Here are the choices America faces in the next election, Roger Kimball writes in American Greatness.
Choice #1: The spirit of mayhem and violence – burning pig heads along with Bibles (as recently happened – in Portland, OR).
Choice #2: The traditional American spirit – one that cherishes the rule of law, free expression, and fructifying engines of prosperity.
Mask-less Elites at John Lewis’s Funeral
Our pampered, arrogant elite feel exempt from our forefathers’ respect for moral and spiritual laws, accuses Victor Davis Hanson in NRO. Look no further than the funeral of Rep. John Lewis. The politicians who have been lecturing America on the need to make sacrifices in order to stop the spread Coronavirus are the same self-appointed moral captains who traveled with impunity to attend Lewis’s large funeral “without proper social distancing and avoided quarantines upon their return,” the Sepctator.US reminds readers.
People have been bared from attending funerals of friends, “but the right people were free to travel across state lines to attend multiple funerals for political and public show,” Gerald Baker notes in the WSJ.
Blatant Hypocrisy
There were many more than 50 people at the Lewis funeral. Social distancing was not maintained in parts of the church or during the burial outside. Politicians attending Lewis’s funeral disregarded onerous restrictions on funerals that so many average Americans have been forced to accept.
NFL, NBA, MLB – the Corporate Elite
Then there are professional sports, adds VDH.
Over the past century, professional football, basketball, and baseball were racially integrated, and they adopted a uniform code of patriotic observance. The three leagues offered fans a pleasant respite from daily barroom politics. As a result, by the 21st century, the NFL, NBA, and MLB had become global multi-billion-dollar enterprises.
The owners, coaches, and players weren’t always racially diverse. But that inconvenient truth did not stop the leagues from hectoring their fans about social activism — even as they no longer honored common patriotic rituals.
All three leagues have suffered terribly during the viral lockdown, as American life mysteriously went on without them. And they have almost ensured that they won’t fully recover when the quarantine ends.
Many of their often-pampered multimillionaire players refuse to honor the national anthem. In the NFL, players will now broadcast their politics on their helmets. They will virtue-signal their moral superiority to increasingly turned-off fans — as if to make sure that their sources of support flee.
Why do American elites, who might be expected to favor preserving the nation that has elevated them, support the effort to dismantle it, asks Andrew Michta in the WSJ.
No Obligation to Serve, Only to Rule
Their thinking seems to be that the radicals destroying monuments and issuing wholesale denunciations of America’s past are wreaking destruction on ordinary Americans and their history, not on the elites and their ideology. Today’s elites as a rule do not believe they have any obligation to serve the public, only to rule it, and so they express little or no disapproval of college students toppling statues on federal land or looters raiding supermarkets. To criticize them would open elites to the charges of “populism” and “racism.”
Yet the elites are playing a dangerous game. Such “canceling”—of historical and living figures alike—increasingly mirrors what happened under communism in the Soviet bloc, where the accusation of being out of step with the party was enough to end one’s career and nullify one’s reputation.
Dominating Our Collective Consciousness
This is about more than statues and history. Those who control the symbols of political discourse can dominate the culture and control the collective consciousness. If you doubt this, ask yourself why there has been so little backlash from ordinary, non-elite Americans. Our sense of self has been progressively deconstructed. We feel in our bones the wrongness of the violence being visited on the nation but lack the language to speak against it.
Look for Part III tomorrow.
Read the entire series here.
