I was reading a long piece by Lawrence M. Mead about social scientist Robert Putnam, of Bowling Alone. In that book Putnam noted the decline in civic involvement in American life and blamed TV watching and busier lives. And baby boomers were interested in “activism” but not “organized civic activity.”
Then there is the race issue. You are not allowed to criticize blacks in America. That could explain part of the withdrawal of white from civic life.
In a later book, Our Kids, Putnam “proposes various programs and services that would help the poor families cope” although he admits they would have only “marginal impacts.”
But what could help, asks Mead? Not more programs and benefits, not promotion of marriage. What is needed is programs like the military that has learned how to help disadvantaged youth.
The problem is that whatever we suggest, our liberal friends will turn around and tell us we are racists and Nazis. That, according to Paul Gottfried, is what has happened to Christopher Rufo, who is involved in Ron DeSantis’s anti-woke revolution in Florida. In reviewing Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution various lefty outfits accused him of being a “dangerous ‘right-wing activist’” and denied that the educated system was uniformly leftist, and asserting that he is trying to recast education in a “right-wing mold.”
Would it be possible to get together with our lefty friends, all friendly like, and recast government social policy from education to welfare?
The fact is that our lefty friends see us as the enemy. That’s what all the pejoratives are about; that’s what the epithets are about. Our lefty friends have a religious belief that all the sins of the world are due to the enemy action of racists and fascists. Hey, it has to be. The idea that the whole leftist agenda was wrong from the start, and has Made Things Worse, is not just impossible, but ridiculous.
So, while I’m all in favor of the Ron DeSantises and Christopher Rufos of the world indulging in a bit of guerrilla warfare on the culture front, I don’t see a big change until our lefty friends really screw us over, so that even liberal women and single women throw up their hands and beg far-right extremists to “protect me.”
I think that the most likely possibility on that front is the war on climate change. In my view, the Net Zero push will absolutely wreck the world economy and utterly discredit the current ruling class, along with scientists, experts, Barnacles, and Stiltstockings.