History Is A List Of Consequences
"They're going to be shocked at how powerful the people are. They think that they have Hollywood, and academia, and foundations, and entertainment, professional sports, social media, and now politics, and they're right. But there's still something called 'the people,' and the people have a say. And they haven't woken up yet, but when they wake up, they're going to have a very loud voice."
(Victor Davis Hanson, earning a lovely grin from Laura Ingraham)
Take a good long look at that second sentence of Professor Hanson's. Those are the "institutions" to which Antonio Gramsci referred in his concept of "the long march," which would subvert and transform an entire culture's values and politics without firing a shot.
If we add elements like finance and industry, as well, then we're talking about what Lenin called the "commanding heights" of the culture.
Both ideas (mere slogans, in fact) turn on the basic principle of gaining values (of unprecedented enormity, now) without producing them.
The generational success of the "Long March" through America is now becoming obvious even to people who have never even heard of Gramsci, although equally few would know how to attribute it or analyze it in American history. I, myself, never tire of observing the exemplary nationalization of American education in 1979 with Jimmy Carter's institution of the United States Department of Education (not ever, dear reader, to be confused by way of principles with Anatoly Lunacharsky's Commissariat of Enlightenment because that can't happen here). If we can't look back at forty-two years of DoE and its "progress" and call it a "long march" with Gramsci's approval, then the language has finally sunk to complete dereliction.
Professor Hanson speaks of "they". The context of that referent is the Digitalnacht purges of social media, and who did it. (I'll get to a bit of the "why they did it" in a moment.) We all (including them) know who they are. By accurate logical extension of principles, a full panorama of the present "commanding heights" can be taken into conceptual view. As if by some mysterious command authority radiating from Seattle, San Francisco, and Mountain View, various industrial, financial, educational, and social institutions across America now clamor for admission among The Righteous and offer their own summary proscriptions for qualification.
It will not be long before a man can't get a coat dry-cleaned without wearing his Blue Check on his sleeve.
At this point, the point is to ask people like Professor Hanson how it may have happened that this happened. As well; what are the actual implications of that happening?
"History Is A List of Consequences"
It should not be difficult in tracing effect back toward cause in all this. (This point has its own implications in the matter of what human beings can do about causes.) Just let me present one fairly reasonable tracing:
We might posit an American college graduate in 1980. This person would stand a plausible chance of having parents of, perhaps, a certain...flowery persuasion. Not necessarily certifiably anointed in patchouli, you understand, but perhaps a bit wafty in its passing breeze. Even if our 1959-er were born to rock-ribbed Nose-Holders for Goldwater '64, he (or she, in their bustlings by 1980) might have at least entertained post-graduate discussion of whether Ronald Reagan might go off his nut and nuke Brezhnev.
Cynical trimmers can have the whole style of argument that would protest Carter's responsibility for the flexibility of an open mind only the year after his big idea. It's far too true that the whole primitive impulse to government had long gained this crucial commanding height of the culture. Jimmy Carter planted a cabinet-level flag on that hill, however, and anyone can go ahead and shrug it off, but I sure do like to point it out.
The class of 1984 freshmen were already only more steeped in the ethics of the state. If we look back to their graduating year, we can see them marching around with crappy evil U.S. stars painted in tempura on cardboard rockets and generally raising hell for "PEACE!!!" I'm pretty sure that their parents hadn't taught them such fine details of politics, although Mom & Dad had likely been -- at some point in their lives and at least -- flushy at the idea of hoisting a Mao-fist: that would have been fun to them, and everybody's education would have relieved them of the duty to think that through.
If our thoroughly rough trace brings us to the mid-to-late 1980s or so, then that might be near enough that our present readery can begin to directly recall how these man-haters... no, wait; Haters of The Man began to take sights on the commanding heights. The giant matrix of government command was not only a superstructural fact of American life, but it was also festooned with opportunity for budding jobholders and breast-beaters of every recruitable sort. They would learn to incline their labors toward the commanding heights, because that's where the power was, and the dogma of force (distinct from the power to produce) had been living loudly within them at least since Mario Savio climbed on top of a police car with his bullhorn in 1964.
And now, their children have risen into the Digital Information Age, pulsing the dogma with their sensational grasp of technology and the ethics of savages. Again; I'm pretty sure that their parents didn't teach them these delicate elements of ethics applied with politics, although we certainly might conject possibilities along the lines of, say, the 'rents defense of the very idea of Oval Office blow jobs instead of perjury before a grand jury, because: free health care!
"...whatever."
History is a list of consequences. This goes for ideas more importantly than events, and these savage children did not simply come sailing over the western horizon on a slow boat from China. Before they were born, they were surrendered on the commanding height of American education where the flag of government was planted in their bones.
Today, they stand on the heights and survey Professor Hanson's "the people". To be sure, I don't think he's talking about people who might, perhaps, pay for their daughter's tattoo or their son's blue hair job, or bottle-necks in anybody's ear lobes. I mean; I suppose lots of people's kids could grow up and host, worldwide, an authentic maniac's stated desire to destroy America with all kinds of medieval hellfire and still mute a rich New York lout who's actually turned-in an objectively honorable chapter in his life, for graciously decent reasons, even if he's still a New York lout. But, you know, I'm just guessing, and I doubt whether many of those parents ended-up voting for Donald J. Trump.
“The people" of Professor Hanson's referral are fearfully and angrily behind in this crisis now coming to crucial straits. Someone among them is going to have to come up with foundational moral refutations of the ethics of force and all of its politics as now practiced, and even a positive recovery of sound language useful to the exchange of ideas among human beings.
Someone is going to have to assert the plainly reasonable idea that nobody gets to just make-up whims as they go along and claim it as "common sense" or "SCIENCE!" without being taken as elementarily confused, at least, or bearing evil intent in the extremity.
In brief, all of the philosophical premises on which these savage children were born and bred must be plainly exposed for their cynical depredations on the very "people" to whom Professor Hanson prays for, well... wokeness.
I'm not here to come-off like some postmoderny, too dumb to attribute Hegel at a 2:00 AM margarita-session in Manhattan, but the dialectics sometimes give me the winds, you see.
It's going to take a lot more than preacher-quality metaphors. It'll require exquisite distillation of premises for analysis to the depths that honest thinkers can reach, and then integral abstraction of implications toward ethical conclusions of (yes) good or evil, in order to...
Live like human beings should.
We all could live without, for instance; being accused of "hate" by resentful little snots, of whom almost none ever build a damned thing of any human value. Everybody could use that; even the resentful little snots would live manifestly better lives if they weren't that, and the whole point of thinking about it right now is in understanding what sorts of ideas it takes to sink whole generations to that.
Right this moment, in practical terms that stem from all the same basic morals:
What's needed right now in the "big tech" arena is an actual John Galt, and not atavistic moon-howling for Teddy Roosevelt risen from the grave and into a scale of government of which he surely never dreamed but of which he surely would have made the heights-topping most.
Now, I'm not rich, so I have no immediately useful advice on meeting the competition in this arena comprising the requisite digi-tech skills, or the sheer industrial implications of requisite hardware. All I'm saying is that somebody had better troll roadsides across the land for deposit-bottles, save their pennies, and get in this game as if they're really serious about producing values and not just a different breed of all the cheaters who think that reality works the way they want it to.
If, in Professor Hanson's "people," there are enough producers who know why (or even that) they're producing instead of destroying, then this American project (not "experiment" -- to me, the data are conclusive) stands something of a chance, even at this dismal hour.
If they're not "the people" to whom he's praying, then I wouldn't say that the prayers are exactly feckless or anything, but I could see why some people might want to watch market prices on Blue Checks.