Destroying the Constitution and seeking state-mandated equality of result

by Victor Davis Hanson (link)

The revolution of 1776 sought to turn a colony of Great Britain into a new independent republic based on constitutionally protected freedom. It succeeded with the creation of the United States.

The failed revolution of 1861, by a slave-owning South declaring its independence from the Union, sought to bifurcate the country, More than 600,000 dead later, slavery was abolished, a Confederacy was in in ruins, and the South was forced back into the United States largely on the conditions and terms of the victorious North.

The 1960s saw efforts to create a new progressive nation by swarming democratic and republican institutions. The sheer force of a left-wing cultural revolution would supposedly transform a nation, in everything from jeans, long hair, and pot to rock music and sexual “liberation.” It was eventually diffused by popular weariness with the extremism and violence of the radical revolutionaries, and the establishment’s agreements to end the Vietnam War, give 18-year-olds the right to vote, phase out the draft, expand civil rights to include reparatory action, legalize abortion, radicalize the university, and vastly increase the administrative state to wage a war on poverty, a war on pollution, and a war on inequality.

Our present revolution is more multifaceted. It is a war on the very Constitution of the United States that has not yet brought the Left its Holy Grail: a state-mandated equality of result overseen by an omnipotent and omniscient elite. The problem for today’s leftists is that they are not fighting Bourbon France, a reactionary Europe of 1848, or Czarist Russia, but an affluent, culturally uninhibited, and wildly free United States, where never in the history of civilization has a people attained such affluence and leisure.

Poverty is not existential as it once was, given high technology and government redistribution. The grievance is not that America is destitute (indeed, obesity not famine is our national epidemic). The poorer do not lack access to material goods (everything from iPhones to high-priced sneakers is in the reach of about everyone).

Instead, the complaint is that some have far more than others, and the government, despite its $21 trillion in debt, seems unable to guaranteed universal parity, especially when the people seem unexcited about joining “taking a knee” protests or “swarming the homes” of counter-revolutionaries. In other words, millions of Americans will never join Antifa, Black Lives Matter, or Occupy Wall Street on the barricades; nor will they worry that in Texas 59 percent of white women voted for Latino Ted Cruz while 95 percent of black women voted for white male Robert O’Rourke. They apparently prefer instead to live private lives on their own terms.

Taking a drive in a Hyundai today is far more comfortable, reliable, and safe than touring in a 1970 Rolls Royce. An inner-city youth with an iPhone has more computing power and global access in his palm than did an estate owner in 1990 with a row of mainframe computers in his basement. So revolution is not so easy anymore and requires changing the very idea of the state, the law, and the ancient institutions that uphold them.

Immigration

Sovereign and secure borders do not lead to the sort of demographic upheaval that fuels progressive agendas. Measured, legal, meritocratic, and diverse immigration does not result in a vast impoverished shadow population in need of self-appointed advocacy; it enhances individual assimilation, integration, intermarriage, and Americanization.

If in the past nullification of federal laws led to the states’-rights crises involving southern states in 1828–32, 1860, or 1962, today there is apparently little worry about ignoring federal immigration statutes. We simply have allowed more than 500 municipalities, counties, and states to declare full enforcement of federal immigration law null and avoid within their jurisdictions — period.

Immigrants 1,000 miles away, intent on crashing the southern border and residing in the U.S. illegally, sue the federal government to force acceptance of their anticipated illegal entry. Again, the revolutionary idea is that progressive messaging cannot win 51 percent approval without changing the demography — and changing the demography is impossible without constitutional nullification.

Elections and Courts

Voting does not always result in the result that progressives desire. Unfortunately for the Left, more than half the country still believes America is unquietly good, blessed with a wonderful inheritance by its brave and ingenious ancestors, a beacon of freedom and security in a scary world, and constantly improving. Even a progressive media, university, Hollywood, and a progressive plutocracy, Antifa, and street theater cannot yet change that fact.

So the revolution again turns to upending the constitution and the law. In Florida, local violations of state election laws seek to warp the result and elect the more progressive candidate. More fundamentally, why does a Wyoming of 600,000 souls deserve two senators, the same number as in California with its 40 million? Are not 39,400,000 California citizens deprived of their “rights” of proportional senatorial representation?

