Yes, But What Should be Next?
it won't be an age of ideas
In “Whither Rufo-ism” the Zman takes down Christopher Rufo, who recently took down the wokies at the New College of Florida on orders from Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Zman thinks there is nothing new here, nothing that hasn’t been tried by conservatives before. He notes that Rufo is now saying nothing about race although he used to say “the real victims of CRT were black kids.”
Zman is afraid that the New Right folks like Rufo are just going to end up as another Washington Generals team everlastingly losing to the Harlem Globetrotters.
The New Left, like the Old Left and it antecedents since the Mayflower needs a dancing partner, one that shares its ultimate goal.
Well, I suppose in the sense of Middlemarch’s Mr. Brooke notion of “up to a certain point, but not too far” that has been true, at least when the Left was proposing ideas that aimed to genuinely help the lower classes, as in helping the workers and pushing for black civil rights. In those days the ordinary middle class may not have liked what the left was proposing, but it didn’t feel that the left was the enemy.
But now, as I write in my current American Thinker piece, the left has declared war on the middle class, with Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “deprogramming” remarks: deplorable because objecting to LGBT politics, and deprogramming because the Trump insurrection.
I think that the dance is over. It would be different if the educated class knew how to dance.
See, I think that after winning political power for itself in the great revolutions from the Puritan to the Maoist, the educated class has done nothing for anyone except grab power for itself.
I think that the left’s agenda for the workers was wrong because it didn’t help the workers climb into the middle class. Ditto for blacks. It kept both groups in cultural limbo. And I don’t think that feminism ever helped middle-class and lower-class women, for whom life is about marriage, family and children. Today, I believe the “equity” agenda is simply a spoils operation. Vote for us, and we’ll get you into the professional racket. That’s what Eric Hoffer wrote back in the 1960s in “The Negro Revolution.”
[T]he civil-rights movement is largely an instrument in the lands of the Negro middle class to force its way into the privileged enclaves of American life. Used thus, the Negro revolution is not a movement but a racket.
Was he right, or was he right? And the scope of the racket has expanded to include all “oppressed peoples.”
I think the dance is over. Because what’s the point of dancing with these people?
You know what would have really helped the lower class and the middle class? No Wars. Never mind the lives lost and the young men thrown into the furnace. Each of the wars has dislocated the economy and caused hardship to ordinary people. The deflation after the Civil War caused hardship for farmers and workers. World War I led to incompetent credit management by the new Federal Reserve system and the lost decade of the 1930s. the guns and butter policies of the Cold War led to the inflation of the 1970s. And the Iraq War of the 2000s plus the Fannie/Freddie housing subsidies led to the Great Recession and the incompetent Obama recovery. Now we have the stupidity of the COVID lockdowns and the sudden increase in the money supply in 2020-21 of 39 percent.
I think the dance is over. Never mind dancing. Let’s reel back government and let the economy work its way without government pushing and shoving. Let’s stop the stupid wars and let ordinary Americans thrive. And let’s put the brake on the “equity” spoils system.
See, I think that the last 300 years or so have been an ideological era, because that’s what the educated class likes; that’s what it does. But the next era won’t be an ideological era. Been there, done that.