It used to be that, for all their disagreements, Republicans and Democrats at least shared a common belief about sustaining the constitutional republic they were gifted by founders who sacrificed their lives, honor, and considerable fortunes for the sake of liberty. Conservatives believed in a smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation, and a strong national defense, while liberals pushed for mostly the opposite. But at the end of the day, they could share a drink and see each other simply as people preferring different paths to the same mountaintop. There are exceptions, of course, but while many on both sides would question each other’s judgment, motives, and even their patriotism, they did not question their opponents’ very humanity. But then came the rise of progressives, essentially reintroducing the word “evil” into the domestic political lexicon.
Begging for an opportunity to spread their gospel of collectivism and cultural Marxism, they pounced on the George Floyd affair in that awful summer of 2020. With the aid of woke media and leftist utopians, they tried to force everyone to bend the knee to an organization, Black Lives Matter, founded by self-proclaimed “trained Marxists.” But then came the predictable meltdown of BLM, reduced to bankruptcy after raking in tens of millions of dollars from guilt-ridden white Americans afraid to exclude themselves from the madness and risk being called white supremacists. So the flagrantly anti-American rhetoric from Americans themselves finally played out its hand, right?
Wrong. While normal people and leftist politicians have now taken to quietly distancing themselves from the actions and statements they accepted or publicly embraced while the country was burning, the real and lasting goal of BLM and its enablers has been achieved – and will be terribly difficult to unwind. Indeed, the deep stain they have left on the nation is the stranglehold they succeeded in placing on public and private institutions that so willingly embraced the radical vision and quickly embedded it into the heart of their missions. Institutions and agencies dedicated to pursuits such as national security, tax reform, or the arts are now driven to alter their standards, or even their identities, by acquiescing to the concept of “equity,” meaning guaranteed outcomes for the self-proclaimed victims of oppression by virtue of their race.
Joe Biden: Born-Again Progressive
Far from responding with his traditional mainstream liberalism, Joe Biden granted the permission concept to the ascendant radicals by agreeing to things he had never come close to endorsing in the half-century since he landed in Washington. He voiced his view that America is systemically racist, those who voted against him are semi-fascists, and that it’s legitimate to use the justice system to imprison and bankrupt your opponent. He suddenly agreed that fossil fuels must be eliminated from the planet in favor of the green utopian vision, that gender identity is fluid, and social justice means letting more criminals loose. And these are just some of the progressive ideas once laughed off the stage but now elevated to a virtual mission statement by Democrats. Biden perfectly exemplified the progressive worldview with his recent mea culpa following the brutal murder of Laken Riley – not to the victim, but to the assailant, for calling him an illegal rather than undocumented. This is what it has come to.
Democrats were long associated with the working class but are now in the grip of let-them-eat-cake progressive elites using a green shield to signal their virtue and solidarity with radical leftists over issues like rising prices, crime, and an open border – all problems from which they themselves are well protected. Biden’s military has now elevated a DEI purity test for hiring, lowering the threshold that had always been applied in defense of the nation: merit. And elite academic institutions, as we were so painfully reminded during the hateful antisemitic debacles at Harvard and Penn, are training the young to embrace toxic critical race theory, ban speech they don’t like, and hate the idea of America.
Did we think the summer of 2020 would be just a stage, an overreaction that would certainly flatten out and normalize over time? No such luck. In fact, the country is not even close to shedding the widespread destruction to people, property, and communities that were justified – or even welcomed – by cowardly left-wing politicians and elite media. You will long remember that reporter famously describing a “mostly peaceful protest” with a building consumed by flames directly behind him.
But far worse even than ripping apart the fabric of inner-city neighborhoods across the land populated by the very people these mostly well-healed white progressives purport to represent was the effect they have had on private and public institutions. The anti-racism screed became the litmus test for every white, privileged American. It required people to go far beyond proclaiming their opposition to racism. Instead, they would need to prove their anti-racist credentials by taking concrete steps to acknowledge their role as oppressors and actively participate in one movement or another affirming the resolution that America is irreversibly – or, as Hillary Clinton might put it, irredeemably – racist.
Simply put, progressives can’t handle the truth, so they lecture the rest of us and refuse to admit their ultimate goal of remaking the country. Thus, the only path to success is to shove their twisted ideology down our throats at every opportunity. And the media has joined the Democrats in turning the outlandish and wildly unpopular beliefs held by a small slice of one party – liberal is no longer a rank pejorative to most people, but progressive is – into the defining ideology of one of America’s two major parties.
The institutional damage foisted on all of us by progressives “re-imagining America” threatens to be long-lasting. The question now is whether those who so easily embraced the flat-out anti-American radicalism of 2020 will admit the grave error of their ways before the progressives spread their hideous tentacles even further.
