THE BATHROOM FREEDOM FIGHTERS: “Back in the 1980s, Bruce Springsteen and other rock stars formed Artists United Against Apartheid and performed a song proclaiming ‘I ain’t gonna play Sun City,’ referencing a resort in South Africa,” Brent Bozell and Tim Graham write in their latest syndicated column:
The song mocked the Reagan administration’s “constructive engagement” policy in South Africa, but rock stars routinely performed in the totalitarian Soviet Union, believing that was incredibly constructive.
One wonders: will these people ever stop complaining? Today, Springsteen and other Artists of Conscience have a burning new cause of injustice. Why, “transgender women” with male anatomy must be allowed to celebrate their chosen identity in the girls’ bathroom. The state legislature of North Carolina attempted to retain the silly old notion that “single-sex, multiple-occupancy bathroom and changing facilities” should be entered based on a person’s actual gender, not what they imagine it to be, and the Left has gone berserk.
As Jonah Goldberg notes in his latest G-File on Bernie Sanders’ desire to not only literally yell at clouds, but then spend billions of taxpayer dollars fighting global cooling/warming/climate change/climate chaos, “Liberalism Is War by Other Means.” And it has been ever since “the founding father of liberalism,” William James, “coined the phrase the ‘Moral Equivalent of War’” well over a century ago, as Jonah writes:
James thought war was fantastic for getting the masses to abandon the personal pursuit of happiness and rally around the state. The one problem with it was all the killing. If only we could come up with some cause or crisis that caused the people to abandon individuality and rally to Large Causes as defined by progressives.
The problem for the left in the 21st century is that having successfully made what Roger Kimball would call the long march through all the institutions, and having passed so much legislation under Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and ironically enough Richard Nixon (who domestically governed as an extension of LBJ’s Great Society), the search for new battlefields to wage war by other means is becoming increasingly thin. Thus the left is currently overreaching badly on an issue that alienates wide swatches of the American public.
At least for now. Given sufficient time and pressure, their calculus is that “you will be made to care,” as Erik Erikson would say.