Cultural Revolution is afoot, at least for those who don’t seem to care for the order of a constitutional republic where the rule of law, not the rule of man, is elevated over the passions of the day. The response to the recent trouble over race by those who have taken to the streets to register their outrage have themselves become the outrage.
You need look no further than the streets of Seattle, Washington to see the sad convergence of anarchy and mollycoddling leadership that has produced a poisonous cocktail that risks national suicide. The anarchists and the leaders who permit this are taking large gulps of it. It’s destructive.
The American founders, in contrast, were constructive. They bravely rebuffed the British Empire, risking everything for freedom. But unlike destructive revolutions of the past—the French in 1789, the Chinese in 1911-12, and the Russian in 1917—all of those failed and devolved into a despotism worse than what was overthrown. Why? Because they became cultural, not liberating, revolutions by omitting a vital step that our Founders didn’t miss, the ordering of revolution.
Our Founders ordered the new nation through a Constitution that balanced power and harmonized the “orders of society” that were first identified by Plato in the fourth century B.C, including rule by one (monarchy), rule by a few (aristocracy), and rule by many (democracy). The Founders’ solution was a republic that would promote “domestic tranquility” and temper the destructive aspects of direct democracy that—frequently—descends to mob rule and anarchy. Unconvinced? Look at France, China, and Russia.
Today in America, there’s an undercurrent of anarchy that is a continuation of the culture clash we have experienced in our nation for the past 50 or more years. Recent racial events have been catalytic, but this clash reveals the anarchy of our age that has roots in the social and cultural revolutions that stimulated the communist takeovers in Russia and China in the 20th Century. Moreover, America’s cultural revolution is the lovechild of many radical academics, who have dominated our educational institutions for decades. The professors have taught a socialist mixology that now intoxicates fulminating students. They have engaged in intellectual malpractice that will produce much pain in our society by producing what can only be regarded as a “suicidal idiot-acracy.” How?
Witness the tearing down of statues across America. Not only are these malcontents defacing monuments to the Confederacy, but also the Union, the very people who fought to abolish the despicable institution of slavery. Now even the memory and representations of the Founding Fathers invite their disdain, to include Washington, Jefferson, and those that followed them. As I recently wrote in the opinion section of the Richmond Times Dispatch, history has vital lessons for us. But the students in our streets refuse to see those lessons in a proper context:
“But we cannot learn if we are more interested in erasing history than viewing it through rational eyes. That takes an intellectual leap, one that requires we consider history in context, both the context of its making and the context of its meaning.”
Moreover we must avoid what I have termed “contextual dishonesty.”
“Contextual dishonesty undermines truth. It’s an intellectual tyranny of sorts. On the one hand, it judges men beyond the context of their own past existence and circumstances while imposing on them a standard of enlightenment we are blessed to possess in the present age. Likewise, contextual dishonesty persists when we refuse to incorporate into the full context of historical events and personalities the lessons we have learned in order to tell a meaningful truth.”
Today’s cultural revolutionaries have no interest in contextual honesty or meaningful truth. They’re creating their own version founded on the failed tyrannies of the past and validated by the utopian gobbledygook of radical professors, malpractitioners financed by taxpayers and philanthropists alike. Meaningful truth is out. Destructive outrage is in. These cultural revolutionaries are drinking a deadly hemlock of their own mixing. But unlike Socrates, who consumed the poison and died as a matter of principle, the cultural revolutions of this age are consuming a venom of lies fed them by the radical left.
Of cultural revolutionaries, author Victor Davis Hansen wrote this in How Cultural Revolutions Die – or Not.
“Some fanatics shave their heads. Others have shamed authorities into washing the feet of their fellow revolutionaries. But inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.”
And when those counterrevolutionaries arrive with a vengeance they will be bearing a cup of hemlock. Thus the “canni-volution” begins. Better to heed the lessons of the Founding Fathers who ordered revolution prudently and peacefully than radicals and anarchists who proffer one of destruction and falsehood.
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