Why is there an electoral college that violates the spirt of Athenian democratic direction elections? Why is there a Second Amendment that allows “automatic” assault weapons and “nuts” with handguns?

For that matter, why is there a counterrevolutionary First Amendment that protects “hate speech” and de facto promotes right-wing racists, homophobes, nativists, xenophobes, sexists, and climate-change deniers, allowing them to propagandize and pollute the public discourse and infect campuses with right-wing rhetoric?

The courts have become revolutionary. They now routinely overturn popular referenda, presidential executive orders, and legislative statutes, mostly on the principle that better-educated, more moral and experienced judges answer to a higher, more progressive calling and know what in the long run is best for the uneducated rabble. From now on out, every Republican-nominated Supreme Court nominee will probably result in a Kavanaugh-like circus, in which protestors in the gallery, disruptive senators themselves, and mobs in the street will attempt to create so much chaos that the wearied public will cave and just wish that conservatives would not nominate such controversial constructionists.

Campuses

Today’s university is in a revolutionary spiral. The U.S. Constitution does not necessarily protect students and faculty. By that dramatic statement, I mean, free speech is all but gone. A professor who confessed opposition to affirmative action, abortion, or global warming would face ostracism and even risk physical assault and yet see his attackers all but sanctioned by a neutral or complicit administration.

Due process is nonexistent in many areas. In accusations of sexual harassment or assault, there is little left of the presumption of innocence, the right to confront and question a transparent accuser, and the appeal to be judged by a jury of one’s peers. Most of the 1960s civil-rights agenda is moribund on campus.

Racial segregation in dorms and safe spaces is unquestioned. Racial biases can result in rejected admission on the premise that there are too many of one particular race on campus — and merit-based criteria are a prejudiced construct anyway. Censorship has returned, by both banning texts and demonizing classics now deemed to need “trigger warnings.” Free assembly and expression are on life support. Speakers and guests deemed “right-wing” are shouted down, swarmed, or disinvited by a terrified Bourbon administration.

The Mob

The mob is becoming in some ways as powerful as the French rabble who cheered on the guillotine, or the adolescent crowds that spoiled affluent kids such as Bill Ayers and Jane Fonda once used as demonstration fodder. Instead, it is vast and global — and linked by instant communications on social media and the Internet, and it remains often anonymous. Post or say one wrong word, and the electronic turba comes out of the shadows, swarming to demand career-ending confessions, or offering amnesty on promises of correct reeducation. One’s entire life can be accessed in nanoseconds to root out past thought crimes and counterrevolutionary speech. Be deemed a right-wing obstructionist or activist, and everything — from one’s cell-phone number and email address to private residence and office —can become known to 7 billion.

Logging on may mean using the public airspace and thus entering the domain of a traditionally regulated public utility, but the masters of the universe at Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, by the power of their trillions of dollars and loud progressive fides, are exempt from antitrust and monopoly legislation. So when the mob targets a public enemy, correct-thinking thirtysomething geeks and nerds in Menlo Park and Palo Alto gear up to shut down, censor, and recalibrate public transmitted speech and thought.

Almost everything we have seen in just the last three months — the Kavanaugh chaos, the “caravan,” the ongoing Mueller octopus, recounting election results until they are deemed “correct,” the Beto and Gillum neo-socialism craziness, the swarming of a Fox News anchor’s home, driving public officials out of restaurants, the media circus at presidential press conferences — are symptoms of revolutionary America. In this conflict, one side believes it is not only not fair but also not allowable that it lacks the necessary power to make us all equal — but equal only in the eyes of a self-anointed elite.

Thanks for sharing this. VDH is perpetually taking Americans to school. Sadly too many find his lessons longer than the average attention span. Another must read.

Thanks for sharing this, Very informative write up.

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Our present revolution is more multifaceted. It is a war on the very Constitution of the United States that has not yet brought the Left its Holy Grail: a state-mandated equality of result overseen by an omnipotent and omniscient elite.

Yes, but I would nitpick his summary just a bit.
It's been a long march through the institutions beginning around 1900. What happened in the 1960s wasn't separate from the 1910s or what is happening today, it's all a part of the same counter-revolution.
The "Progressive era" and the counter-revolution have been ongoing for over 100 years.

It's all based on Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. John Dewey brought it to American education.

