How Cultural Revolutions Die — or Not
By Victor Davis Hanson
June 18, 2020 6:30 AM
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How Cultural Revolutions Die, or Not | National Review
They eat their own, unless a cruel dictator rises to unite and control the mob.
Unlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don't just change governments or leaders. Instead,
they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them "holistic" and "systematic."
Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins' so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months, and created a new supreme being: Reason.
Mao cracked down on supposed Western decadence such as the wearing of eyeglasses, and he made peasants forge pot iron and intellectuals wear dunce caps.
Moammar Qaddafi's Green Book cult wiped out violins and forced Libyans to raise chickens in their apartments.
The current Black Lives Matter revolution has "canceled" certain movies, television shows, and cartoons, toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas. ...
...But inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.
If toppling Confederate statues is required, what then about Nancy Pelosi's own mayor father, who once, as Baltimore's mayor, dedicated honorific statues to Confederate generals?...
...Eventually, the architects of cultural upheavals always make two miscalculations.
One, they presume that destroying things will never apply to themselves, given their loud virtue-signaling.
Two, if they are fingered by the mob, they assume they can somehow use their clout and influence to win exemption.
In other words, once cultural revolutions turn anarchic and eat their own, they lose support. When quiet sympathizers conclude that they too may targeted, they turn on their former icons to survive.
We are seeing that now. Liberal sympathetic bystanders are wondering whether downtown arson and looting will go private and reach their suburban homes. Do they really want their marquee universities or the Washington or Jefferson Monuments defaced or renamed?
What happens when calling 911 gets a constant busy signal? When a liberal mayor or black police chief or progressive governor or white leftist who diverges from the party line is targeted by the mob, then who really is safe?
Answer? No one.
And so the cultural revolution sputters to irrelevance.
What deflated the #MeToo movement was the high toll that the accusations took among the
Hollywood and cultural elite. Suddenly, when their own careers were destroyed, progressive celebrities began demanding evidence and insisting on presumed innocence....
...There is one caveat.
Sometimes cultural revolutions don't die out — if they are hijacked by a thug or killer. The National Socialist movement was an irrelevant nihilist mob of crazies until Adolf Hitler turned it into his personal genocidal cult. A murderous Stalin resuscitated the absurdities of Lenin's failing Bolshevism.
The present madness will wane like a virus, as it eats its own and terrifies its sympathizers that they may be next — unless, of course, a would-be Napoleon uses a "whiff of grapeshot" and turns the mob into his personal cult....
....A final thought: Cultural revolutions not only eventually die without cruel dictators, but
they can spawn dramatic pushbacks.
Ronald Reagan was the answer to the radical Sixties.
Revolutionaries are now sowing the wind, but they have little idea of the reactive whirlwind they may soon reap.