Probably due to past loyalty, I sat down to watch the San Francisco 49ers v. Seattle Seahawks game last Sunday (SF won 27-7); however, I must admit that my enthusiasm for professional sports has waned. I can’t remove from my mind Big Sports’ enrollment in the radical left. Neither can I erase the images of these two cities’ decline into urban chaos, as is true of most of the other NFL home cities. These cities willingly chose that path. A smothering cloud of ideologically driven misrule overhangs the stadium crowd, the broadcast, and the team organizations. With few exceptions, the NFL schedule has turned into a series of Dystopia Bowls: one team booster of the radical left agenda from a radical left dystopia playing another with an identical image.
I didn’t politicize the sport. Previously, I had no clue about the political leanings of those composing the team organizations and the league, and didn’t care. As for the cities, they upheld for the most part some sense of decency. Not anymore. The sport concerned itself, pure and simple, with athletic competition at the highest level. Not anymore.
How did the NFL and their urban homes allow themselves to descend into such depravity? The movie “All the President’s Men” made popular the modern cynic’s favorite principle: “Follow the money”. That’s not true by a long shot. If you want to accurately follow the course of human events, “Follow the ideas”. It’s how we got to a compromised NFL and today’s unlivable cities.
It begins with one word: Socialism. Yes, that word, a rhetorical vessel wherein the perennial hopes and dreams of human betterment can be realized, despite its track record of abysmal failure. Its oppressed/oppressor dialectic is so appealing that it escapes any final verdict on its failure. It’s the vampire that won’t stay dead.
In one sense, what began with Marx and Engels, passed through the 60’s New Left, and would end up in today’s BLM, Antifa, college campuses everywhere, and the Democratic Party platform. In the good ‘ol days of the 19th century Socialist International, the oppressed was the industrial revolution’s urban working class (proletariat). But the dreams of revolution by the proletariat fizzled and where they did succeed in a takeover, it was a litany of nightmares: 100 million deaths in the 20th century by one accounting of a group of French historians in The Black Book of Communism.
Yet, something happened on the way to the collectivist Emerald City of Oz to keep the flame burning. Two things: new groups auditioned for the roles of oppressor (the white patriarchy) and oppressed (minorities and a plethora of hypothetical outcasts), and the real threat was said to come from an abstract “system”. And voilà, new life was breathed into the disgraced Marx.
Pointing the way were disgruntled Marxists ensconced in what came to be called the Frankfurt School. They followed the line of thought of Antonio Gramsci who tried to explain away the reluctance of workers to be enthusiasts of revolution by pinning the blame on “cultural hegemony” – the values, mores, institutions, and ways of life that keep them supposedly docile. In modern lingo, synonyms would be “the man”, “the system”, or “the establishment”. Inspired by Gramsci’s gambit, European activist academics banded together and formed the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, which would later be dubbed The Frankfurt School. Hitler, however, set them packing in the 1930’s. Many of them made their way to the United States – the Frankfurt School set up shop in New York City – to eventually take up academic posts to proselytize the American young in their babble.
Theordor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, et al, and the risible Herbert Marcuse lent their thoughts and encouragement to the burgeoning 60’s counterculture and the extremist New Left to continue the erosion of the foundations of western civilization. The physical consequences were plagues of drugs and STD’s. The political offshoots were the SDS, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army, etc. Crime and urban riots erupted, and campuses were paralyzed in protest and violence. It would appear that the trail of these ideas is one of tears. Some liberals were shocked into neo-conservatism by the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Once again, disaster, and, once again, someone will appear to pick up the torch to fling it. It’s proof that gullibility like the poor will always be with us. In our social media world, glibness reigns supreme in the form of stitching together words into appealing quips that remain just as erroneous as they did before. The glibness of the BLM politburo, Nikole Hannah-Jones (the lead founder behind the intellectually bankrupt The 1619 Project), Bernie, the Biden crowd, the CRT demagogues, AOC and her Squad, and the big wheels of the Democratic Party can only put lipstick on a pig and cannot with a wave of the hand turn the porcine beast into Miss Universe. I don’t believe in shapeshifting. Do you?
