Now it’s Andrew Sullivan’s turn…

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…to say buh-bye:

“I am trying hard to create in this magazine a civil, respectful, intellectually honest space for political debate,” Haskell [the New York editor] said. “I believe there is a way to write from a conservative* perspective about some of the most politically charged subjects of American life while still upholding our values. I also think that our magazine in particular has an opportunity to be a place where the liberal project is hashed out, which is to say not only championed but also interrogated.”

Or as Seth Mandel of the Washington Examiner tweets, “Translation: I want to challenge our reader base but I don’t know how to do that without challenging our reader base,” adding, “that feeling when you thought you were publishing far-right-wing ideas because you hired Jon Chait.”

And while we’re on the subject of cancel culture, there’s this:

Until last week, Gary Garrels was senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). He resigned his position after museum employees circulated a petition that accused him of racism and demanded his immediate ouster.

“Gary’s removal from SFMOMA is non-negotiable,” read the petition. “Considering his lengthy tenure at this institution, we ask just how long have his toxic white supremacist beliefs regarding race and equity directed his position curating the content of the museum?”

I confess I’ve never heard of Garrels or of SFMOMA. Sounds like quite the Nazi, doesn’t he? Let’s see:

The petitioners cite few examples of anything even approaching bad behavior from Garrels. Their sole complaint is that he allegedly concluded a presentation on how to diversify the museum’s holdings by saying, “don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.”

Garrels has apparently articulated this sentiment on more than one occasion. According to artnet.com, he said that it would be impossible to completely shun white artists, because this would constitute “reverse discrimination.” That’s the sum total of his alleged crimes. He made a perfectly benign, wholly inoffensive, obviously true statement that at least some of the museum’s featured artists would continue to be white. The petition lists no other specific grievances.

Are these people that powerful? Or was Garrels just tired of the fight? I could easily understand it if he were.

Here’s an article that sheds a bit more light on the Garrels flap. It appears to me that the expression “reverse discrimination,” which he used, was part of the list of his terrible crimes. My suspicion is that to the anti-racist woke, “reverse discrimination” cannot possibly exist, because of their Marxist power-dominated definition of discrimination.

Also there’s this:

…[Garrels’] lasting legacy at SFMOMA may be tied to two very different initiatives: the museum’s extended loan deal of the Fisher Collection and its decision, last year, to auction off a painting by Mark Rothko for $50.1 million in order to create a dedicated fund to acquire work by female artists, artists of color, and LGBTQ+ artists. Works that have been acquired using the fund include pieces by Rebecca Belmore, Forrest Bess, Frank Bowling, Leonora Carrington, Lygia Clark, and Norman Lewis.

So the auction and the use of the funds to buy up works by members of the designated interest groups were not enough to save Garrels. Apparently the whiteness of the Fisher Collection was a problem that offset that effort:

In 2009, Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher agreed to lend their collection of 1,100 works to the museum for 100 years. As part of the deal, the museum agreed to organize Fisher-only displays once a decade and to keep three-quarters of the works on show at all times in designated galleries as Fisher works. But the collection contains very few works by women or artists of color, creating a structural dominance of white men in the museum’s galleries.

Those nefarious Gap collectors of white male art!! No wonder Garrels had to go.

Quite some time ago, I noticed that museum art of the modern variety had become totally political. Even for collections of older works, much of the commentary is such leftist PC claptrap that it often ruins the exhibit and in order to enjoy the art you have to skip the explanatory materials on the wall.

Then again, Soviet art wasn’t very good either.

The Littleton shooting

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In Detroit, a 20-year-old black man was killed by police. His name was Hakim Littleton.

Black Lives Matter, the organization dedicated to publicizing and protesting all deaths of black people at the hands of police (particularly white police), sprung into action with predictable results:

…[A]round 300 converged at the site of the shooting on Detroit’s west side, yelling at police and chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Defund DPD!’

Several members of the crowd threw bottles, bricks and other projectiles at officers, who deployed tear gas and made eight arrests.

