It’s never a good sign when you’re watching a scene of street terror in yet another gut-churning YouTube video and you find yourself thinking: ‘Hang on a minute, that’s around the corner from my apartment!’ But there’s a now infamous video from last week where a mob of enraged millennials with their fists pumped in the air surrounded a lone young woman sitting outside a Washington restaurant where I often eat. Like a scene from the Cultural Revolution, the crowd demanded she shout certain slogans and raise her clenched fist in solidarity — or be damned as a racist. Most of her fellow diners took the path of least resistance. She wouldn’t. The chants grew louder: ‘White silence is violence!’ They started screaming in her face. She wouldn’t cave. Wokeness, in case you hadn’t noticed, has entered a more intense phase. Not so long ago, you were canceled for something you did or said or wrote. Now you’re canceled just for saying absolutely nothing at all.
I had a much milder experience of this during the past week when the New York Times decided to run a profile of me. The hook was that I was forced to leave New York magazine last month because, according to the NYT, I had not publicly recanted editing an issue of the New Republic published…in 1994. The issue was a symposium on The Bell Curve, a book by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein that explored the connection between IQ, class, social mobility and race. My crime was to arrange a symposium around an extract, with 13 often stinging critiques published alongside it. The fact I had not recanted that decision did not, mind you, prevent TIME, the Atlantic, Newsweek, the NYT and New York magazine from publishing me in the following years. But suddenly, a decision I made a quarter of a century ago required my being canceled. The NYT reporter generously gave me a chance to apologize and recant, and when I replied that I thought the role of genetics in intelligence among different human populations was still an open question, he had his headline: ‘I won’t stop reading Andrew Sullivan, but I can’t defend him.’ In other words, the media reporter in America’s paper of record said he could not defend a writer because I refused to say something I don’t believe. He said this while arguing that I was ‘one of the most influential journalists of the last three decades’. To be fair to him, he would have had no future at the NYT if he had not called me an indefensible racist. His silence on that would have been as unacceptable to his woke bosses as my refusal to recant. But this is where we now are. A reporter is in fear of being canceled if he doesn’t cancel someone else. This is America returning to its roots. As in Salem.
The conversion of the Left in America back to a totalitarian, repressive, coercive Soviet ethos is alarming. In the 1950s-1980s we slowly evolved our concern about the Soviet Union from a largely military fear to a combined concern about economic prowess, military prowess, and cultural corrosion.
The economic prowess turned out to be a massive failure of intelligence - the USSR and its client states were economic failures whom we consistently overestimated. And over time, absent the productivity of the foundational economy, their military prowess also declined despite our overestimations. They were certainly dangerous. Just not as dangerous as we thought.
It was the third concern, cultural corrosion, that has actually been the most successful consequence of the brief existence of the USSR. The Gramscian infusion of postmodernism, critical theory, and social justice theory into the news and entertainment media, into academia (K-12 and universities) and into the Administrative State do now present by far the most effective threat to our nation. It is not the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb which is the most pertinent emblem of our danger, it is the the black bloc attire of distributed, anarchic, fanatical Antifa members (along with similar movements) and their institutional and government supporters.
Agents of destructive violence encouraged across the nation by select politicians, academia, news and entertainment media, and by the regulatory Administrative State who indict innocent citizens and exercisers of their Bill of Rights and who simultaneously release known criminals with outstanding warrants. Who punish the police and who encourage the rioters.
Who demand struggle sessions. Who demand professions of group guilt. Who reject due process and science and freedom. Who de-platform, cancel, and write out of history those who are not compliant. Who demand submission from public diners. Who pronounce and denounce rather than discover and collaborate. Shameful.
Sullivan's experience of a journalistic commissar brings back memories of all those old Soviet habits.
Everyone needs to stand up and turn back this tide of totalitarianism. All of us together.
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