By Angelo Codevilla
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Our ruling class’s forceful exaltation of the persons,
proclivities, and symbols by which it defines itself, along with its pretense
that its preferences trump reality, defeat themselves by their absurdity. That
absurdity stems from its members’ conceit about who they are.
Led by Barack Obama’s Democrats, echoed by the media,
backed by big corporations’ muscle, and trailed by Republicans with tail tucked
between legs, our rulers demand no less than the paradigm of totalitarianism in
George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”
Recall that Big Brother’s agent berated the hapless
Winston for preferring his own views to society’s dictates, then finished
breaking his spirit by holding up four fingers and demanding that Winston
acknowledge seeing five. Our rulers, like Big Brother, hector us to accept
their rewritten history and to superimpose their scales of value on ours. They
end by demanding that we substitute their will for what our very senses tell us
is reality—because they please to be who they are.
There is a sense in which the ruling icons of political
correctness—lesser Americans are racist, sexist, religiously bigoted, and
infested by pathologies for which they must make amends—are petty partisanship
meant to squeeze the last drops of voter participation out of the Democratic
Party’s habitual constituencies. But our Progressive rulers’ partisanship is
more. It is identity politics waged as war.
Ignoring the irony, Obama described what the war is about
by accusing Americans unlike himself (and the progressives to whom he was
speaking) of being inferior because of their “antipathy toward people who
aren’t like them.” Specifically, he said, they “cling to guns or religion.”
Hence, pursuing identity war requires breaking the American people’s grip on
their sense of worth, on their very connection to reality. That is why, over
decades, our Progressive ruling class has penalized Americans who say the wrong
thing in front of the wrong person, re-written schoolbooks, etc.
It’s All About Us
But 2016 will be remembered as the year in which
Progressives forced their redefinition of American history upon one and all by
re-facing America’s currency with their favorite faces. Obama took Andrew
Jackson off the $20 bill and replaced it with a glowering image of anti-slavery
activist Harriet Tubman. Jackson’s victory at the 1815 battle of New Orleans
ended the War of 1812 and removed doubt about America’s independence by
securing America’s possession of the Mississippi valley. But Progressives think
it more important for Tubman to reproach us (not themselves, for sure) every
time we open our wallets.
We may also remember 2016 as the year in which
Progressives dropped pretenses about asserting the rise of their class as world
history’s main event, that all concerning the clash of empires and
civilizations must be judged by its relevance to themselves. This Obama did
when he justified to a British audience his decision to remove Churchill’s
bronze bust from the Oval Office. Churchill had led the Western world to
recognize Nazism’s evil and to vanquish it. Churchill had also fought the
Communist empire and championed the Western world’s civilization.
But for Progressives, the first is of small account,
while the latter is unforgivable. Symbolically, Obama replaced Churchill’s
bronze with one of Martin Luther King Jr. who, Obama said, had done so much to
“allow me to have the privilege of holding this office.” That’s what’s really
important.
Our Progressive ruling class’s war on our scale of values
climaxed in 2016 with a campaign in favor of “transgender rights”: a demand
that Americans accept that someone with a penis can be a “woman” while another
with a vagina can be a “man.” Object to that mandate to take leave of your
senses, insist that sex-specific public bathrooms be used exclusively by
persons with the requisite personal plumbing, and be expelled from polite
society. Next to this, Big Brother’s demand to call four fingers five is small,
mild stuff.
Subjugating Fellow
Americans to Make Our Rulers Feel Good
Why also, for example, do our rulers force schoolchildren
to recite Islam’s act of submission, order male soldiers to walk around in pink
high heels and wear simulated female breasts; why do they lecture others on how
ashamed they should be of their “white privilege”; why do they proscribe common
words and prescribe others in their stead, etc. ad nauseam?
Surely these impositions are not attempts to turn
inferiors into equals by persuading them. Progressives view those outside their
class not as fellow citizens who are capable of being persuaded into equality
with them, but rather as a herd to be prodded into alienation from their
irremediably flawed natures and affections. But why do that? To what end?
The answer is one of mankind’s oldest stories. Confessing
other people’s sins (real or imagined) and inflicting punishment on them has
ever been human beings’ preferred path to feeling good about themselves. The
more fault I find and the more penance I impose on thee, the holier I am than
thou. The worse you are, the better I am and the more power I should have over
you.
Because feeling better about one’s self by denigrating
and punishing others is an addictive pleasure the appetite for which grows with
each satisfaction, victories can never satiate those who wage identity politics
as war. The insatiability of their need to bolster self-esteem at others’
expense is the reason why our rulers must trump every imposition with another,
without end.
It is why satisfying any of political correctnesses’
demands only generates more. Finding or manufacturing new ones is cheap and
fun. But precisely that unwillingness, that incapacity, to aim at an end point
in which our rulers might be satisfied ensures that they engender more revolt
than submission. The sort of people against whom Americans revolted 250 years
ago were not as pretentious.
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