Many of the protesters were carrying signs and chanting ‘we want badge numbers,’ and ‘killer cops get out of town.’

Sound familiar? But something was different. The police chief James Craig (who happens to be black, by the way) immediately released a video of the incident, and it revealed that Littleton had actually fired at a police officer from about three feet away, aiming at the officer’s head. He missed, and the officer gave chase, as several other officers fired on Littleton and felled him, causing his death.

Craig said he released the video hours after the incident to quell ‘a false narrative’ that the shooting was unjustified. The ‘erroneous information that was put out has incited violence,’ he said.

I don’t have a full text of Craig’s remarks, but I wonder whether he named who put out that “erroneous information” (better known in the past as a lie).

The incident began with the investigation of a fatal shooting days earlier at a party. Police came to arrest another man, Darnell Sylvester (apparently a friend of Littleton’s), who was wanted on an outstanding drug arrest and who was also a suspect in that earlier shooting. Sylvester followed police instructions and was being taken into custody when Littleton (who was not being arrested) decided to act quite differently.

This entire incident highlights many things. One is that if a person cooperates, no problem. The second is that some people with guns aren’t good shots. The third is that police work is very very dangerous and difficult. The fourth is that BLM and other such groups are in the business of firing up cop-hatred without any interest in learning facts first. The fifth is that videocams can sometimes help tell the truth. The sixth is the political use of a story: will this one fade, or will Littleton enter the pantheon of BLM’s martyrs?

“The unhinged revolution is trying to make the U.S. into one big CHOP”

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That title is a quote from this article by Victor Davis Hanson. Please read the whole thing.

Hanson isn’t ordinarily given to extreme statements. I’ve followed his columns and articles for years. He’s become more bitter and more angry, as have most of us (I include myself). This particular article is written at great intensity, and he’s clearly alarmed.

Hanson seems to think this thing may be burning itself out. The title of his piece indicates that we possibly have reached “Peak Jacobinism” (again, interesting that this appears on Bastille Day, from a historian such as Hanson).

I’m not at all sure we have – and neither, I may add, is Hanson. I hope so. But I don’t think so.

The New York Times may regret firing* Bari Weiss

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[NOTE: I think it’s apropos to note that today is Bastille Day.]

Journalist Bari Weiss resigned today from The New York Times. She may ultimately become more damaging to the Times as a voice on the outside than she ever was when she was on the inside. In other words, the Times may end up regretting not having heeded the words of the inimitable LBJ: “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

Weiss was one of the few remaining sort-of-centrist voices left at the Times. Therefore, of course, the tumbrils came for her. She is not going gentle into that good night; here’s her scorching resignation letter:

But the lessons that ought to have followed the [2016] election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

When James Bennett was forced from the Times for having the audacity to publish an editorial by Tom Cotton, I noticed on Twitter that the New Jacobins were calling for Bari Weiss’ head next. It was not long in coming. Here’s Weiss’s resignation letter again:

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

That last sentence also feels like a reference to the Times’ mendacious rewrite of American history, the 1619 Project.

Weiss gets into some details:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.

Will anyone ever be charged with such things regarding their treatment of Weiss? I’m sorry to have to say I doubt it, particularly if the offenders are from any of several protected groups.

However, in this next part, Weiss seems to indicate that she doesn’t quite get it – not fully, anyway:

I do not understand how you [the editor to which the note is addressed] have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage. Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.

And yet in a later passage she shows that she actually does understand exactly what’s going on:

Perhaps [other people working at the Times have allowed the behavior of those who have been trying to cancel Weiss] because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm—language—is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes. Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry.

Or perhaps it is because they know that, nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back. Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root at the paper of record.

That is the saddest thing of all – the private stand of some supporters of Weiss versus their craven public caving. It’s an old story; courage is in short supply.

I wish Weiss well. I think she will find another place to write, although I’m not sure where it will be. And the Times will go on – and on and on – purging itself of its actual thinkers, making itself more and more into the voluntary Pravda of our times, and wreaking its tremendous damage on our country and the world.

