The Countercultural Revolution

Heather Mac Donald asks whether the counterrevolution has arrived. Has the country finally turned the corner on the cultural revolution that has infested the nation for so many years now?

Have we, in other words, reached peak scold? Can we go back, for example to enjoying high culture-- Mac Donald’s bailiwick-- without drowning our sensibility in guilt.

For those who do not recall, I suggested in a prior work, my book about Saving Face, that we were suffering through a cultural revolution whereby we are implored to feel guilt about the sins of the past, both real and imagined. 

The cure for guilt is, of course, pride. And the Trump administration is now hellbent on restoring national pride, and erasing the fabricated guilt that infects so many minds, both young and old.

Mac Donald takes us to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to an exhibition of Dutch masters. The Met curators could not restrain themselves. They abused spectators by exposing what they considered to be the deeper meaning behind the paintings, which involved colonialism and imperialism.

Consider a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show featured the Met’s extraordinary collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, that explosion of creativity that produced Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, Gerard ter Borch, and other masters. Were we to see beauty in those cloud-laden horizons, those serene compositions of domestic order, those haunting portraits of age and vulnerability? No, we were to see what was not there: “colonialism, slavery, and war,” which, the Met curators reminded us, were major themes in seventeenth-century Dutch history, but which were “barely visible” in the Met’s Dutch collections. Or take the still lifes, a new genre that marked Northern Europe’s epoch-changing attention to empirical detail. What was a viewer to make of the dragonfly iridescence of ripe grapes, the delicate play of light on cut glass, the puckered skin of a lemon peel? Do not be taken in! the Met advised us. Dutch still-life paintings omitted the “human cost of colonial warfare and slavery” that underlay the bounty these canvases documented, the wall labels warned. Of course, by definition, a still life features inanimate objects, not human subjects, so any still life would be hard-pressed to portray colonial warfare and slavery. But never mind. The artists should have anticipated twenty-first-century concerns about racial justice and revised their subject matter accordingly.

Do you feel sufficient guilt for enjoying these artworks? If not, take a walk over to the Metropolitan Opera for a performance of Verdi’s Aida:

Here is another manifestation of that prior worldview: the Metropolitan Opera’s new staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida, currently running at the Met (see the May 2025 issue of The New Criterion). Aida tells the story of a doomed love between an ancient Egyptian warrior and an Ethiopian princess. The opera’s director has added a frame around the work: a group of archaeologists who troop across the stage at random moments taking stock of the pharaonic tombs. During the famous triumphal march, that glorious brass-filled explosion of military hubris, the archaeologists cart away Egyptian sculptures and other trophies for their European collections. The inspiration for these gratuitous images of plunder is Edward Said, the father of postcolonial theory and a key source of the anti-Western hate that animates today’s universities. Said viewed Egyptology as an act of theft and Aida itself as an act of imperial domination. Never mind that it was the Khedive of Egypt who commissioned Verdi in 1870 to compose an opera for the opening of Cairo’s opera house. Never mind that the construction of that opera house was itself an Egyptian, not a European, initiative. The magazine Opera (the successor to the Met’s house organ, Opera News) gushed over Edward Said’s interpretation of Aida in anticipation of the new staging, lest anyone miss the subtext. Said, by the way, taught at Columbia University for four decades before his death in 2003, which tells us much about the anti-Israel animus among some university members.

In some considerable part we owe it to the Biden presidency.

To live under the prior regime was to live under a set of fictions: The West ushered into world history colonialism, slavery, and xenophobia. Non-Western civilizations were peace-loving and egalitarian, before being invaded by Western interlopers. 

Mainstream institutions in the United States discriminate against underrepresented minorities in admissions, hiring, and promotions. The biological difference between males and females is a petty convention that can be wished away as a matter of personal choice. To argue that solar and wind energy cannot at present replace fossil fuels is to wish for the annihilation of the planet.

So, we were functioning within a fiction, of America as an evil empire, a civilization whose successes were really failures, signs of oppression:

American elites preserved the hegemony of these fictions and paradoxes through stigma, casting into the wilderness anyone who dared to deviate from the official line. Anyone who believed in the traditional American narrative of vitality and progress, who thought our history was not entirely disfigured by slavery, was a racist in need of bias training. Careers have been ruined for failure to toe the pro-diversity line, even in private conversation. Self-censorship reigned on college campuses, even as those institutions held themselves out to the public as the font of free inquiry. Members of the University of Pennsylvania female swim team had to hide behind anonymity to protest the unfair advantage enjoyed by a male teammate.

Now, with the new regime, we want to know whether it is over yet. Surely, corporate America has seen the light and is ridding itself of diversity, equity and inclusion. 

And yet, the academic intelligentsia is willing to fight to the death to preserve their power and influence as keepers of ideological orthodoxy.

Mac Donald sheds an optimistic light on the current situation:

The scandal of the present moment is that someone with outsize visibility has said: No more. The race hustle is over; the gender hustle is over. The denigration of traditional values and American history is over. The demonization of law enforcement: over. Being black or female will no longer be treated as an accomplishment. The only thing that matters in employment is excellence. And to realize that principle, the White House on April 23 banned the greatest enemy of meritocracy: disparate-impact analysis.

She notes that the university system will be the last to renounce the madness of DEI:

Besides this bureaucratic retrenchment, the curriculum remains steeped in the hermeneutics of suspicion. The faculty will continue churning out graduates who see America and the West as the world’s main problems. Turning off the geyser of federal tax dollars to recalcitrant institutions should be an enormous lever, whether against K–12 schools that indoctrinate students in victimology, or against research universities that have rerouted science funding to diversity sinecures. But that strategy, too, is being shut down via preliminary injunctions and outright defiance.