As brave Hong Kongers protest the totalitarian communist Chinese regime in the streets and at the airport of their city, the mood here in the West, even in the United States, seems to be going in the opposite direction.
I’m not just referring to the violent so-called anarchists of Antifa, who often turn out to be emotionally disturbed community college instructors behind their Guy Fawkes masks, but to the larger zeitgeist. From Big Tech to Hollywood to our media to our campuses to the campaign rhetoric of virtually every Democratic candidate, we are moving toward a homogenization of thought and action that is, well, Chinese communist in style and ultimately in content.
Chairman Mao said, “Let a hundred schools of thought contend,” knowing full well whose would prevail. We’re no longer even paying that kind of lip service. Some form of political correctness has dominated our major institutions for years with minimal pushback.
Except for the election of Donald Trump, which was considered a horrifying aberration by our elites. How could such a vulgarian rise to such power? (No matter that they themselves were equally, if not more, reprehensible, as the Epstein revelations demonstrate.)
Because Trump’s policies were often arguably good and sometimes even conventionally so, attacks on him concentrated on his personality. That was especially true because his very persona upended that unifying and totalitarian (what else?) impulse toward political correctness.
So an American Cultural Revolution—not that distant from the original Chinese one, except so far no dunce caps—has been put in place by those various elites of the Academic-Hollywood-Media Complex. Actually, it’s been in place for a long time; only now it is escalating and approaching a point of no return.
Writers and thinkers are ghettoized. Only approved Republican pundits are allowed space, at least for long, in mainstream newspapers or television shows. The arts have become almost entirely off-limits to the right. Conservative professors are an endangered species at our universities, if not already extinct.
That is why it is no accident that you see Democrat proposals on the 2020 campaign trail that could have been taken from Lenin’s playbook. They are just part of this metastasizing zeitgeist. That these ideas have failed over and over is of no consequence. They sound good.
Don’t look at China or the Soviet Union or Cambodia or Cuba or Venezuela or North Korea or the entire Eastern Bloc when it was communist, not to mention Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia plus many others that all flirted with socialism/communism uniformly to disastrous ends. Look at Denmark! And please ignore that that extremely homogeneous country has a tiny population roughly half the size Los Angeles County’s and that they have been becoming less socialist themselves in their actual policies. We can use the land of Hans Christian Anderson as our model.
But the sad truth is we are already halfway to our Chinese-ification. Google, et al., have done it for us. Chairman Mao could never have dreamed of their success. To the Great Helmsman, power, as he wrote in the Little Red Book, stemmed from the barrel of a gun. How first half of the 20th century of him. Power these days begins with the click of a search engine. Without our even being aware of it, we are being told what to think. We already have “social credit scores,” just like our Chinese brothers and sisters. It’s practically over. Caught between Google—the super-government—and our own all-seeing secular government, the citizen as an individual is vanishing.
Apocalyptic as it may sound, if you love freedom, election 2020 is becoming the last chance to stem the tide. I hate to place my hopes in the Great Vulgarian—or in any single man or woman for that matter—but at this point, there is no alternative, not even remotely. In any case, judging a politician by his or her personality is a boring and subjective enterprise. With Western civilization in the balance, voting against a candidate because you think a tweet is crude is nothing short of idiotic.
Meanwhile…
Help stem the liberal monopoly of the arts and have fun in the process! PJ Media co-founder Roger L. Simon’s new novel — The GOAT — is, as of September 1, now available for sale on Kindle and hardcover. Soon in paperback as well. Some rather good early reviews here, here, here and here.
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