Come the Counterrevolution

In yesterday’s post about America’s aneurysm, I quoted a text by Victor Davis Hanson. Surrounding that text was an important prophecy, one that deserves its own separate post. 

The subject: the coming counterrevolution. After all, our major cities and our major media outlets and our major academic institutions have been taken over by Jacobin revolutionaries. Large numbers of Americans are certainly not on board with this madness. Perhaps they are awaiting their turn. At which point, the intellectual elites who have been leading this convulsion will find their backs to the wall. They will have been exposed as the morons they are, and will lose their institutional power bases. At least we can hope.

Of course, if we see a Biden presidency, then perhaps the counterrevolution will have to wait. 

Hanson explains its inevitability. 

There will be a counterrevolution because without one there is not much of America left. And about 250 million people liked the America prior to March 1 and finally, in extremis, won’t so easily give it up. Washington and Lincoln, after all, do not just belong to some unhinged Antifa thug mad at America because he is mostly mad at himself. To almost every Jacobin tactic, from defunding the police to violent attacks on federal property, the people are opposed. And they make no apologies for their past or present.

I would offer a slight demurral here. The antifa thugs who are mounting an insurrection against civil authority are not so much mad at themselves. They are destroying because that is all they know how to do. If they fear anything, it’s having the authority to put their programs into action. And of course, having been force fed Nazi ideology, as in, deconstruction, they are doing what Martin Heidegger’s favorites, the Storm Troopers were doing in Germany.

Consider professional sports. Will America’s wealthy and coddled athletes continue to offend their fans, thus killing the goose that is laying the golden eggs? How far will they go in disrespecting the nation before they will start having to pay for it.

What will the counterrevolutionary entail in areas beyond politics? I wager that the NBA, the NFL, and perhaps even major-league baseball will soon have a come-to-Jesus moment. Either they will continue with the kneeling, the left-wing sloganeering, the mock-heroic logos, and the finger-pointing at their audiences, and thus slowly grow shriller and more irrelevant as Americans refuse to subsidize insults to their persons and country — or they will quietly return to the pre-Kaepernick world (as the NFL, for example, had in 2019) when politics was seen as bad business in a business, for-profit sport.

And then, will the counterrevolution finally break the stranglehold that universities have on the American mind? If anything counts as a racket in today’s America, higher education must top the list. Not the higher education that involves STEM subjects-- all of which is a province of Asian students-- but the higher education that involves indoctrination in the dogmas of politically correct wokeness.

The universities told us that they could charge $80,000 a year for the “campus experience,” that piling up $200,000 in debt for a B.A. degree was a wise investment, and that such campus intellectuals and progressives needed to pay no attention to the Bill of Rights. Fine. But all such nonsense was predicated on the belief that their brands were worth the cost, and the experience on campus was both unique and precious.

In the past year, the curtain pulled away and the con was exposed. You can stay home and tele-learn without stepping foot on a campus — a poor substitute for live teaching, but not so poor a substitute given the cost, the debt, and the indoctrination.  The advantage of a Princeton or Stanford degree is now exposed not as proof of a superior education, but simply the purchase of a cattle brand to separate one’s future career from the herd — not much different from having Michael Jordan’s name on an otherwise pedestrian pair of tennis shoes.

At some point the public will want the federal government to turn over the student-loan-guaranteeing business to the universities, which will then cut costs. 

Endowments of such politicized and warped institutions will soon be taxed. And America will let go of the idea that a 21st-century B.A. degree has anything to do with knowledge, inductive thinking, and learning. After all, somebody “educated” those privileged, prolonged adolescents whom we see nightly in the streets, the environmentalists who leave trash and flotsam and jetsam as their trail, the woke who shout in the face of black police and arrogantly appoint themselves the anarchist brains of BLM, the compassionate who try to burn down, blind, attack the elderly, and destroy anything they cannot themselves create.

And then there is that other national embarrassment, the mainstream media. Will it too have its comeuppance? For having completely compromised journalistic ethics, it ought surely to pay a price.

Polls show that Americans by overwhelming numbers now believe that the media are hopelessly biased. NBC and other networks and cable outlets are laying off employees. The no-holds-barred arenas of the Internet and social media are replacing newspapers and televised news as sources of public information — not because they are more accurate or less biased, but because consumers can access their bias and inaccuracy at far cheaper prices. Woke journalists have bragged that they no longer need to be anachronistically disinterested in the age of Trump. So why pay a marquee reporter $200,000 when you can get a comparable flack to write the same stuff online for a tenth of the price?

Hanson considers that the counterrevolution will end the influence of the Vietnam generation, the Baby Boomers, if you like. At least, we can hope.

The Sixties generation is going out as it came in: gross, loud, and cowardly, destroying the very institutions for others that it so selfishly consumed for its own benefit. If we wish to know why America’s veneer of civilization was so thin, and this year so easily scraped away, revealing barbarism beneath, look to a generation’s architects in the university, the media, sports, corporations, and politics who long ago seeded their cultural IEDs and are now giddy they are at last going off, though terrified that the ensuing blasts are reverberating ever closer to home.