Provocation of the Worst Angels of Our Nature

Thousands of residents of Minden, Nv., ran BLM protesters out of town as soon as they showed up in the neighborhood and threatened to cause a scene, August 2020.

While reading this morning, I realized that I was listening to a musical piece entitled “Inequities in a Society” on XMRadio’s Symphony Hall. The online write-up for the piece goes as follows:
“The death of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 drives Julius P. Williams’ InEquities in a Society, a ‘political’ piece that laments this country’s tendency to crucify young men of color. The oboe carries us forward, merging with a string melodic line whose angularity will result in a full ‘confrontation’ with the repressive agents of ‘authority’.”

Julius P. Williams
A Trayvon Martin selfie

Now, I thought, it’s everywhere with no nook or cranny of life not infected with the dreaded specter of “inequities”, and a clarion call for an “equity” holy war. It’s as if a Ministry of Truth has suddenly planted itself into our society with its controlling tentacles everywhere. Some have noticed its appearance; some have warned of its baleful influence. Indeed, it is here, and provoking the worst angels of our nature.

What is the source of the provocation? I believe that one part of the country is in the grip of a shiny new and chic thing: the belief that racism must, absolutely must, exist despite its universal condemnation and six decades of public and private efforts to weed it out, with near-unanimous acclaim.

At root, Marx’s class-obsession is replaced by a Foucauldian race-obsession. Foucault was famous for announcing the existence of concealed forms of power. So, the way is cleared for claiming the presence of something that can’t be proven but nonetheless will be proclaimed. It’s what all the beautiful people take for granted in their stultifying conversations in their exclusive and tony east and west coast soirees.

Michel Foucault

To give the thought a patina of academic respectability, statistical contrivances are conjured to add an aura of confirmation. One such gimmick is “statistical disparity”. When a socio-economic number strays from the norm – the “norm” defined as a group’s percentage of the population – it’s time to jump to the conclusion of the alleged actuality of white/male power with its host of useful monikers (white supremacy, white privilege, systemic racism, patriarchal hegemony, etc.).

Don’t expect the people who should know better to know better – and by people who should “know better”, I mean the degreed people who populate Sociology Departments, et al. They should know better but don’t because their mind is surrendered to Foucault’s mind. When the stuff percolates down into the broader society, the beautiful and truly semi-literate people in their social circles, and in the complete absence of a skeptical mind, parrot the baloney. Thus, we get “Inequity” symphonies, corporate sponsorships of Marxist groups (BLM), NBA endorsements of Leftist propaganda, the Big Brother light-and-heavy censorship coming from Big Tech oligarchs, streamed entertainment to reinforce the party line, as ad-men and women insert the dogma in their commercials. Maybe Biden was wrong in an earlier carnation. His hope that China will become more like us must give way to the realization that we are becoming more like China.

Is this what we’re in for?

As in a strike-slip fault, when one tectonic plate moves while the adjoining one remains stationary, the great divide in America is between those who remain faithful to the Founder’s vision of a moral equality in law and government in addition to a supportive civil society, and those who have jumped with both feet into Foucault’s mental snake pit.

Most people may not be able to articulate the divide but they intuitively, as in Justice Potter Stewart’s famous words, “know it when [they] see it”. The average person recoils in horror at the antics of spoiled, fulminating snowflakes on our college campuses, the scorched-earth rampages through our cities, the indoctrination masquerading as scholarship, the swarming intimidations and threats on social media, and the mobs defacing the tributes to others who sacrificed so much for our freedoms and prosperity. People know barbarity and ingratitude when they see it.

Protesters wrecked a statue of Philadelphia abolitionist and philanthropist Matthias Baldwin, June 10, 2020.

Like two magnets that repel each other if touched by ends of identical polarity, so we increasingly find each other odious. Those who rejoice and those who find the revolution repellent are finding coexistence untenable. Terry Teachout predicted it in 2000, along with Gertrude Himmelfarb, as well as Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing in their 2004 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Traditionalists in blue-state red counties flock to red states. The blues stay pat in ignorance and denial. Blue becomes bluer and red redder. And some reds become purple as their cities emulate their blue-state cousins. Teachout predicts a soft civil war, or will it be occasionally hot? I hope not . . . to both, and most of all to the latter.

The real catalyst for the confrontation may lie in something more profound than Foucault’s intellectual hallucinations. Princeton’s Robert P. George thinks so. George, one of the few contrarians left in our over-priced and hubristic academies, sees the cultural emasculation of Judeo-Christianity as the accelerant. He’s onto something. Today, the restraint of the cross is replaced by the brute power of multiculturalism’s secular messiahs. The therapeutic restraint of Christianity on our worst instincts has been neutered leaving nothing behind but the exercise of naked power.

George refers back to Germany’s 18th-century Jewish-Christian poet, Heinrich Heine. Heine prophesied the dark clouds of brutalities in Germany’s future. To quote Heine,
“Christianity, and this is its greatest merit, has somewhat mitigated the brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which the Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame.”

Robert P. George
Heinrich Heine

The resuscitated “ancient warriors” need not be limited to jackbooted Nazis. Our would-be tyrants have no affection for jackboots, but wear penny loafers and suits and possess prestige indoctrination from prestigious Ivy League schools. Call them GQ tyrants. They operate with the same bumptiousness as SS-Brigadeführer Reinhard Heydrich in carrying out the 1934 bloody Nazi purge of the SA known as the Night of the Long Knives. You think that I exaggerate?

I do, but only slightly, to make a point. The federal government’s vast cadres of prosecutors and people with guns – the military and numerous law enforcement agencies – are about to be harnessed to a crusade against “domestic terrorism”. January 6’s capitol riot is yesteryear’s Reichstag Fire. The ground will be prepared by incessant talk of “extremism”. Do you actually think that they are looking both left and right for kooks? No, for them, “extremism” only comes from the right. Not to say that there aren’t kooks over there, but such talk greases the skids to ride out of the public square the last vestiges of opposition to the official wokeness. It will be the excuse to shame those who think differently. And Hollywood, Big Tech, and Big Media will enthusiastically join in the pogrom.

Reichstag Fire, 1933
American newspaper stories of the Night of the Long Knives, 1934.

In the meantime, the breakdown of law and order, the incessant “equity” inquisitions, the catastrophe of socialism’s incursions into the economy, the attempt to reformulate our Constitutional order to embed them in power for a generation, a facile and inhuman culture-run-amok, the threat to livelihoods from the commissars of the Green New Deal, will take its toll on vast populations lacking in enthusiasm for the revolution. The passion for a woke future will still have an audience in urban America and faculty lounges. Everyone else will either be refugees or man the political ramparts to keep the revolution’s bacillus from penetrating their state’s borders.

Biden and powerful Democrat politicos are preparing a jam-down. Their mistake is to think that they’ll be able to get away with it. They’ll discover that they’ve provoked the worst angels of our nature . . . on both sides.

RogerG

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