What We Should Learn from Idiot Protesters

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:

The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries…There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food and a little political boredom. everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness.

But not everyone was happy. A return to private life was not to everyone’s taste:

A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions…Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.

and

To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. they began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.

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.