Hanson:
What has become of free speech, free markets, and the rule of law?
Sometimes
a culture disappears with a whimper, not a bang. Institutions age and are
ignored, and the complacent public insidiously lowers its expectations of state
performance.
Infrastructure,
the rule of law, and civility erode — and yet people are not sure why and how
their own changing (and pathological) individual behavior is leading to the
collective deterioration that they deplore.
There
is still a “West” in the sense of the physical entities of North America,
Europe, many of the former British dominions, and parts of Westernized Asia.
The infrastructure of our cities and states looks about as it did in the recent
past. But is it the West as we once knew it — a unique civilization predicated
on free expression, human rights, self-criticism, vibrant free markets, and the
rule of law?
Or,
instead, is the West reduced to a wealthy but unfree leisure zone, driven on
autopilot by computerized affluence, technological determinism, and a growing
equality-of-result, omnipotent state?
Tens of
thousands of migrants — reminiscent of the great southward and westward treks
of Germanic tribes in the late fifth century, at the end of the Roman Empire —
are overwhelming the borders of Europe. Such an influx should be a reminder
that the West attracts people, while the non-West drives them out, and thus
should spark inquiries about why that is so. But that discussion would be not
only impolite, but beyond the comprehension of most present-day Westerners, who
take for granted — though they cannot define, much less defend — their own
institutions.
No one
claims that such mass immigration into Europe is legal. No one wonders what
happened to the fossilized idea of legal immigration, much less the legal
immigrant who went through what has now been rendered the pretense of
bureaucratic application for legal entry into Europe. Germany, which lectures
others on law, is lawless.
In
theory, Westerners have the power to stop the mostly young males from the
Middle East from swarming their borders, but in fact they apparently lack the
will. Or is it worse than that? Without confidence in their own values, much
less pride in their accomplishments, are they assuaging the guilt over their
privilege by symbolic acts of undermining the foundations of their own culture?
Certainly, Germany, which insists on European Union laws of finance applying to
its fellow European nation Greece, has no compunction about destroying, for its
own particular purposes, the Union’s immigration statutes as they apply to Middle
Easterners.
The
same is true in the United States. Millions of foreign nationals from Latin
America, and Mexico in particular, simply have crossed the border without even
the pretense of legality. They assume Americans not only won’t enforce their
own laws, but also will find ways to demonize any who suggest that they should.
If there is now no such thing as an “illegal alien,” what in theory prevents
anyone from arriving from anywhere at any time and making claims on the
American state?
Again,
the irony is not just that millions of Mexican nationals want into the U.S.,
but that, ostensibly, no one in Mexico or even the United States knows why that
is so (certainly not the National Council of La Raza [“the Race”]) — much less
wonders whether Mexico might learn from the U.S. about ways to make a nation’s
own people become content enough to stay in their homeland. Only in the West
does a migrant fault his host for insufficient hospitality while exempting his
homeland, which drove him out.
Sanctuary
cities illustrate how progressive doctrine can by itself nullify the rule of
law. In the new West, breaking statutes is backed or ignored by the state if it
is branded with race, class, or gender advocacy. By that I mean that if a
solitary U.S. citizen seeks to leave and then reenter America without a
passport, he will likely be either arrested or turned back, whereas if an
illegal alien manages to cross our border, he is unlikely to be sent back as
long as he has claims on victimhood of the type that are sanctioned by the
Western liberal state.
Do we
really enjoy free speech in the West any more? If you think we do, try to use
vocabulary that is precise and not pejorative, but does not serve the current
engine of social advocacy — terms such as “Islamic terrorist,” “illegal alien,”
or “transvestite.” I doubt that a writer for a major newspaper or a politician
could use those terms, which were common currency just four or five years ago,
without incurring, privately or publicly, the sort of censure that we might
associate with the thought police of the former Soviet Union.
It is
becoming almost impossible in the West to navigate the contours of totalitarian
mind control. Satirists can create cartoons mocking Christ, but not Mohammed.
If a teen brings a suspicious-looking device of wires and gadgetry to school,
he will be suspended — unless he can advance by his religious or ethnic
background some claim on victimization.
