Yes, This Is a Revolution

 Are you amazed how quickly all pro sports bowed to Black Lives Matter? Have you been concerned for your job if you spoke your mind on political topics? Is your family split between those who agree with defunding the police vs. those who appreciate law enforcement?  Yes, this is a revolution.

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We know it’s different this time because the stakes are continually articulated by the enemies of the current order. They are demanding, and in some cases getting, a new and exotic country. The police are indeed being defunded. The statues are coming down. The heretics are being outed. The dissenters are being silenced. The buildings are burning, and the demands are ever growing.

In June, the editors of Commentary called this combination of mob violence, cultural torment, and public intimidation “the great unraveling.” Since then, things have gotten appreciably worse.

The great unraveling at first consisted of riots and looting under the pretense of seeking justice for the recently killed George Floyd; the anarchist occupation of a section of Seattle; and a rash of accusations, confessions, and dismissals of individuals who showed insufficient fealty to the new anti-racist paradigm. At the time, extreme policy proposals, such as defunding municipal police departments, were subjects for popular discussion and debate. Everyday Americans swapped Black Lives Matter reading lists and strove, however misguidedly, to broaden their conception of racial inequity.

As of this writing, Portland, Oregon, has endured more than two months straight of anarchist violence directed at federal buildings and employees. In other cities—New York, Los Angeles, Richmond, Omaha, and Austin, to name a few—mob violence continues to erupt regularly, always connected to cries for justice and sometimes resulting in death. Accelerating the general dissolution, police forces have been successfully hobbled in response to the killing of George Floyd, and the resulting spike in murder and violent crime shows no sign of abating. All the while, armchair lynch mobs have continued to claim the scalps of those who veer from or merely stumble on the path to social-justice enlightenment. It is the full-time job of any American with a public presence to bow down before the identity cult. Professional athletes have mutated overnight into a congeries of Kaepernicks. As for the public, 62 percent of all Americans, according to a poll by the CATO Institute, now say they’re afraid to voice their political views lest they be punished professionally.

Leading media organizations, as they did from the start, lend their approval to all of it. After months of defending chaos in the streets as “mostly peaceful,” the media elite is openly covering for a movement whose defining features are intimidation and mass violence. And having completed their Internet-assigned reading in black–white relations, a majority of Americans (56 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll) now find the United States guilty as charged of systemic racism.

Which is now all but beside the point, as perceived racism has less and less to do with the passions convulsing the nation. Statues of abolitionists—indeed, of Frederick Douglass—are torn down with no less vigor than those of slave owners. And the social-justice paradigm has proved capable of accommodating a growing number of grievances. “Cancel the rent,” to take one example, has joined “defund the police” as a rallying cry for the mob. As law professor Amna A. Akbar explains in a July 11 New York Times essay: “The people making these demands want a new society. They want a break from prisons and the police, from carbon and rent.” Toward the end of her essay, titled “The Left Is Remaking the World,” Akbar writes: “And whatever you think of their demands, you have to be in awe of how they inaugurate a new political moment, as the left offers not just a searing critique, but practical ladders to radical visions.”

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/abe-greenwald/yes-this-is-a-revolution/