From The American Mind:
Leading critical race theorists such as the widely acclaimed, New York Times best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi have made it clear
that wiping out “systemic racism” will require rigid racial quotas in
all sectors of society and suppression of First Amendment free speech
guarantees. Kendi recommends the establishment of a super-powerful
federal Department of Anti-Racism (DOA) that would preclear “all local,
state, and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield any racial
inequity…investigate private racist policies when racial inequity
surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas.”
Antonio Gramsci, an early leader of the Italian Communist Party,
famously wrote that the Marxist revolution could not succeed politically
until the revolutionary forces had conquered civil society (the
culture) and established “ideological hegemony.” This meant the fight
was not won until the moral values and core principles that had
legitimated the old regime (in Italy, Roman Catholicism) had been
discredited and replaced with new revolutionary mores and principles.
In the late 1960s, the German radical student leader Rudi Dutschke
called for a “long march through the institutions” of power. Entering
the third decade of the 21st century, the “long march” of identity
politics/wokeism through leading sectors of American society
(universities, media, entertainment, government bureaucracy, woke
corporations) has achieved considerable success.
What has been going on in American civil society and politics for the
past 40 years is not simply a “culture war,” though it is often
disingenuously dismissed as trivial on those grounds (“are we really
going to argue over which bathrooms to use?”). In reality, what is at
stake is not a minor argument over habits and lifestyles but a “regime
change” conflict between two fundamentally antagonistic visions of
America and our way of life. This intense division is clearly
represented in the presidential campaigns of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Speaking on July 4, 2020, Biden declared,
“American history is no fairy tale.” He decried the “more than 200
years of systemic racism” and lamented the plight of “the marginalized,
the demonized, the isolated, the oppressed.” He promised to “rip the
roots of systemic racism out of this country.”
In another address, Biden bellowed
that not only is there “absolutely systemic racism in law enforcement,”
but the problem is much, much broader than that. He continued, “it’s
not just in law enforcement, it’s across the board. It’s in housing,
it’s in education, and it’s in everything we do. It’s real. It’s
genuine. It’s serious.” Biden’s language would seem to indicate just how
far left he has moved. After becoming the vice-presidential candidate
on August 29, Kamala Harris stated that “the reality is that the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human.”
The rhetoric employed by Biden and Harris is not the language of the
give-and-take inherent in democratic politics, but the language of
delegitimization. A political regime that has “never” treated fellow
citizens as “fully human” because of their race; that stigmatizes “the
marginalized, the demonized, the isolated, and the oppressed”; and that
has been “systematically racist” for hundreds of years is, by all
accounts, an illegitimate political regime.
These remarks were made in the context of nationwide rioting and
insurrectionary disorder. After the death of George Floyd in police
custody in Minneapolis on May 25 there were mass protests across the
country. But soon the protests (particularly after dark) became full-fledged riots. (Read more.)
From Catholicism:
No doubt that fact is why some perspicacious commentators have
located the root of the current civil disorders in the pernicious
influence in academe of the culturally Marxist Frankfurt School,
and no doubt that influence has had its role. Students who fell under
it in the 1960s went on to become the millennials’ professors.
Whether
or not President Trump knows of the Frankfurt School, he certainly sees
what is going on. Did you pay attention to his speech at Mount Rushmore
on July 4? Listen to him: “Our nation is witnessing a massive campaign
to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and
indoctrinate our children. In our schools, our newsrooms, even our
corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands
absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its
rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will
be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished.”
Trump
has had to spend a great deal of his time during the past four years
fending off efforts to remove him from office. It has prevented his
doing all that he might to counter the “far-left fascism.” However, it
was possible as late as the beginning of this year to hope that
nationalist populists in Europe could accomplish more. Then covid-19
hit. The two issues that were propelling the nationalist populists
toward success were the mass arrival and movement around the Continent
of Muslim aliens, and the open borders that made that possible. These
issues disappeared with the advent of the virus. The nations of Western
Europe remembered that they had frontiers. Globalism’s golden boy
Emmanuel Macron suddenly sounded like Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini.
This has very considerably reduced the political strength of the
nationalist populists for the time being.
As baneful as is the
influence of cultural Marxism, I believe that at least in the U.S.
another factor accounts more importantly for the new barbarism we see in
the streets and nearly everywhere else. That is the breakdown of the
family, the basic unit of society (exactly as affirmed by professional
politicians even as they never cease to undermine it by their actions).
Our new barbarians did not know family life as it existed before
no-fault divorce, the Pill, legal abortion, and the rise of feminism.
The
breakdown began in the 1960s. For us Catholics, and through us to the
rest of society, I’d date it to 1968 with the failure of the bishops to
uphold Humanae vitae, Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on the evil of artificial contraception that also reaffirmed Casti connubii, Pope Pius XI’s earlier encyclical on marriage and the family.
Subsequently
they followed the lead of probable homosexual and possible Satanist
Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, then the most prominent figure of the
dominant liberal wing of the Church in the U.S., by espousing his
“seamless garment” pseudo-theology instead of continuing to teach (if
not always very vigorously) religious doctrine. As long as they did the
latter, they spoke of the family as the “domestic church.”
That
church had a head, the father, even as the Pope, the Holy Father, is
head of the universal Church. What happened to the father? The question
brings us to politics – specifically the political left, which is to say
the politics of the Revolution that began to unfold with the overthrow
of Christian government in France in 1789 and finds expression in
today’s America with the presidential candidacy of a septuagenarian
advocating socialism in economics and, when it comes to morality, the
“right” of a woman to kill her preborn babies. Honore de Balzac, creator
of the naturalistic novel as a literary form and Catholic monarchist,
makes my point: “When they [the revolutionaries] cut off the head of the
King, they cut off the head of every father of a family in the
country.” (Read more.)
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