Cancel Culture is Cancelling Culture… Gleefully

Where a Frederick Douglass monument USED to be…

Gone are the once-thought-to-be horrible days when the left-cathedral excommunicated individuals. This was all of the past three decades up to about three months ago. Those burned at the progressive auto-da-fes are too numerous to mention. Some standouts: Robert Bork (thanks Joe Biden), James Damore, David Daleiden, Jordan Peterson and other college professors slightly to the right of Bernie Saunders.

At present, the cancel culture is doing its best–and succeeding for the most part–in cancelling, culture. You see that’s the thing about these uber-Karens: It is not enough for them to destroy free individuals. They are out to crush individualism, and the inherent mirth that comes with it.

Culture, as it turns out, is a very funny, very non-pliant thing. And, revolutionaries the world and time over have recognized the need to own it before they owned the state. From Danton and Marat; Trotsky and Lenin to BLM leadership today, they appreciated just how enduring old civilizational habits and principles are. The Vendeans and the kulaks imbibed the traditional values of faith and private property, so they needed to be and were, exterminated. Such a drive to command culture is all the more dangerous in the United States because, as is evident time and time again, American culture possesses (or is unfortunately possessed by) a New England, Puritanical streak that disdains individual freedom and scorns the irascible nature of culture.

A region or people do not bow in obedience to the Yankee-fication of America by the cathedral left? You are to be hated and eliminated. People don’t follow the social justice script? They are gone. This includes the entire South, sane people against Fauci, YouTube viewers who dare watch and listen to dissenting opinion on the “deadly” coronavirus, the West’s (Kanye, Kim and all the directional children–“Chicago” is acting out a lot recently), and probably you and me.

Thaddeus Russell just riffed on this topic (for his Unregistered Underground crew) of historical American progressivism, especially as it emanated from the earnest, if at the same time dastardly, John Dewey.

Progressives–surprise, surprise–love war, both of the hot/actual and ethereal/unending variety. For Dewey, World War I was a dream come true. According to Russell:

Dewey noted that the requirements for fighting a total war had realized much of the progressives’ vision for a centrally engineered society in which the individual identities of Americans would merge with the American nation-state:

‘Legal possession and individual property rights have had to give way before social requirements,’ he wrote. ‘The old conception of the absoluteness of private property has received the world over a blow from which it will never wholly recover. . . . . public requirements may at any time be given precedence by public machinery devised for that purpose.’

John Dewey: Screams FUN, doesn’t he?!

Dewey was pleased that disciplining the population to fight and produce weaponry for the wartime state had advanced the causes of sex and alcohol prohibitions, which led to the mass jailing of prostitutes and homosexual men in New York and other port cities where troops were massing. ‘Again, the war has added to the old lesson of public sanitary regulation the new lesson of social regulation for purposes of moral prophylaxis,’ Dewey wrote. ‘The acceleration of the movement to control the liquor traffic is another aspect of the same fact.’

The draft, which had been instituted out of necessity after only a fraction of the number of troops that Wilson wanted for his crusade volunteered to fight, was according to Dewey and other progressives a utopian government program that hastened the advent of a society in which all were Americans and America was all. ‘Finally, conscription has brought home to the countries which have in the past been the home of the individualistic tradition the supremacy of public need over private possession,’ Dewey opined. ‘No matter how many among the special agencies for public control decay with the disappearance of the war stress, the movement will never go backward.’

The thing I love about the original progressives is that they were unashamed to say what they wanted. They were similar to Trump in that way, but obviously with very different politics.

‘The oldest problem of political philosophy, the proper relationship between the individual and the community, had been solved’ by the creation of a wartime state, Dewey wrote. ‘There would be no individual.'”

When, therefore, you hear over and over again progressives in the Democratic and Republican parties declare the need to fight wars against poverty, drugs, terrorism, Afghanistan, Syria, racism, baseball, discrimination, viruses and unmaskers–clutch your Bibles (sorry Barack), Rosaries, Lil’ Wayne and Waylon Jennings CDs, and especially your guns. Because, the Deweyites are coming… precisely for you.