Sunday, January 30, 2022

Our Conservative March Through the Institutions

 E. Jeffrey Ludwig has a hopeful article at the American Thinker entitled Wokeism Contains the Seeds of its Own Destruction. He in turn cites an article on Substack by N. S. Lyons entitled No, The Revolution Isn't Over. Lyons explains why the "wokeism" that has taken over our society is likely to not just continue but get worse. Part of its success is due to the fact that it is a sort of substitute for religion. But many of the big money donors, even the law itself is driving "wokeism."

For the record, I think Lyons is correct. He points out that the Left owns the cultural highground. The corporations, big tech, the foundations, the think tanks, academia and frankly they are infiltrating the church...the Church! And the government too: the courts, the three letter agencies, the military. And while politicians come and go, I have come to believe that they have less effect on the overall policy than their current position indicates.  Trump was a speed bump.  No matter who is at the top, the culture keeps drifting leftward.

Ludwig, however, is hopeful because he believes the woke will eventually destroy each other.

Lyons's article is well written, but he does miss a few things. He misses that the unprincipled movement of the wokesters plants the seeds of its own destruction. Thus, a comparable fifty-year march through our institutions really will not be necessary for the woke message of life-transforming narcissism to collapse. The pathetic destructive dance of AOC, Ilhan Omar, and other Squad members (including the fierce-looking Rashida Tlaib) and their ilk will most assuredly turn on each other and gobble, gobble, gobble. We already can see the beginnings of the self-destruct button of narcissism working in this woke subculture.
The Cuomos are out. Matt Lauer is out. Harvey "Fat Mouth" Weinstein is out. Soon more of the brittle psyches with the destructive personalities will destroy each other — e.g., Alec Baldwin and other vain and intemperate men like him.
Now I am all for following Napoleon's dictum that when the enemy is making a mistake, don't get in his way. But I also believe that it will take more than just that. I think we will have to do our own "march through the institutions." We will not have the advantage of lying and presenting ourselves as something we are not. That is the province of the Left, for whom "by any means necessary" is the byword. So, our march will be more difficult. I think too we ought to start with marching through the Church.

Taking over the school boards is part of the answer, sure but then there is this:
9. Personnel is policy. Let’s imagine, for example, that some lawmakers officially ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in their state’s schools or universities. Will this be the end of the matter? Will all the woke teachers and administrators who consider “consciousness raising” through “critical pedagogy” – or in general what Marxists call “praxis,” the constant need for the transformation of theory into practice – to be practically a religious commandment just stop doing so? No of course not. As one consultant/cleric recently advised teachers, “Don’t say critical race theory, just teach its precepts… You’re going to see how classroom teachers apply some of these pedagogical models in ways where they don’t even mention the words critical race theory but are doing anti-racist work.” Yes, the work of spreading the new good news shall not be stopped! After all, who is going to stop them? Will they be fired by the woke human resources department, or the woke principal? Abandoned by the woke teachers’ union? Reported to the state by their un-woke peers, all of whom have already been systematically purged from the collective for their heresy? If concerned parents do manage to get them fired, who will hire their replacements? Why… the woke HR department! The people who actually set the effective policy of any institution are inevitably the personnel located in the power centers closest to implementation. Or as a Chinese saying goes: “for every measure that comes down from on high, a countermeasure arises from below” (上有政策, 下有對策). That principle works equally well for a revolutionary professional managerial class as it does for beleaguered counter-revolutionary peasants...
You see the problem. Just to change this one issue, you must march through the Education Departments at the universities, through the HR departments that hire teachers, etc. It will be a long, hard slog. But unlike the Left, this is not about politics or power for us. This is about making this a decent place for our families to thrive and grow, and eventually raise their families. It would mean a renewed belief in upholding individual rights as expressed in the Bill of Rights, which besides protecting individual rights places the individual in their proper relationship to society as a whole.

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