I do agree with his conclusion:

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Almost everything we have seen in just the last three months — the Kavanaugh chaos, the “caravan,” the ongoing Mueller octopus, recounting election results until they are deemed “correct,” the Beto and Gillum neo-socialism craziness, the swarming of a Fox News anchor’s home, driving public officials out of restaurants, the media circus at presidential press conferences — are symptoms of revolutionary America. In this conflict, one side believes it is not only not fair but also not allowable that it lacks the necessary power to make us all equal — but equal only in the eyes of a self-anointed elite.

These are two human goals which are incompatible: Freedom and Equality.
The only way to be free is to recognize that we will not be equal. The only way to make people equal is to deprive them of freedom.

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Originally posted by chellim1:
These are two human goals which are incompatible: Freedom and Equality.
The only way to be free is to recognize that we will not be equal. The only way to make people equal is to deprive them of freedom.

Too that end, I was clowning around with this 'kid' at church (a 26 year old 6'5" 260 pound ex-UCF offensive lineman who just also happens to be black) about the 'equality' nonsense. The conversation went like this....

Me: Come on, do you really think you'll ever be as smart as I am?
Him: Nope. And you'll never be as good looking as I am. So much for equality old man.
Me: Can't say as I can argue with you there.

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Originally posted by fpuhan:
The mob is becoming in some ways as powerful as the French rabble who cheered on the guillotine, or the adolescent crowds that spoiled affluent kids such as Bill Ayers and Jane Fonda once used as demonstration fodder...

In this conflict, one side believes it is not only not fair but also not allowable that it lacks the necessary power to make us all equal — but equal only in the eyes of a self-anointed elite.

There's a lot more to this than the author got into. I can see why he got into the "one tweet, and you'll be e-crucified by seven billion" argument, but it may be a lot less scary if you look at it from the opposite perspective.

George Rude (Roo-day, I have no idea how to type accent marks) put together a collection of essays in a book called "Paris and London in the 18th Century". He was a screaming communist, but with a bit more scholarly discipline than Saul Alinsky seems to have ever been able to muster.

He went back and looked at the French Revolution, and found that it was essentially all based in Paris. Indeed, the war of the counter revolution essentially devolved into a war between Paris and a few isolated urban pockets on one side and the rest of the country on the other. More than that, the revolution in Paris was essentially waged (successfully) by four or five neighborhoods in Paris, with its ideological shock troops being the fish wives from the market just east of the old Bastille.

How did that work? Easy. Government in France was thoroughly and deliberately centralized in Paris. That meant that a handful of revolutionaries living in Paris could be the "firstest with the mostest" in any political conflict that would determine the fate of France. That also meant that they defined the environment in which government personnel lived, and therefore that fed into government personnel's everyday notion of what is "normal" and what, therefore, the rest of the country must be thinking as well - even if that's only true in the imaginations of people working in government. Did you ever wonder how normally good, rational people get elected to federal office and then either become GDCs or become passive in the face of GDC BS? That's how.

I would argue that the same held true for the hippies and new radicals of the 60's. They were effective where they were concentrated. When the hippie wave crested and broke (to quote Dr. Hunter S. Thompson), they essentially concentrated on concentrating their populations in college towns and large urban areas - which is where they're effective today.

That's not to say that we can be complacent because so many more counties in America vote red rather than blue. Elections in the US are won or lost not only on the basis of geography but population density as well. That's why the GDCs want to de-emphasize geography by arguing for a purely popular vote and the elimination of the Electoral College.

No, what that should tell us is that if we are going to win, we need to redefine the political battlefield. We need to find a way to go into the big cities and college towns and oppose the GDC's politically on their own ground, rather than quietly ceding them places to use as foundations or staging grounds from which to launch political attacks on the rest of us. One look at the suburban votes in the latest midterm elections should be enough, IMHO, to convince anyone of that.

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We need to find a way to go into the big cities and college towns and oppose the GDC's politically on their own ground, rather than quietly ceding them places to use as foundations or staging grounds from which to launch political attacks on the rest of us. One look at the suburban votes in the latest midterm elections should be enough, IMHO, to convince anyone of that.

I agree with you. I've been saying for years that we have to campaign more in the urban core areas. Rand Paul made some inroads doing that, and DJT did too. We have to increase our support, especially among blacks.