[* NOTE: I’m aware that the title of this post is technically incorrect. The paper didn’t fire Weiss; she resigned. But I’m using the word “firing” instead because she obviously was driven out. I suppose to be more accurate I could say “forcing Bari Weiss to resign,” but that’s unwieldy and doesn’t express the situation perfectly either. So I let “firing” stand, with this note to clarify.]

Allan Bloom again, on the genesis of what’s happening now

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[NOTE: The following is a revised and updated version of a post I wrote over seven years ago, based on Allan Bloom’s book published in 1987.]

I’ve written before about Allan Bloom’s masterful The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987, here and here.

And I probably will again. It is so richly loaded with thought that almost every sentence might cause the reader to pause and reflect. Plus, it’s extremely readable. Bloom has done something extraordinarily difficult, which is to write a serious work about education, politics, history, and philosophy in a very lively style.

Apparently, that’s the kind of guy he was.

On reading the book, I was blown away at the outset by the first few paragraphs of his introduction, entitled “Our Virtue.” And so I’m going to reproduce some of it verbatim, just for you, to whet your appetite for the book itself. Remember as you read this that it was written no later than 1987, and probably a bit earlier [emphasis mine]:

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. Those are things you don’t think about. The students’ backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged—-a combination of disbelief and indignation: “Are you an absolutist?,” the only alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as “Are you a monarchist?” or “Do you really believe in witches?” This latter leads into the indignation, for someone who believes in witches might well be a witch-hunter or a Salem judge. The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness, and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.

Let’s pause here for a moment to digest that. Bloom is saying in 1987 that openness is the only virtue primary education has been dedicated to inculcating for more than fifty years. That would put the beginning in the Thirties. And Bloom isn’t talking just about colleges; he specifically mentions “primary school.”

I have to say that it’s not what I was taught, or certainly not solely what I was taught. I went to primary school in the Fifties, and my teachers were old, really old for the most part. I think most of them were close to retirement age, which would place their births close to the turn of the century or even in the 1800s. That might explain a lot about my education, which was fairly old-fashioned.

Bloom continues [emphasis mine]:

Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right,; rather it is not to think you are right at all.

There’s a lot in that paragraph, too. But the situation has changed since he wrote it, and even since I wrote my earlier post on the subject. The idea that the beliefs of the past were “mad” has now given way to the idea that all those beliefs are evil, and we can’t even learn about the people who believed that and their other accomplishments. We must obliterate them and their symbols, and ignore or belittle their accomplishments. And the last sentence, about not thinking you’re right at all, has very much given way to the idea of the left that the only right thing is what the left says it is. They can change that from day to day, as the left is wont to do, but they’re still always right (including in the moral sense).

Bloom again [emphasis mine], with an important and telling anecdote from his own past:

The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated…

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person…Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime…A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man…

But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

I find that passage about the obtuseness of Bloom’s history professor astounding as well as very descriptive of how we got here. The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation, although there have long been some. But Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen. The unnamed history professor Bloom describes in that passage was almost certainly not a radical. At most he was probably only mildly liberal. Perhaps he even passed for what was then known as conservative. If so, he was also unaware of the lessons to which Bloom refers to in that last sentence I quoted, even though – as Bloom notes – they had just experienced those lessons in WWII. The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.

But Bloom, his student, saw it, even back then, even at so young an age.

Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization. If you read the book, pay particular attention to those uprisings, which were the template for what’s happening today.

[NOTE II: Here’s a very good article about the mess at Cornell in 1969, when Bloom was there. It’s by the great Thomas Sowell, who was also a professor at Cornell at the time the crisis began, although he quit before it reached its fever pitch.]

In Britain, the anti-racist thought police have come for the children

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Zero tolerance for thoughtcrime in the young:

One thing I know – and have felt from the very beginning, for some reason – is that Twitter is a cesspool. It is responsible for magnifying and encouraging hateful expressions of all kinds, with its rewards for “gotcha” quips and its provision of easy access to the ear of everyone who uses it, both celebrities and obscure folk. Many children growing up in an atmosphere where this is the norm, and where they can compete with adults on the playing field of insult, will be motivated to participate in a lot more than the usual schoolyard bullying.

