At The American Mind, Angelo Codevilla provides us with this essay that takes a hard look at the revolution in which we find ourselves. And make no mistake, this is a revolution. It is a fight that has been imposed upon us by a hostile force; Marxist leftism. And those who call themselves “Progressive” (nothing could be further from the truth) have taken it as a given that they are our superiors and that therefore they can treat us, not as equals to be respected, but as ruled to be suppressed by any means necessary.
We, the deplorables of the nation, have fought back in the way that comes naturally to us; we vote. And over the last decade, we have removed Democrats from elected office all across the country. Depending on whose numbers you use, up to 1200 seats have been taken from the Democrats and given to the only available alternative; the Republicans. But the “Progressives” don’t recognize the legitimacy of anyone other than themselves any longer and have formed “the resistance.”
This state of affairs is clearly unstable and as time goes on one side must win over the other. Who that may be, remains to be seen, but it is clear that the left cannot be allowed to win if we, the deplorables, wish to have anything resembling a normal life and to retain some measure of our freedom. The left puts people into gulags or worse, as we know from a study of the history of the 20th century. Millions put to death for not bowing down before the hateful regimes of communist countries is a fact, and there is no reason to think that the left wouldn’t do the same thing here. The left is made up of people with serious mental illnesses who must take out their self-hatred on others to assuage their own weak amygdalae. For them, there is no peace, only a continual assault on the normal people who vex them. And so here we are, fighting a fight against the mentally unstable, who have amassed the power to impose their hate on all of the rest of us whether we like it or not.
The logic that drives each turn of our revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior. With Newtonian necessity, each such exercise causes a corresponding and opposite reaction. The logic’s force comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands. If that were the case, acquiescing to or compromising with them could cut it short. Rather, it comes from that which moves, changes, and multiplies their demands without end. That is the Progressives’ affirmation of superior worth, to be pursued by exercising dominance: superior identity affirmed via the inferior’s humiliation. It is an inherently endless pursuit.
The logic is rooted in disdain, but not so much of any of the supposed inferiors’ features or habits. If it were, the deplored could change their status by improving. But the Progressives deplore the “deplorables” not to improve them, but to feel good about themselves. Hating people for what they are and because it feels good to hate them, is hate in its unalloyed form.
Our time’s sharp distinction between rulers and ruled, the ever decreasing interchange and sympathy between them, is rooted in the disdain for ordinary Americans that the universities have sown since the Civil War. Ordinary Americans and their rulers are alienated now in ways unimaginable to the Northerners and Southerners who killed each other a century and a half ago, but who nodded when Abraham Lincoln noted that they “prayed to the same God.” Both revered the American founding. Both aspired to the same family life. Often, opposite sides’ generals were personal friends. And why not? The schools they attended, the books they read, did not teach them the others’ inferiority. They were one people. Now, we are no longer one people.
In our time, the most widespread of differences between rulers and ruled is also the deepest: The ruled go to church and synagogue. The rulers are militantly irreligious and contemptuous of those who are not. Progressives since Herbert Croly’s and Woodrow Wilson’s generation have nursed a superiority complex. They distrust elections because they think that power should be in expert hands—their own. They believe that the U.S Constitution gave too much freedom to ordinary Americans and not enough power to themselves, and that America’s history is one of wrongs. The books they read pretend to argue scientifically that the rest of Americans are racist, sexist, maybe fascists, but above all stupid. For them, Americans are harmful to themselves and to the world, and have no right to self-rule. That is why our revolution started from a point more advanced in its logic than many others.
The anti-establishment “wave elections” of 2010 and 2014, in which the Democratic Party lost Congress and control of a majority of state legislatures, only led America’s Progressive rulers to double down on their positions of power in the judiciary, the media, corporations, etc. The Supreme Court struck down a referendum by liberal California defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The federal Defense of Marriage Act, which had become law by near-unanimity, was overturned bureaucratically and judicially. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, on the books just as firmly, was undone by executive, judicial, bureaucratic, corporate, and mediatic subordination of religious freedom to anti-discrimination. By the 2016 election, America’s Progressive rulers were demonizing and punishing persons who define male and female by their birth and personal plumbing. 1984’s Big Brother had not been so imperious.
