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What We Should Learn from Idiot Protesters
People are desperate for meaning, for being part of something greater than themselves. People are, rightly, interested in making their lives something more than long.
If society/religion/nation offer that vision, and people buy into it, then it can be an outlet for this need. Even if the vision is no deeper than “Greater Russia.” Nationalism is an outlet, and not necessarily a bad one.
But when we offer no vision, then at least hating Jews is standing for something. The hunger does not go away just because society has lost its way. It just becomes an angry mindless mob.
We ignore these lessons at our peril. It is not enough to point out how stupid and ultimately evil these protests and protesters are. We have to market and sell something better. We have to do it with belief and confidence and even inspiration – because everyone, from the smallest child to the oldest person, admires a cause that is pursued with passion. Which means we have to go on the offensive in these culture wars, or civilization is lost.
Published in General
Pat Buchanan said much the same in 1992. The issues that fueled the culture war then are still in the thick of it today — abortion, bearing arms, church/state issues, free speech, politics of sex, and so forth. The Left never stops pushing, never rests, so the fight goes on.
Will the upcoming generations even know enough about American liberty, with all its flaws and shortcomings, that they’ll believe it worth preserving? Will they recognize their freedoms now in danger of being lost forever?
The young people in the antiwar movement in the 60s and activists in civil rights movement did not ask for likes, clicks, followers or subscribers online. Narcissism tends to distort or even supplant a search for meaning. Combine that with an astonishing degree of ignorance and a groupthink culture and we get the sexually confused shilling for the most loathsome people in the entire Middle East where the competition for that designation is quite stiff.
There’s a great memoir by Sebastian Haffner, who came of age in Germany between the wars.
He says that when the economy and society began to significantly stabilize – which he credits to Gustav Stresemann’s chancellorship and the introduction of the Rentenmark into the monetary system – most people were happy:
But not everyone was happy. A return to private life was not to everyone’s taste:
and
I think that in America today, we have a considerable number of people who get, maybe not all of the entire content of their lives, but much of the content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions.
See my post The Hollow Men–and Hollow Women too.
The Hillsdale curriculum used in charter schools and at the college itself asks students — after studying the western canon, including the Bible — to write a senior thesis answering the question, “what is the good life?” It is an antidote to the postmodern nihilism destroying our civilization. I imagine there are others (religious upbringing in a stable home with two (Jewish or Christian) adherent parents, for example). But, the current public education system is an agent of chaos. What we’re seeing starts well before kids get to university.
Public education delenda est.
The protesters are so ignorant.
Our obsession with sports is a good illustration of this.
When people’s lives lack meaning, they’ll latch on to anything that gives them purpose, no matter how wrong . . .
These will be the next set of tenured facility or the head of your DEI department at your company.
Government schools = less than no value added.
I think that what the protesters hate is Jews slaughtering civilians, women and children, by the tens of thousands, and Jews attempting to starve them by the millions.
From a longer perspective, what the protesters seem to hate is the Jewish conquest, ethnic cleansing, and oppression of the Palestinians.
Others might see the facts differently, but I’ve been paying attention to what people opposed to Israel’s actions are saying, and this is generally what they are saying.
It is interesting to me that so many people here at Ricochet don’t seem to be able to understand this.
I have seen it posited that sports fandom benefits society in general by giving people the outlet to feel intensely passionate about something which in the general scheme of things has no effect one way or the other on society. Unlike passionate politics, for example.
They dont want to.
Get back to me when a million Palestinians starve.