And a stupid society will arrest them for it.

Is this a Fourth Turning?

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Hmmmm:

It was all prophesied in 1997 in Neil Howe and William Strauss’ “The Fourth Turning,” and, depending on who you ask, it was either a breakthrough in “generational theory,” a strange work of pseudo-science, or both.

In the book, Neil and Strauss — who cowrote several books on generational theory, following careers in Washington DC-area consulting circles — argue that history moves in 80-year cycles that stretch back thousands of years to the ancient Greeks. Why 80 years? Because each cycle roughly corresponds to the length of one long human life, what the Etruscans ritualized and the Romans called a “saeculum”…

The end of the saeculum 9 is the 20-year period that represents the “winter” stage of the cycle. Howe and Strauss called this “the fourth turning,” when the hero generation, entering young adulthood, faces off against the prophet generation that is entering elderhood…

Howe and Strauss saw the climax coming around 2020 and the resolution, including a “Great Devaluation” as the economy is entirely restructured for a new set of circumstances, around 2026.

“History is seasonal, and winter is coming,” they wrote…

Warning that “a sudden spark will catalyze a crisis mood,” Howe and Strauss said that “[r]emnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire.”

Sometime before 2025, they wrote, “America will pass through a great gate in history” and “the very survival of the nation will feel at stake.”

I think there’s at least something to the theory, although how much I credit it I haven’t decided. I do know that the last two paragraphs of the above quote feel like a pretty good description of 2020 so far, including the bit about the “sudden spark.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute – You ain’t heard nothin yet”

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If you didn’t know the history of this clip, you probably wouldn’t think it at all extraordinary. But it’s Al Jolson in “The Jazz Singer,” uttering the first line ever spoken in the movies.

The audience was stunned. And I think that one of the best things about it is the joke – “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” until now!

Jolson’s energy is extraordinary, very different from anything you see today. He had quite the hip swivel, too, back in 1927.

This is the sort of thing that explains why the left hates Trump with the heat of a thousand suns, and must destroy him

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Trump dares to go there:

President Donald Trump said Friday he is asking the Treasury Department to review the tax-exempt status of universities and school systems, suggesting in a tweet that too many were about “Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education.”

Trump also said he would have their funding revoked “if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues.”

“Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!” he wrote.

I am actually in awe of this. It is exactly where the fight must be carried. I don’t think this move of Trump’s will actually work – although I wish it would, because the universities do not deserve their tax-exempt status, having utterly forfeited their stance as objective seekers of truth and defenders of freedom of expression and having become propagandists for the worst excesses of the left. But whether it works or not, Trump has named what is happening and he has done what the left is usually so adept at doing – moving the Overton Window.

I don’t even think that Trump thinks this particular action would succeed at this point. However, what he and the right need to do is to let people know that the rot in the universities is one of the main causes of the turmoil and riots and craziness that have been going on for the last six weeks or so – as well as of the more longterm cancel culture and the furious debunking of history, of the Enlightenment, and of western civilization itself.

He needs to keep saying this, because that is the real war. The 2020 election is only one battle in it.

Biden, the blank screen candidate

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Commenter “Barry Meislin” writes of Joe Biden:

Biden, in his current, quasi-vegetative state is merely the next logical step up from Obama’s description of himself as a “blank screen on which people…project their own views”…

And it is precisely his blankness that so many fervently hope and pray will “catch the conscience of the king”.

On the other hand it may be going to far to even refer to Biden as “Blankness Visible”.

It seems far more likely that he’s trending more in the direction of a speech-impaired, not-even vague Chance the Gardener appearing in a highly touted but hugely underwhelming sequel called “Being (Not All) There”.

I think all of that is true. In some ways it’s a brilliant move on the part of the left – because I doubt it’s a strategy of Biden himself. More likely Obama and others have come up with it.

Initially they were faced with a large group of candidates from which to draw, as well as an opposing candidate (Trump) whom they had successfully demonized with a huge swath of the American public. Not a bad position for the left.

