[NOTE: The first part of this post is a repost of something I originally published on 11/11/2019, a little over a year ago. I think it’s interesting to look back at it in the light of what’s happened since. I’ve added an entirely new portion at the end as well.]
This is the Nineteen Eighty-Four election, according to Victor Davis Hanson:
It is becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism.
I don’t think there’s any “becoming” about it. This has been true of elections ever since at least 2008 and perhaps earlier. After all, remember “hope and change” and Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of this country?
Some of this transformation had already occurred, of course, with events such as the reform of immigration laws during the 1960s. I’m not going to argue about when it really began – for example, you could start with Wilson or TR the “progressive,” or you could talk about FDR or the income tax or even the popular election of senators – but now it’s reached a sort of fever pitch and is far more open in its manifestations and goals.
More from Hanson:
The choice in reductionist terms will be one between a growing, statist Panopticon, fueled by social media, a media-progressive nexus, and an electronic posse. Online trolls and government bureaucrats seek to know everything about us, in Big Brother fashion to monitor our very thoughts to ferret out incorrect ideas, and then to regiment and indoctrinate us to ensure elite visions of mandated equality and correct behavior—or else!
In other words, the personality quirks of a Trump or an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders will become mostly irrelevant given the existential choice between two quite antithetical ideas of future America. In 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all—and the furious, often desperate, and unfettered pushback against it.
We are also well beyond even the stark choices of 1972 and 1984 that remained within the parameters of the two parties. In contrast, the Democratic Party as we have known it, is extinct for now. It has been replaced since 2016 by a radical progressive revolutionary movement that serves as a touchstone for a variety of auxiliary extremist causes, agendas, and cliques—almost all of them radically leftwing and nihilistic, and largely without majority popular support.
…Hanson discusses the aspect of this change that has resulted from indoctrination via the school system. He emphasizes universities, but the rot now goes all the way down to the youngest students:
Our universities effectively have eroded the First Amendment and the due process protections of the Fifth in matters of sexual assault allegations. Higher education is now controlled by a revolutionary clique. It institutionalizes racially segregated dorms and safe spaces, matter of factly promotes censorship, and either cannot or will not prevent students from disrupting lecturers with whom they disagree. What or who exactly say not to all that? Who would dare say that America in its third century is not going to change its use of English pronouns or decide that there are not three and more biological genders?
One of the problems is that it may be too late, and that’s true even if Trump is re-elected. Is his unique (to say the least) personality a mere speed bump along the way to leftist domination? In my darker hours I very much fear it may be:
Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. One side advocates a complete transformation not just of the American present but of the past as well. The Left is quite eager to change our very vocabulary and monitor our private behavior to ensure we are not just guilty of incorrect behavior but thought as well.
The other side believes America is far better than the alternative, that it never had to be perfect to be good, and that, all and all, its flawed past is a story of a moral nation’s constant struggle for moral improvement.
The election is almost exactly one year from now.
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That was the end of the original post. Now I will add that, speaking of “One side advocates a complete transformation not just of the American present but of the past as well”: one of Biden’s very first acts via executive order will apparently be to dissolve the Trump-appointed 1776 Commission, a group that sought to counter the lies of the 1619 Project. And its recently issued report was removed from the White House website on Inauguration Day, which tells you something important about the Biden administration’s priorities.
Victor Davis Hanson explains the report here:
…[A]t any other age than the divisive present, the report would not have been seen as controversial.
First, the commission offered a brief survey of the origins of the Declaration of Independence, published in 1776, and the Constitution, signed in 1787. It emphasized how unusual for the age were the founders’ commitments to political freedom, personal liberty and the natural equality endowed by our creator — all the true beginning of the American experiment.
The commission reminded us that the founders were equally worried about autocracy and chaos. So they drafted checks and balances to protect citizens from both authoritarianism, known so well from the British Crown, and the frenzy of sometimes wild public excess.
The report repeatedly focuses on both the ideals of the American founding and the centuries-long quest to live up to them. It notes the fragility of such a novel experiment in constitutional republicanism, democratic elections and self-government — especially during late-18th-century era of war and factionalism.
The report does not whitewash the continuance of many injustices after 1776 and 1787 — in particular chattel slavery concentrated in the South, and voting reserved only for free males.
Indeed, the commission explains why and how these wrongs were inconsistent with the letter and spirit of our founding documents. So it was natural that these disconnects would be addressed, even fought over, and continually resolved — often over the opposition of powerful interests who sought to reinvent the Declaration and Constitution into something that they were not.
The text of the report can be found here. And yes, of course left-leaning historians and the MSM have criticized the report. (By the way, when I used Google and DuckDuckGo to search for “1776 Commission Report text” and compared the results, they were widely divergent in exactly the way you might think.)
You may recall that in Orwell’s book one of the most urgent concerns of the government was to rewrite the past. The 1619 Project vs. the 1776 Report may seem trivial, but it is a fight over the past and therefore a fight about the basics of who we were and who we are today. This particular act of the Biden administration may seem small, but it is not. And they will wrap themselves in the cloak of patriotism while trying to make the false 1619 narrative become the law of the education land, spread in school after school, poisoning the air and a generation of children against their own country.
Allan Bloom nailed it nearly thirty-five years ago when he wrote this [emphasis and additions in brackets mine]:
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 [in education], 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.
We are seeing the fruits of many decades of such education.