Today is different, though. Whereas before, the nuttiness infected the fringes of society, only occasionally bursting forth to wreak havoc. Today, it’s everywhere and especially among the those who occupy the commanding heights of the culture. Why does big business from Major League Baseball to Coca-Cola to Delta Airlines to Disney risk alienating two-thirds of their customer base, unless they actually believe this bunk? There must be something more at work than fear of the race hustlers’ shakedown racket.
Rudi Dutschke, a German missionary of the 60’s New Left, pointed the way by espousing a “long march through the institutions”. He elaborated, “Revolution is a long complicated process in which people have to change.” He meant to shove aside and replace established civil society and government. But others realized that a root-and-branch approach wasn’t necessary, that today’s unkept radicals in blue jeans could be tomorrow’s tenured staff in tweed. Welcome to your kid’s nest of revolution, errr, college.
Simply put, the barbarians at the gates became the barbarians inside the gates. Lo and behold, the neo-socialism is dogma among the beautiful people residing in their super-zip code (Martha’s Vineyard, Chappaqua, NY, Atherton, Ca., Malibu, Ca., etc.), any place where hyper-wealth screens people from the consequences of their beliefs. Of course, part of the uniform for this new aristocracy is a degree from a legacy university, preferably Ivy League. They have all the outward signs of manners and outlook of a college pedigree, and the inward signs of proper breeding in fealty to the dogma. The Fortune 500 is no longer the Republican Party at work. It’s an alumni booster club for the neo-socialism of the campus.
The minions of this new privilege infiltrate beyond the boardroom and into all positions of power and influence. Since FDR made DC into the new Rome, and swelled its politico-cultural influence beyond the District and into the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia, the neo-socialism has at its disposal the aggrandized power of the federal government. Any popular threat to its monopoly can be squashed under the banner of another German rhetorical import: streitbare Demokratie, or defensive democracy. It normally shows up as censorship. It’s the speech control in “hate” and “extremist” statutes and regulations in the European Union, UK, Austria, Germany, etc. You hear it out of the mouths of Pelosi, Schumer, Biden in “defending our democracy”, which is code for thought control by pasting contrary views with “misinformation”. Biden has attempted an institutionalization of the censorship by creating “misinformation” ministries in his administration, all stymied as of now.
Streitbare demokratie seeks to freeze in amber the gains of the long march of neo-socialism through the institutions. The effects are physically observable in viral gender confusions among the young, uninhabitable downtowns, a plague of crime, radical indoctrination of the young, an ecotopia that forcibly reverts life back to medieval times, and a crumbling infrastructure that can’t deliver safe roads, sewers, water, or affordable and reliable electricity. Hillsides aflame, high taxes, inflation, and gargantuan government waste characterize life in this “democracy”. It’s like the decay of Rome in the 5th and 6th centuries after repeated barbarian conquests and misrule. Soon, much of the place is abandoned only to fall into rubble, to be later uncovered by the new field of 19th century archeology. Is that the fate of New York City, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, et al?
The stench of watching it unfold in real time overpowers the senses. The knowledge of the occurrence overwhelms any enjoyment of watching a football game. Sorry.
RogerG
Sources:
* An account of the super-zip codes can be read here: “Super ZIPs: New map reveals who is part of the rich ‘isolated elite”, Deseret News, Nov. 18, 2013, at https://www.deseret.com/2013/11/18/20529811/super-zips-new-map-reveals-who-is-part-of-the-rich-isolated-elite#:~:text=In%20the%20Wall%20Street%20Journal%20and%20his%20book%2C,5%2010514%3A%20Chappaqua%2C%20N.Y.%20%28New%20York%20City%20area%29
* A rudimentary internet search of “streitbare Demokratie”, Rudi Dutschke, The Frankfurt School, the guiding lights of the School, Antonio Gramsci, will shed light on today’s neo-socialism.