Penna Dexter

Historian, columnist, and professor Victor Davis Hanson has been speaking and writing lately about the current cultural revolution. He contrasts cultural revolutions with political revolutions, which change governments and leaders. Cultural revolutions, he writes, “try to redefine entire societies” and “attack the very referents of our daily lives.” He points to the movies, TV shows, and cartoons that have been “canceled” due to the Black Lives Matter Revolution. This revolution, he adds, has “toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas.” Professor Hanson argues that unless they are “hijacked by a thug or killer”, like Hitler or Stalin, these revolutions ultimately “die out when they turn cannibalistic.” It’s true, the Left has begun to eat its own. For example, New York Times editor, Bari Weiss, a liberal who is honest enough to critique the cancel culture and the radical identity politics that dominates the paper, resigned last week, complaining she has been canceled by bosses and colleagues. Will this cultural revolution really flame out? Author and commentator Carol Swain says “we have a small window of time to reclaim our core values and principles.” She spent years as Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt and, before that, at Princeton. In a column for Real Clear Politics, she points out that colleges and universities reject their founders, often Christians, and have “become transmission belts for socialism and Marxist propaganda.” Professor Swain contends that “America is poised to collapse from within.” She says America’s demise “will come from Marxists and anarchists who use racial grievance and the cries of the oppressed to dismantle America’s institutions and defenses.” Of the focus on “white supremacy,” Dr. Swain writes, “Government cannot fix the individual choices people make that cause some to prosper and others to languish in generational poverty.” Demands to defund police, she says, invite chaos. This revolution will succeed unless men and women of courage, believers and patriots, reclaim our culture.