In
major news accounts, the identification of race and ethnic background of a
criminal suspect is often predicated on liberal notions of social engineering. Recent
graduates of journalism schools must have learned during their time there that
identification by race of a white criminal suspect, but not commensurately of a
suspect of color, is a social obligation, a way of avoiding a
“micro-aggression,” the latest Orwellian exercise in creating a new word in
hopes of inventing a new reality. Marchers with Black Lives Matter banners
chant, “Dead Cops!” and also call for them to be roasted, even as to quote what
they are saying is deemed racist. As the president of the United States lends
his support to Black Lives Matter, a violent crime wave hits his upscale
Capitol Hill neighbors, as young inner-city predators go on a rampage against
the yuppie liberals living there. Liberal residents call it a “reign of terror,”
yet they win as much attention from the president as does the slaughter each
weekend in Chicago.
In a
San Francisco middle school, recent democratic elections for student officers
were massaged into nothingness, since the outcome did not result in the
preferred architecture of diversity. Note that the female white principal who
nullified the election should not, by her own logic and the theory of
proportional representation, be principal of a school where her own race is in
the minority. Bureaucratic apparatchiks, apparently aware that careers are
enhanced or destroyed by the degree of adherence to diversity and political
correctness, have become genteel fascists, somewhere in between those of the
Soviet Union and those whom Orwell described in 1984.
When
Hollywood puts out a movie called Truth,
we know, also in good 1984 fashion,
that it should be called Lies — a
story of how the supposed noble end of electing a liberal president justifies
all the sordid means necessary to achieve it, including amateurish forgery. The
probable Democratic nominee for president of the United States just hours after
the Benghazi attack announced in private to concerned parties that it was an
al-Qaeda terrorist operation, while she was telling the world that it was a
spontaneous riot in reaction to an illiberal video, confirming the Obama
campaign’s old talking point that al-Qaeda was “on the run” and thus incapable
of doing what it had just done. Truth? Lies? There are no such things — just
operative and inoperative narratives. Ask the video maker who went to jail for
his short movie, or the families of the dead Americans who were assured that it
was not al-Qaeda that had killed their loved ones.
In the
same mode, today’s campus is a cross between premodern Victorianism and
something postmodern out of Clockwork
Orange. Never have so many undergraduates hooked up for impersonal, crass,
and callous sex, often fueled by alcohol and drugs, and never have the rules of
such ad hoc intercourse been so formalized.
If
universities really believe that they have and should have the power of
stopping males from engaging in improper sexual congress that results in
post-coitus unhappy parties, it would be much simpler to go back to the 1950s
paradigm of segregating dorms by gender, banning alcohol from campus, viewing
possession of illegal drugs as grounds for expulsion, and formulating new rules
of treating women during sexual unions according to past formality and manners.
A sober and drug-free male who picks up the tab, opens doors for women, watches
his language around the opposite sex, and allows a woman some privilege in
entering a building might be more receptive to asking formal (written?) consent
at each ascending step of love-making, the apparent objective of the new campus
sexual codes.
The one
constant in the more recent manifestations of the slipping away of the West is
the emergence of a new privileged, mostly white progressive class of plutocrat.
A Google exec, an Al Gore, a university president, a diversity czar, a Goldman
Sachs progressive, a Clinton Initiative apparatchik, a pajama-boy techie — none
of them ever expects the ramifications of his ideology to hit home. They assume
that they have the power and influence not only to change the mentalities of
the caricatured middle class, but in the process to enjoy their own privilege
without either guilt or risk. Opposing charter schools usually means your
children are in private schools, just as championing open borders reflects
one’s own gated community, just as promoting affirmative action in the abstract
suggests recourse to a countervailing old-boy network to gain admissions,
internships, and jobs for one’s own offspring. Our progressive elites resemble
the opportunists of the French Revolution, who rode the crest of popular revolt
— hoping that their calls for enforced egalitarianism and fraternity by any
means necessary allowed their ample privilege to be exempt from the disorder
they had incited.
The
Obama administration did not create an anti-Western Western world (indeed, if
Obama didn’t exist we would have to invent him), it simply summarized the
recent pathologies of late Western life, codified them, and made them
institutional, as in “workplace violence,” “white Hispanic,”
“micro-aggression,” “sanctuary city,” and the rest of the lexicon of
misrepresentation.
In the
new West, freedom is inequality, liberty selfishness, and tribalism unity.
That is
all ye need to know.
