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If you’ve been watching the machinations of the American left with concern but indifference because it’s so far away from us and doesn’t really affect us, “think again” springs to mind.
Pretty much every fad that had its origins in the USA from Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips in the fifties, to hoodies and baseball caps (now worn backwards of course) to Black Lives Matter marches and “taking a knee” have found their way to the most far flung corners of the planet.
The hysterical behaviour we’re witnessing across the United States shows all the signs of serious mental illness, driven by political correctness, wokeness and this strange phenomenon called “cancel culture”. It is driving a level of domestic terrorism that is violent, disruptive, highly dangerous and not unlike COVID-19, has its own exponential growth characteristics.
That so many American leaders are making excuses or even supporting it is arguably treasonous. The elected representatives of the people, refusing to act to protect the majority, contravenes the most basic tenets of the American constitution and removes the basic civil rights of ALL American citizens. It is a cancer on American society and one that will be difficult and extremely painful to excise.
80-year-old award-winning writer Lance Morrow comments in The Wall Street Journal under the headline:
Dawn of the Woke
Joe McCarthy was a B-movie monster. Today’s cancel culture is more like a zombie apocalypse.
Comparing McCarthy’s sensationalist red scaremongering of the late ’40s and early ’50s is a bit of a loose fit: A solitary senator driving a national anti-communist campaign that became very public and resulted in reds being found under many beds. It happened in an age when the media did its job and reported the facts and the public came to its own conclusions. The similarity, however, does arise in the levels of hysteria that were generated then, just as they are now.
The country’s myriad cancelers emit the odour not of sanctity but of sanctimony, and of something more ominous: the whiff of a society decomposing.
What’s happening on the American left—with surreal rapidity, like the fall of France in 1940—is sinister. Wokeness and the cancel culture represent not idealism but virtue gone clinically insane. Look up the word hysteria: “a psychological disorder whose symptoms include . . . shallow, volatile emotions, and overdramatic or attention-seeking behavior.” -The indignant woke, who imagine themselves to be righteously awake and laying the foundations for a more just and humane world, ought to pause—to draw back for a moment, and consider the possibility that they are, as it were, fast asleep, caught up in strange, agitated dreams: that they have become a mass joined in a cult of self-righteousness, moral vanity and privilege. One of these days, they will have to be deprogrammed and led back to the real world. Woke institutions will need to be fumigated.
How do they get away with it? How did McCarthy get away with it?
McCarthyism and the cancel culture—which is the military wing of wokeness—are most alike in their power to conjure fear. It was fear that kept McCarthy up and running for several years, and it is fear—of losing a job, losing an assistant professorship, losing one’s good name, one’s friends, fear of saying the wrong thing and bringing down ruin on one’s head, fear not to sign a party-line faculty petition—that fortifies and sustains the cancelers. -What can be done? The gravest casualty of the 1960s was adult authority, which vanished from the land around the time of 1968’s Tet Offensive. Ronald Reagan provided an apparition of authority for a while, but then Bill Clinton, frisking with an intern, restored the adolescent model. The best remedy for the cancel culture would be resistance by strong adult leaders—university presidents, newspaper publishers, heads of corporations and so on—capable of standing up to Twitter. But the odds are against such a miracle. The woke, like hyenas, hunt in packs, and those in authority are craven. -In time, McCarthyism burned itself out. The senator—censured by his colleagues in 1954—withdrew into alcoholism and died three years later. Wokeness will prove harder to kill than McCarthyism. McCarthy was a B-movie monster. Wokeness is a zombie apocalypse.
Our world needs the adults in the room to step up and do their jobs. Now more than ever.
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