USA 2020 Elections: Thread

[grarpamp]

Victor Davis Hanson: This Isn't Your Father's Left-Wing Revolution

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/10/this_isnt_your_fathers_left-wing_revolution_145908.html

Starry-eyed radicals in the 1960s and 1970s dreamed that they either
were going to take over America or destroy it.

One of their favorite mottos was "Change it or lose it," even as
protests focused on drugs, music, race, class, sex, fashion -- almost
anything and everything.

Sixties radicals tutored America on long hair; wire-rim eyeglasses;
who was a drag, a square, a bummer; and who was hip, cool, groovy,
mellow and far out. Most of these silly revolutionaries were not
unhinged Weathermen killers or SDS would-be communists, but just
adolescents along for the good-time ride.

With the end of the draft in 1972, the winding down of the Vietnam
War, the oil embargoes and a worsening economy, the '60s revolution
withered away. Cynics claimed the revolution was mostly about
middle-class students with long hair kicking back during the peak of
the postwar boom, indulging their appetites and ensuring they would
not end up in Vietnam.

It is not even true that the '60s at least ensured needed reform. The
civil rights movement and equal rights for women and gays were already
birthed before the hippies, as were folk songs and early rock music.

Instead, what the '60s revolution did was accelerate these trends --
but also radicalize, manipulate and coarsen them.

The grasping "yuppies" of the 1980s were the natural successors to
let-it-all-hang-out "hippies." The '60s were at heart a narcissistic
free-for-all, when "freedom" often entailed self-indulgence and
avoiding responsibility.

By 1981, the Reagan revolution finished off the dead-enders of the
Woodstock generation. Most eventually grew up. They rebooted their
self-centered drug, sex and party impulses to fixations on money,
status and material things.

Sixties protestors mainlined divorce, abortion on demand, promiscuity,
drug use and one-parent homes. But by the late 1970s and the 1980s,
most veteran cultural revolutionaries had gotten married, were raising
a family, bought a house, got a job and made money.

This time around, their offspring's left-wing assault is different --
and far more ominous.

The woke grandchildren of the former outsiders are now more ruthless
systematic insiders. The woke and wired new establishment knows how to
use money and power to rebirth America as something the founders and
most current Americans never envisioned.

Name one mainline institution that the woke left does not now control
-- and warp. The media? The campus? Silicon Valley? Professional
sports? The corporate boardroom? Foundations? The K-12 educational
establishment? The military hierarchy? The government deep state? The
FBI top echelon?

The left absorbed them all. But this time around, members of the left
really believe that "by any means necessary" is no mere slogan.
Instead, it is a model of how to disrupt or destroy American customs,
traditions and values.

Woke revolutionaries are not panhandlers, street people or Grateful
Dead groupies. They are not even a few nutty and murderous Symbionese
Liberation Army terrorists fighting against "the Man."

They are "the Man."

Our 21st century revolutionaries are multibillionaires with
flip-flops, tie-dye T-shirts and nose rings, but with the absolute
power and desire to censor how half the country communicates -- or
cancel them entirely.

They don't flock to campus free-speech areas; they are the campus
administrators who ban free speech.

They don't picket outside the Pentagon; they are inside the Pentagon.

They don't chant "eat the rich"; they are the rich who eat at Napa
Valley's French Laundry.

They don't protest "uptight" values, because they are more intolerant
and puritanical than any Victorian.

They don't believe in racial quotas based on "proportional
representation," because they are racists who demand
underrepresentation of "bad" racial groups and overrepresentation of
"good" groups. The color of our skin is their gospel, not the content
of our character.

They are top-down revolutionaries. None of their agendas, from open
borders and changing the Constitution to critical race theory and
banning clean-burning fossil fuels, are ever favored among a majority
of the population.

Their guiding principle is "never let a crisis go to waste." Only in
times of a pandemic, a national quarantine or volatile racial
relations can the new upscale leftist revolutionaries use fear to push
through policies that no one in calm times could stomach.

Our revolutionaries hate dissent. They destroy any who question their
media-spun hoaxes.

Truth is their enemy, and fear is their weapon.

Sixties paranoid revolutionaries warned about George Orwell's "1984,"
but our revolutionaries are "1984."

While this elitist leftist revolution is more dangerous than its
sloppy '60s predecessor, it is also more vulnerable, given its
obnoxious, top-heavy apparatus -- but only if the proverbial "people"
finally say to their madness, "Enough is enough."