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| Sarah Hoyt: The Twilight of the Liberal Gods |
| 2017-09-29 |
| [PJMedia] We are living in amazing times, astonishing times, times I wouldn’t have believed possible as little as a year ago. There is this Jorge Luis Borges story, where the old gods are returning to Earth, but upon their arrival, it is found that they have lost the ability to speak. Instead, when they open their mouths, they caw or roar, or make other bestial sounds. The populace, disgusted, turns away from them and refuses to worship them. I don’t remember precisely (it’s been years since I read them), but I think in the end the "gods" get utterly destroyed. That’s what’s been happening to the left this last year. ...Part of what led to the dominance of the left in all the "gatekeeping" places, including publishing, the arts, education, and to a large extent government, was two things: their ability to project intelligence and calm; and the ruthlessness to not only not hire anyone who wasn’t a fellow-traveler, but also to kick out everyone who disagreed with them as soon as they could. The second led to, by a ruthless and slow process, getting rid of everyone who wasn’t first at least social-democrat, then socialist, and finally outright communist from most of the fields the left captured. (And if one is to believe Robert A. Heinlein, the process was completed with the Democratic Party back in the forties.) The first led to their holding that power, because not only did they have control of the mass media, and really, all forms of cultural communication, but they could project the calm and gentle impression of being the sane ones. ...Which is how we've come to where we’re now, with the left in control of all the cultural high ground and being able to declare, at will, that so and so is excommunicated or unworthy. ...And then this amazing thing happened (try this one easy trick!) -- something we’d predicted much earlier, and which frankly we’d despaired would come to pass: for whatever reason, the left’s dominance of the heights of culture failed them in a national election. Perhaps it was that Donald Trump is such a dark horse; perhaps it is that Hillary Clinton is such an unappetizing, corrupt candidate; perhaps it was the new media dominance revealing the crazy face of the left; perhaps it was the fact that the left had decided to fight the strangest battles, such as who got to pee where; perhaps it was a combination of all of these. All I know is that the minute Donald Trump was elected, the left lost whatever shred of sanity that had let them hold on to "normal appearing" speech and attitudes. ...Who would have thought the election of a rather conventional, traditional NYC Democrat could achieve this? In one year they’ve destroyed much of what took them close to a hundred years to achieve. They still look ‐ with a few exceptions ‐ like American upper-class, polished, well-mannered individuals. But the things that come out of their mouths cannot in any way be mistaken for "normal." The "old gods" have returned. But they’ve forgotten human speech. And the humans are noticing. Their speech still sounds normal to themselves. They have no clue what comes next. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |