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From Peggy Noonan: A Point Worth Pondering
As I was wandering through the news headlines this morning, I came upon an item that recounted MSNBC “journalist” Joy Reid’s interview with Pete Buttigieg. Don’t ask me how the topic came up, but Reid took Buttigieg to task for a recent tweet of his that said, in part, that America needed a president shaped by “heartland” values. Poor Buttigieg did not anticipate her response which was that the word “heartland” was “like a dog whistle for white voters.” When I read that, I thought of a recent opinion piece by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal that said in part:
The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture, and journalism. In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them. Their entire program is accusation: You are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic; you are a bigot, a villain, a white male, a patriarchal misogynist, your day is over. They claim to be vulnerable victims, and moral. Actually they’re not. They’re mean and seek to kill, and like all bullies are cowards.
Although I agreed with Ms. Noonan, the thought struck me; do we really have 10 years before this woke progressivism renders this country incapable of any intelligence in any field? We can look back on any number of watershed moments in American history. Take, for instance, Joseph Welch’s masterful rebuke of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (“At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”), which many historians believe was the turning point in the history of McCarthyism. Would the woke progressives (or even those less woke) even recognize such eloquence? More importantly, would they even want to recognize it? I’m not so sure.
I want, with every fiber of my being, to believe that we have not descended so far into chaos that we can still preserve this republic. However, when I see the idiocy of Ms. Reid and hundreds of those like her, I cannot help but think that we, as a nation, have been educated far beyond our intelligence.
Published in General
I just thought of a perfect response to Joy Reid’s comment, and I’ll bet Pete wouldn’t have thought of it.
“Who’s the bigot now, Joy?”
One reason why I left California and avoid big cities. You can’t be too careful.
This is how you get Trump.
Joy Reid seems committed to drive me into Trump’s arms.
What does that even mean?
I hope she is successful. We would love to have you on our team.
Not sure whether we can still prevail. There have always been crazies but lately I feel like I’m in Invasion of the Body Snatchers where people I once thought normal are spouting this woke stuff like robots.
You either push back or you don’t. I’m guessing the former mayor of South Bend did not, so he deserves what he got. If we all do our bit when confronted with this stuff, it would help a lot.
Man, does that actually put me on the same team as Joy Reid, in some weird way?
Now for a serious response.
Good post, CACrabtree. I do have a sense that the wackiness on the Left is at a new high, though I don’t personally remember the 60s. I also have the impression that the younger generation is even more clueless than prior younger generations, but this is difficult for me to personally assess.
In 1987, Allan Bloom documented a significant change in his students, occurring around 1980. Feedback from academia, especially Jonathan Haidt, suggests a similar shift in the 2010-2015 period. The recent Powerline podcast — an excellent interview with a Clemson professor named C. Bradley Thompson — documented something similar, in just the past 2-3 years. I suspect that Thompson and Haidt are reporting on the same shift, with a delay of a few years between an Ivy-league professor like Haidt (at NYU now, I think) and a less prestigious (and less nuts) place like Clemson.
My hope is that these are the death throes of a bankrupt ideology, which is becoming increasingly hysterical as its irrational and resentful premises are challenged. But perhaps the kids are not OK, and this is the wave of the future.
I did not expect to live long enough to find reality weirder than a Monty Python skit.
I have one serious disagreement with the OP. I really dislike Welch’s dishonest rebuke to McCarthy. McCarthy was a blowhard, but he was also correct about many things. There was serious Communist infiltration of our government, unions, and the Democratic Party. I am going from memory on this, relying on Ann Coulter’s book on the subject. Being a member of a Communist front organization is every bit as reprehensible as being a member of a Nazi front organization. It is not indecent to object to governmental employment of actual Communists and Nazis.
Although, again because I’m living in a Monty Python skit, the Dems may be on the verge of nominating a Communist for President.
Gary is that Mister or Mrs. Trump’s arms? The later I could believe.
Yes. That reality is always ignored. Still, my own sense is that McCarthy was right and he had little or no decency. So while I grind my teeth that communists get a free pass, I do think a lot of fellow travelers were better motivated and more moral than any Nazi. Roosevelt allied with Stalin when circumstances called for it. Hard to imagine him doing that with Hitler (I hope and pray).
Still by the time of McCarthy, they should have known better. Many did and some became heroes of conservatism. (Same with Castro. He was sold to us as a friend of the poor in Cuba. Why shouldn’t we admire that? But by the time of the circus trials, to stick with him was obtuse at best. To do so today is moral idiocy, I think.)
And who decides these kinds of things? I mean, one day the “ok” symbol doesn’t simply mean “ok”; it’s a symbol of racism. The next day, the word “heartland” doesn’t simply mean the central part of the nation; it’s a racist term. Who in the world decides these things?
Thanks for your comments. Just a couple of observations.
Although I was an undergraduate from 1969 to 1973, I would hesitate to attempt any comparisons between the student protestors of the 60s and the “woke” progressives of today. Although an argument can be made that the students of the 60s were involved in some noble causes (at least for them) such as ending the war in Vietnam and civil rights, today’s campus radicals come across as juvenile and just plain silly.
I regard Allan Bloom’s, The Closing of the American Mind, as essential reading for anyone attempting to understand what is happening on today’s college campuses. Simply put, many of yesterday’s jerks became the faculty and administrators at today’s colleges and universities.
As for “Tail Gunner Joe”, the Venona Project proved that he had the correct idea. However, he should have used a scalpel instead of a blunderbuss.
This is much worse than the 60s and 70s (I say this having attended an SDS meeting in 1969 and listened to the self-identified Stalinist and Trotskyite factions denounce each other). Now it’s as if some of our major institutions are run by the Weather Underground.
There are far more normal people than there are woke progressive bullies. They just need to be led in a way that will make them feel confident when they speak out in ways that get people denounced and fired. The fear that the woke bullies inflict needs to be turned around on them. It’s hard to imagine how this could come about. It’s gone so far, it will take the political equivalent of a messiah I’m afraid.
True, but we still haven’t reached the levels of violence (bombings, etc) that were present in the 60s and 70s. As I recall, there were over a thousand bombings in a single year by groups such as the Weathermen and FALN.
Well for a truly committed Leftist, there is always plenty of evidence, even if it just means they need to point to your lack of skin pigment to make the point.
Even in the 1980’s, I knew people who worked for governmental agencies and big corporations, who dared not write a letter to the editor regarding what they thought of unlimited immigration, because it could mean having their employment record tainted with the notation “racist.”
I thought that was very sad, but now it has extended to the point that some 74 year old guy in Palo Alto is slammed around for wearing his MAGA hat. By a young punk.
In a truly progressive society, that punk would be slammed by progressives for dis-respecting the senior citizen. But right now, being old or fat are two bodily characteristics that allow for anyone to target you.
This morning in our staff meeting (I work at a church) one of the guys who works with the yout’ read from a study that suggested if you wish to minister to the yout’ then you need to not dismiss the causes that they are animated by. He specifically mentioned environmentalism as that thing that kids have jammed into their heads at school. And that if they sense we don’t care about the environment, we’re not going to be able to reach them with the gospel. But it would likely apply to all the other political messages they get.
I . . . was . . . bothered by this. Does this mean we have to adopt the woke lingo and pretend we accept it in order to minister to kids? Shouldn’t we help them break free from the woke brainwashing?
The conversation didn’t go much farther than that, and topics quickly shifted. But it bothered me. How far do we take that?
That is correct – in fact my office was cased for possible bomb locations by the last of these groups – but while there was a lot of violence it was perpetrated by a small number of people and the political parties had no association with them. Today, we have one of our political parties and large segments of academia, the foundations, the media, the tech companies etc dominated by woke crazies. It is a much deeper sickness we face today.
The problem is with the word “cause”. I worked in the environmental field for 30+ years. There is a lot of good we accomplished solving some real problems. But each issue and what to do about it should be factually based – and sometimes when you do the research there is not a factual basis for action. Just saying “my cause is environmentalism and everything I label as such therefore becomes valid” is nonsense. Like most subjects within the topic of environmentalism are some good things and some stupid things. What signals that we are thinking human beings is the ability to make distinctions between those things. Wokeness eliminates the need for thought. It encourages stupidity.
I’m also reminded of Eric Hoffer’s observation, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Environmentalism is now in the racket phase.
I’ve always preferred the word “conservation” but that isn’t as glamorous.
Yes. It was precisely the over reach of the Left that led to Trump becoming president. But good luck getting any committed Leftist to acknowledge this fact.
Comment of the month.
From Ann Althouse this morning:
The only way this goes away is if the left sees its current aggressive posture as being self-defeating, which is the same thing that had to happen in the 1970s and 80s following the New Left activism of the late 1960s and early 70s.
Both then and now, it’s the reaction of a supremely over-confident progressive movement, which has convinced itself that their beliefs are now in the majority, and they therefore no longer have to hide who they are. That same type of reaction in 1972 gave the Democrats McGovern, followed by the 1972 wipeout, but Nixon’s impeachment kept the arrogance alive really all the way through not just the two Regan wins, but the 1988 victory by Bush 41. Only then did the far left of the Democrats finally agree to shut their pie holes, which allowed Bill Clinton to win in ’92 by playing to the swing voters, instead of trying to excite the party’s activist liberal base. (They should have learned that lesson in ’76, when the voters rejected the more liberal Democratic hopefuls for Carter, but all that did was convince Ted Kennedy and his people that Carter was failing by late ’79 because he hadn’t been progressive enough).
John Judas’ “The Emerging Democratic Majority” is their Bible, and they take it as gospel that the coalition of special interest groups based on race, gender and sexual preference, combined with the votes of millienials and urban elites, will give them the White House in perpetuity, and just as with Carter in free-fall in 1979, they think Hillary failed in 2016 because she wasn’t progressive enough. It’s really going to take Trump winning not just by more than he won by in 2016, but winning states the Democrats currently think will never, ever, ever vote Republican again for them to even begin to re-think their progressive activism, and even there, it will probably take three straight losses again at the national level to as the very least get them to shut up for the few years.
That was indeed a rhetorically masterful attack.
Its falsehood is soIt is the successful result of a disinformation campaign that was thoroughly pervasive that you make unquestioning use of it. Welch, as the Army’s counsel, was defending the Army as an institution. The problem was that McCarthy was right. The Signal Corps installation at Fort Monmouth was so deeply penetrated by Communist agents that it had to be shut down and reconstituted elsewhere with better vetted personnel. The Army was stonewalling McCarthy, and ultimately destroyed him with ad hominem attacks.It will last until the people who pay Joy’s salary start wondering why the dogs won’t eat the dog food anymore.