But it didn’t go as planned. None of the interest-group darlings of the left caught on with enough people to become a leader. Biden was nowhere, bringing up if not the rear then close to the rear. But the left didn’t care about that because he didn’t fit the bill in the least; they thought he was a loser, an old white guy, and he certainly hadn’t historically been on the left anyway.

Over time, though, a leader finally emerged, and it was Bernie Sanders. Oh, no! Another old white guy, this time a Jewish one – not the demographic they had in mind. What’s worse, he was unashamedly on the left and always had been. They were afraid that, because of Sanders’ up-front leftism, if he was their nominee he would lose to Trump, and that could not be borne.

Who was left by that time who had any chance of beating Trump? The only one turned out to be Biden, because of his history as Obama the Great’s vice president. It was actually Obama, you may remember, who then issued a warning that Sanders was too extreme to be the party’s candidate. Biden remained, and although he was not one of the original candidates of choice, he was now the candidate by default.

And yet, over time, as his slide into dementia became more clear, and as COVID and the resultant lockdown reared their ugly heads, the strategy emerged: expose Biden as little as possible, protect him at all costs, lean on the Obama legacy and the idea of returning to better days, and send messages to the voters on the left that people other than Biden himself would actually be in charge of policy and those people would be of the far left.

Quite brilliant, actually. It might even win. Biden’s fading mental capacity has been turned into a feature of sorts, rather than a bug.

However, the very odd thing about Biden’s current stance as a blank screen is that, unlike Obama in 2008 (who initially projected himself as a blank screen), Biden’s been in the public eye for over 40 years as a very prominent politician. And people (outside of Delaware) have consistently rejected him on the basis of the lengthy record of mediocrity coupled with mendacity and just plain ickiness that he’s amassed.

Now in his dotage, as his mind fades, Biden is being recast by his helpers as a newly-blank screen. It’s surpassingly odd and it might even work. It’s like the plot of a bad movie, and yet it’s real.

!968 vs. today

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As Kathy Shaidle writes in her discussion of the life of Valerie Solanas, the woman who wrote an anti-male manifesto and then came very close to murdering Andy Warhol in that annus horribilis 1968:

Yesterday’s mental illness is today’s social policy.

Yes, yes, and yes.

Solanas was recently featured in a New York Times article that said:

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas walked into Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory, with a gun and a plan to enact vengeance. What happened next came to define her life and legacy: She fired at Warhol, nearly killing him. The incident reduced her to a tabloid headline, but also drew attention to her writing, which is still read in some women’s and gender studies courses today.

I was in college at the time, and I remember my own reaction to the story of Solanas and Warhol, as well as much of the turmoil of the late-60s. I was having my own personal turmoil, which involved trying to decide what I should do with the rest of my life (temporarily resolved in my case by going to law school, which was really no resolution at all) but in particular included dealing with the fact that my boyfriend was in combat in Vietnam during the year 1968-1969. For me the personal and the political intersected, as it often does, and other events of that year were also so dramatic and so disturbing that Solanas was only a distant footnote that didn’t have much meaning to me except that I thought what happened was a fringe event at the hands of an insane person.

I’ve been thinking about the late-60s more and more often these days, for obvious reasons. As Shaidle writes, “2020 more and more resembles 1968 but with worse music.” That’s a true line and a funny one. But the parallel is also serious, and although I agree with it up to a point, here’s why I depart from it: the difference between then and now is the successful 50-year Gramscian march in-between, ironically (or inevitably?) accomplished by many people from that same fringe of terrorists turned educators and cultural “leaders” who have instructed generations of young people to follow their ideologies and have spread and mainstreamed them.

Back then, the crazies and revolutionaries and assassins and the like were on the outside, and the vast vast majority of people and institutions in the country did not support them. Yes, the antiwar protests were large, but when the draft died and Nixon initiated troop withdrawals and Vietnamization, the protests died down too.

Indeed, 1968 and 2020 resemble each other except for the music. But it’s like the difference between a pennywhistle and a Wagnerian opera.