Depicting revolutionary France, Dickens wrote, “Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to what they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my father’s house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants!”
Today America’s tumbrils are clattering about, carrying toppled statues, ruined careers, unwoke brands. Over their sides peer those deemed racist by left-wing identitarians and sentenced to cancelation, even as the evidentiary standard for that crime falls through the floor. Rioters over the weekend destroyed a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the general who finished off the Confederacy. Falsehoods and innuendoes outpace the truth: in Oakland, a panic arose over what were supposedly nooses in a public park; turns out they were just exercise equipment that had been there for months. But no matter. America’s Jacobins are in no mood to reason. As in Dickens’ France, genuine social problems have mushroomed into a national orgy of self-harm.
Beyond Woke
Buy New $19.99
(as of 11:37 UTC - Details)
But who are these cultural revolutionaries? The conventional wisdom goes that this is the inner-cities erupting, economically disadvantaged victims of racism enraged over the murder of George Floyd. The reality is something more…bourgeoisie. As Kevin Williamson observed last week, “These are the idiot children of the American ruling class, toy radicals and Champagne Bolsheviks playing Jacobin for a while until they go back to graduate school.” Most of the culling is taking place not in the streets, but in the faculty lounge, the corporate boardroom, the upstart real estate firm with a socially conscious Twitter footprint and a penchant for Mean Girls GIFs. The most high-profile casualty so far isn’t even a person but a maple syrup, Aunt Jemima, whose threat to world peace seems rather manageable.
A Radical History of t...
Best Price: $10.00
Buy New $13.99
(as of 06:06 UTC - Details)
Such superficial victories are a clear sign of the bourgeoisie’s soft hand. Meaningful police legislation, the kind that might prevent future George Floyds, currently being worked on by serious reformers, is a difficult push. Whereas reducing policymaking to maximalist slogans is easy; spray-painting a statue is even easier; whining about a visage on a syrup bottle is easier still. And ease is the currency of these weekend warriors, these erstwhile stoppers of Kony. Who is the face of their revolution? It’s tempting to name Melissa Click, the white (check) communications professor (check) who at a 2015 protest over racial issues (check) exhorted others (check) to beat up a student journalist. (Click was later fired for her misconduct by the University of Missouri, only to be scooped up by Gonzaga. The culling, it seems, only ever goes in one direction.)
But there’s another figure who I think is even more representative than Click—not from the French Revolution or our present Tantrum of the Tenured, but the 1960s.
