“Is social revolution approaching its Thermidor, the point at which its progress stops or reverses.” James Kalb
Until recently, effective opposition to globalism, open borders, and lifestyle liberalism, that is for traditional local ties over global markets, regulatory bureaucracies, and recent understanding of human rights, had all but disappeared, that is until Brexit and Donald Trump.
While the connection between the two is indirect, both expressed the common man’s opposition to globalization and open borders rather than for lifestyle liberalism. Even so, unity is the strength of orthodoxy, including that of the left who worry that these recent movements in support of national and local identity threaten their gains on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, gender identify and transgenderism
Having not only dominated the public discussion, Progressives have absolute faith in their cause, so any reverse in the left tilt forces them to redouble their efforts to reign in the deplorables. They did it in the past. The AIDs scare sacralized homosexuality, abortion put radical feminism beyond discussion and 9/11 turned Islamophobia into a hate crime. So it should come as no surprise that Brexit and Trump’s victory brought screams of bigotry and illegitimacy. In any case, hate and bigotry are partly in the eye of the beholder. Some say it’s hate to deny Bruce Jenner is a woman, others that it’s hate to write almost half the population off as an irredeemable basket of deplorables.
The liberal lap-dog media claim that reverses in the leftist tilt comes from ignorance, conspiracy theories and manipulations or deceptions perpetrated by Fox, the Russians, obscure web sites, ad nauseam. Genuine news, apparently, only applies to stories from the New York Times or the Washington Post, or some other left leaning news organization. Owned by the left for decades, they have no concept of reality.
Elitist have always had interests at odds with those of the common man. To make matters even worse, their world vision eliminates the basic aspects of human reality, the need for tradition, for local connections, for a usable conception of man’s natural tendencies and a spiritual and moral order that transcends him. They view the social world as endlessly malleable, something to mold into their image. And since they have complete faith in their utopia, they believe their rule will bring an era of peace, prosperity and justice once they destroy anyone with common sense.
It is for that very reason that the establishment have lost credit among many people and their future is unforeseeable. There is a new readiness to defy orthodoxy, new vehicles for dissenters to make their voices heard, and a new willingness among many to listen and consider.
Make America Great Again may be vague, and it may or may not be the right slogan, but it has its virtues. It connects to American political discourse and unmistakably expresses an understanding of man as social, as finding an essential part of what he is in his connection to particular concrete traditions and social structures, and of the need for those structures to be oriented to something higher than the everyday.
Source: A Turning Point in the Culture War? By James Kalb
