Victor Davis Hanson: Seattle's CHOP and the radical left – Here's how cultural revolutions die, or not
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/seattle-chop-radical-left-cultural-revolutions-die-victor-davis-hansonUnlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don't just change governments or leaders. Instead, they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them "holistic" and "systematic."
Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins' so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months and created a new supreme being Reason.
Mao cracked down on supposed Western decadence like the wearing of eyeglasses and made peasants forge pot iron and intellectuals wear dunce caps.
Very similar to Maoist China or French Revolution. Cultural revolutions are nihilistic.
But inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.
If toppling Confederate statues is required, what then about Nancy Pelosi's own mayor father, who once as Baltimore's mayor dedicated honorific statues to Confederate generals?
If racists understandably do not deserve their names on national shrines, what to do with the iconic liberal graduate program at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? It was named for a president who did more to further segregation and racial prejudice than any chief executive of the 20th century.
They eat their own.
In other words, once cultural revolutions turn anarchic and eat their own, they lose support. When quiet sympathizers conclude that they too may targeted, to survive they turn on their former icons.
We are seeing that now. Liberal sympathetic bystanders are wondering whether downtown arson and looting will go private and reach their suburban homes. Do they really want their marquee universities or the Washington or Jefferson monuments defaced or renamed? What happens when calling 911 gets a constant busy signal?
When a liberal mayor or black police chief or progressive governor or white leftist who diverges from the party line is targeted by the mob, then who really is safe?
Answer? No one. And so the cultural revolution sputters to irrelevance.
MeToo met its end because people were turning on each other. Rose McGowan and Alyssa Milano turned on each other.
Interesting read from Victor Davis Hanson.