America on the Fourth of July

In a better world we would today be celebrating American independence, happily. Unfortunately, we do not live in a better world. We live in the world we live in. How's that for profound. In our current world, where America seems to be disintegrating before our eyes, we can be forgiven if our festivities are less than whole- hearted.

In a moment of uncommon lucidity Bret Stephens explains that the problem is not Donald Trump. America’s problems are the legacy of the political left, the elite liberals, the ones who do not know how to think, who have decided to do a hostile takeover of the American mind:

The more serious problem today comes from the left: from liberal elites who, when tested, lack the courage of their liberal convictions; from so-called progressives whose core convictions were never liberal to begin with; from administrative types at nonprofits and corporations who, with only vague convictions of their own, don’t want to be on the wrong side of a P.R. headache.

Considering that I have long since pointed out that today’s American liberals are not liberal and that today’s progressives are really a radical left, it’s good to see Stephens joining the crew.

The American left has become tyrannical and despotic. We are not talking about internet trolls or unhinged college students. We are talking about the mainstream corporate media:

This has been the great cultural story of the last few years. It is typified by incidents such as The New Yorker’s David Remnick thinking it would be a good idea to interview Steve Bannon for the magazine’s annual festival — until a Twitter mob and some members of his own staff decided otherwise. Or by The Washington Post devoting 3,000 words to destroying the life of a private person of no particular note because in 2018 she wore blackface, with ironic intent, at a Halloween party. Or by big corporations pulling ads from Facebook while demanding the company do more to censor forms of speech they deem impermissible.

Of course, if the idiots are allowed to control the public conversation, people will no longer be able to think clearly, if at all. Have you considered that the war against proper syntax, the war against grammatically correct pronouns, is designed to confuse and confound, to turn your brains into mush:

These stories matter because an idea is at risk. That’s the idea that people who cannot speak freely will not be able to think clearly, and that no society can long flourish when contrarians are treated as heretics.

As noted, today’s radical left wants monopoly control over the marketplace of ideas:

But those defenders are, on account of one excuse or another, capitulating to people who claim free speech for themselves (but not for others), who believe all the old patriarchal hierarchies must go (so that new “intersectional” hierarchies may arise), who are in a perpetual fervor to rewrite the past (all the better to control the future), and who demand cringing public apologies from those who have sinned against an ever-more radical ideological standard (while those apologies won’t save them from being fired).

Stephens concludes:

Right now, all the Twitter furors, the angry rows over publication decisions, the canceled speeches and books, the semantic battles about which words take an uppercase and which don’t, may seem remote to those who care about more tangible issues: depression, disease, police abuse, urban decline. Yet the issue that counts the most is whether the institutions that are supposed to champion liberal ideals will muster the moral confidence to survive. On this July 4, it’s very much in doubt.