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2020-06-28 d
A New Cultural Revolution

The Great Awokening and the Second American Revolution

Statues toppled, buildings renamed, curricula “decolonized,” staff fired. The protests following George Floyd’s killing have emboldened cultural revolutionaries in America and Europe. The iconoclasts are changing minds, and could be in a position to enact a root-and-branch reconstruction of America into something completely unrecognizable to its present-day inhabitants. Imagine a country whose collective memory has been upended, with a new constitution, anthem, and flag, its name changed from the sinful “America” to something less tainted. Far-fetched? Not according to data I have collected on what liberal white Americans actually believe. Only a renewed American cultural nationalism can resist it.

According to multiple surveys, the effect of the riots which occurred at around the same time as the BLM protests is quite different from what occurred with previous waves of rioting. First, many of the participants in the major riots were white. Second, there has been no clear call for Nixonian law and order following the riots, but rather greater public acceptance of the BLM movement’s unsupported claims that contemporary structural racism explains why police shoot unarmed black men or violent crime plagues inner-city neighbourhoods. While 57 percent of Americans disagree with the protestors’ radical slogan, “defund the police,” an astounding 29 percent support it. This is so despite the deaths of a number of black people during the riots and the fact the riots have coincided with a steep rise in the number of black homicide deaths in inner-city neighbourhoods due to a “Ferguson Effect” of police reducing their presence in these areas.

Meanwhile Trump is polling well down after the riots, having dropped 2.5 points to Biden since Floyd’s death on May 25th. Trump’s repeated mistruths, unstatesmanlike behaviour and nepotistic employment of family members may have eroded the truth-based environment to such an extent that evidence-free shifts in issue position become increasingly easy. His sinking popularity tarnishes issue positions associated with his presidency, even when they are backed by the weight of evidence—as with the idea that indiscriminate police brutality rather than racism accounts for violence against unarmed blacks. The power of corporate and celebrity endorsement, magnified by “trendy” social media herding, has resulted in unusually high approval among whites for the activities of the rioters. This is an important departure from what occurred during, for example, the late 60s race riots, 1992 Rodney King riots, or even the 2014 Ferguson riots.

Statues, memory, and the social construction of harm

Progressive scholars are fond of emphasizing the socially-constructed nature of perceived reality. This is overstated, of course. Human minds are not blank slates. Gender can’t be readily reconstructed to make males dominate the caring professions and females the majority of ditch-diggers. Similarly, Americans can’t easily be convinced they are actually Russians.

But you don’t need to follow social construction to its postmodernist extreme to acknowledge that social construction does play a role in how we perceive the world. To a partial extent, there really is a “social construction of reality,” as Berger and Luckmann put it. Psychological research, for example, shows that flagging certain issues repeatedly, or framing them in particular ways, affects attitudes and feelings.

What society chooses to focus on and care about, the emotions it feels, the objects it sacralizes, the boundaries between groups, vary a lot across time and place. For instance, choosing not to shake someone’s hand is offensive in Western culture, but not in Japan, where a bow is the common greeting. Leaving food on one’s plate is treated as an insult in Japan, but not in the West. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning show that in Western elite culture in 1800, as in violent inner-city neighborhoods today, insults were treated as violence, which can only be avenged by physical violence. But for most of us, who haven’t been inculcated into a touchy honor culture, verbal slights don’t carry the same emotional punch. We either ignore them or respond with a counter-insult. As the sociology of emotions tells us, the way societies and individuals emotionally respond to words is, to an important degree, socially constructed.

Let’s apply this lens to the sacred values of left-modernist ideology. Is a white woman wearing a Chinese prom dress complimenting or insulting the Chinese? Most Chinese would probably take the former view, but a left-modernist ideological entrepreneur can spin this as cultural appropriation and white colonialism. In effect, the left-modernist socially constructs “harm” and “racism,” spinning something positive into a negative and seeking to sensitize Chinese people to the “fact” that they should feel insulted rather than proud. Those inducted into the religion of antiracism get the message and signal their virtue online, helping to propel people toward the new norm. If this were to catch on in China, the emotions Chinese feel when seeing the image of a white woman in a cheongsam would flip from pride to anger.

The same sensitizing dynamic works for history, literature, film, statues, and even words. Like Red Guards with a hair-trigger sensitivity for sniffing out the bourgeois, today’s left-modernist offense archaeologists outdo each other in trying to reframe the world as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and so on. Turning the principle of charity on its head, they insist on the most suspicious interpretation of a person’s motives when the subject matter is associated with their canonical totems of race, gender, sexuality. A Hispanic man flicking his fingers outside his truck window gets fired because this was photographed, tweeted, and spun as the “OK” white power sign. The result is an atmosphere where inter-personal trust is as low as humanly possible while discursive power flows to the accuser. The new cultural revolutionaries have constructed our emotional and conceptual reality.

Once “harm”, “racism” and other concepts become unmoored from reality, more of the world is remade. Statues which were long ignored become offensive. Complex historical figures like Jefferson or Churchill, who embodied the prejudices of their time, or elites like Columbus or Ulysses Grant, whose achievements had both positive and negative effects, are viewed through a totalizing Maoist lens which collapses shades of grey into black and white. If a historic personage transgressed left-modernist sacred values, their positives instantly evaporate and activists myopically focus on their transgressions. (read more)

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