Nothing new under the sun
Our booz-em chum Tal Bachman makes the case that this time maybe, just maybe, there might actually be.
At the end of my last column for SteynOnline, I asked: “What can patriots do to retake their beloved nation?”
We could do worse than getting to know our enemy. Not just know them, but really get inside their heads to understand where they’re coming from, and why.
This is what I see.
The strange figures known as Wokists currently destroying America aren’t just reprises of earlier enemies. They represent something rather new. The political cult of Wokism combines the worst aspects of every political cult in history.
Mebbe so, mebbe so. As a committed contrarian, however, I feel it incumbent on me to take up the mantle of Devil’s advocate here, just a wee bit. The eye-tearing tableau of Wokistry looks to me not so much like a unique and wholly new departure from the standard-issue, Mark-1 Mod-0 Lefist cant with which exhausted Normals have become depressingly familiar. Rather, I think Wokistry and its companion ideological afflictions might more correctly be seen as extensions of said cant—extensions that have become, as they were ever more radicalized, grotesquely exaggerated caricatures of the comparatively moderate but more or less moribund Progtard ideology they elbowed aside and trampled underfoot.
Consider: Wokistry retains Progressivism’s century-old commitment to all-powerful, all-intrusive, all-encompassing government unaltered. Their hoary ideal of perfectable humanity, a sort of shitlib Frankenstein’s monster brought to life not with electric current but the judicial application of government authority and infallible Science, is old-school Progressivism 101. Likewise their unswerving faith in totalitarian rule by an Expert Class; blanket rejection of the existence of unchanging human nature to promote the notion that all human personal characteristics, preferences, and responses are instead malleable, subject to alteration through medical therapies, federal legislation, and societal pressure; the grandiose assertion of an “arc of history” impossible to stop or hinder, advancing human civilization always towards greater enlightenment, cooperation, compassion, equality, and whatever else they think constitutes “progress”—all these things together form the fundamental blueprint off which Progressivism has been working since Day One.
Arrogant, narcissistic twaddle, every bit of it—the stuff of stoned late-night Cow College dorm discussion amongst self-obsessed Ignorati Youth, nothing more. But the creature walks among us even today, and the Wokists, frustrated to the point of tetchiness with the seeming torpor of their more mellow antecedents, hew to an intensified, more aggressive update of the old version. Wokism is nothing new after all. It’s the same old pig in fresh lipstick.
My piffling and somewhat forced quibble aside, though, Bachman is actually dead on. In fact, there’s significant irony here: in proposing that Wokistry in essence amounts to a truly new development, he’s come up with something genuinely new his own bad self. To wit:
Whether they realize it or not, Wokists themselves combine the lunatic loyalty of the Manson family with the hollow pseudo-joy of Jonestown residents, the racism of National Socialists, the inhumanity of Mao Tse-Tung, the bratty tantrums of Veruca Salt, the nihilism of Bakunin-style anarchists, the totalitarianism of Stalin’s Soviet Union, the child torture and sacrifice of the Mayans, the derangement of Heaven’s Gate followers, the sadistic violence of the Jacobins, and the ruthless control-freakism of the current Chinese Communist Party.
Now add to that noxious syncretic blend the Wokist use of powerful communication technologies to shape narratives and meta-narratives, destroy opponents, and recruit new converts, and you’ve got yourself a thing.
Through it all, a counterfeit moral imperative with a deceptively appealing name (“social justice”) drives the cult. That counterfeit imperative casts all existence as one great battle between Good (Wokism) and Evil (everything that is not Woke). It denies any constraints on efforts to win that battle. It entails an obsessive totalitarianism. It forbids critical self-examination of itself. Adherents of the cult are Knowers of the One True Truth. They are crusaders in righteous battle. Only victory matters. Anyone so much as questioning the One True Truth, inside or out, must be destroyed.
All perfectly correct, all object lessons in how the spool of original Progressivism is unwound until the end of the thread has been reached.
It’s long been rightly said of the Progressivist beast that it cannot create or originate, only pervert, defile, and destroy. It forever walks a circular path, plodding doggedly along on his never-ending journey to a place he’s already been. The lumbering, delusional beast is incapable of altering anything but its velocity, never course or direction. Condemned by its own constricted vision, the poor, stupefied Proggybeast can only stumble pointlessly on, finally collapsing in a sweaty, disheveled heap from sheer exhaustion.
No wonder Progressivists are such bitter, angry, and hateful people.
And what they’re actually doing is something like an Invasive Parasite Play: While keeping the outer forms (like the country’s name, like “elections”, etc.) intact, they move in to co-opt and control the structures and institutions which really run the country (which is to say, the structures and institutions which control us). As a result, millions remain oblivious that Wokists are destroying and replacing everything that ever constituted the country—that is, that they are changing what ‘The United States of America’ actually is.
Among many other things, that means first targeting public order, buildings, cities, fair trials, public trust, careers, police forces, education, laws, educations, freedom of speech and religion and assembly and press, codes of ethics, corporate practices, borders, political boundaries, the military, the economy, demography, religious beliefs, customs, music, books, myths, movies, family dynamics, sexuality, heroes, villains, history, aspirations, everything, and then, wherever possible, either destroying them or replacing them with Wokist substitutes.
I mentioned above the analogy of an invasive parasite, but this play is really something even more ambitious. It’s a metamorphosis play, where infiltration, destruction, and replacement is followed by transforming the United States into some completely different entity altogether. That different entity is on track to resemble the former East Germany—a totalitarian puppet-state run by a lawless secret police, subservient to a greater foreign power—far more than any iteration of America throughout its history.
And that, as I always say, is no accident. Be ye not deceived: the Left, always and for all time, is working a plan here—a familiar one, a nefarious and wholly intolerable one. The plan’s contours and ambitions have not and will not change; however exaggerated or extreme the beliefs of the wild-eyed fanatics pushing it at any given time are, the song remains the same. Really, and meaning no insult whatever to my friend Tal, there’s nothing new about a single note of it.
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