for the sake of guaranteeing that those minor children can receive cross-sex hormones in an effort to change their sex. This is something that the woke ruling class cannot bring itself to accept is an issue up for debate!
People who grew up under Soviet communism know from experience that the State asserted the primacy of its connection to children, over and against parents. In the USSR, Pavlik Morizov was the child-martyr who turned his father in to Soviet authorities, and who was killed by his family for the betrayal — thus becoming a celebrated figure of Soviet mythology. The ruling class is going to start presenting Pavlik Morizovs soon — and both Hollywood and the news media will dutifully play their roles in enforcing official ideology. Recently I watched a series of network TV segments for Pride month, in which the only acceptable way to deal with a trans or genderqueer child was full affirmation. To even think otherwise — why, that’s transphobic, and putting the lives of trans people are risk!
These next two or three election cycles will determine whether or not America is doomed to soft totalitarianism, or if the people will rise up and elect leaders who are able and willing to fight very hard, and very smartly, to roll back wokeness. I like to think that the idiocy on display in Washington last week, from the woke Berkeley prof, is a sign that the ruling class is seriously out of touch with the people, but I can’t easily avoid the fear that in the end, there are too many Americans who are afraid to stand up, afraid to risk their own position within the professional world, and who instead will lie to themselves, and practice ketman. What is ketman? From Live Not By Lies:
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-battle-ahead/
