Save The Last Dance For Me - Progressives Leave Washington With An Empty Dance Card

It has been a particularly bad year for progressives.  Not only has Donald Trump reassumed the presidency, but he has done so in high style; and in just a few months he has rolled back DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusivity), closed the southern border, attacked Iran, opened vast lands for drilling, reduced and/or eliminated the bureaucratic behemoth, sent in federal police to clean up crime-ridden cities, ridiculed the gender spectrum, and withdrawn punitive regulation from private business. 

This is not simply a change of administration, but a cultural coup.  The days of woke governance, flaccid immigration, the deification of race, redistribution of wealth, and the demission of religion were over in a flash.  Such is leadership, and such was the unspoken demand for change - once the President said what was on people's minds - that radical progressivism was nothing but a chimera, a fevered Utopian fantasy full of Sturm und Drang but with no substance, no historical precedent, and no foundational principles - the cultural shift was quick, complete, and dramatic. 

The Emperor had no clothes on after all realized Americans after being told for four years that he was wearing finery.  The preposterous cant, the outrageous claims, and the bald self-righteousness of the Left were there for all to see. 

Now, it is one thing for policies, programs, and initiatives of one administration to be shut down upon the arrival of another; but when the whole foundation of the progressive movement is shown to be the sham that it is, that is real trouble.  There can be no legislative tinkering, no compromises around the edges, no quid pro quo when it comes to such radical reversals of political fortune.  The entire rug has been pulled out from under progressives, the whole kit-and-kaboodle of sinecures, lame justifications, and febrile assumptions thrown out and tossed on the curb. 

And so it was that the progressives who had staffed the government and its non-profit claques were sent packing, unceremoniously dismissed.  There was no orderly transition of power, friendly adversarial handshakes, and ceremonial respect.  Biden and his shills were gone and done with and everything in Washington changed.

Blonde, blue-eyed young women strode proudly along Pennsylvania Avenue on their way to the White House.  Loud parties of celebration were heard on the South Lawn.  The tenor, the atmosphere, the environment, the language, and the furnishings all changed.  It was a different world, an alien one to those who had just left. 

Where to go? was the question these progressives asked. What doors were still open to them? What jurisdictions would have them?  Where could they fit, accommodate, and produce?

The answer was simple - nowhere; or at least nowhere that mattered.   The county was turning red from top to bottom, and even the most radically progressive cities were losing public support and political approval.  The private sector, forward looking and now more optimistic than ever wanted nothing to do with old political hacks and retreads.  The world of enterprise, free association, open discussion, and apolitical intentions was an unimaginable thing for these political vagrants.

The vision of Walmart greeter loomed in Washington as resume after resume was rejected.  Applicants were ghosted as never before.  A DC postmark alone was enough to toss an application in the trash.  

Older politicos considered early retirement, but a long life of selfless commiseration for the poor and the black man had bled their bank accounts, and so decades of scrimping by loomed large. 

'Don't worry, Bob', Corinne Muzelle said to her husband who had seen his NGO, Scientists For Social Justice, close its doors after many years of hectoring and bullying. Corporate sponsorship had been withdrawn, foundational support was now nil, and individual memberships down to zero.

Bob's organization was exactly the kind that the new Administration ridiculed.  It had been at the forefront of gender reallocation and the integration of transgender teachers in the school system, on the barricades with Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, and on the hustings when it came to socialist reform. 

There was no way to retool or reconfigure radical progressivism, make it fit into some private sector niche or figure in its algorithms.  The ideas and ideals were contrary.  There was no room in a Silicon Valley start-up for the likes of Bob.  The young Korean and Chinese geeks wanted nothing more than a big gigabyte computer and clear sailing to profitability.  

Corporations which had jettisoned all DEI programs and had backed off from woke imagery had no place for the reintroduction of discredited ideas. 

'The Park Service', said Bob out of the blue. 'I've always wanted to be a park ranger'.  The idea of sitting in solitude atop a ridge in the Shenandoah had always appealed to him; and this was an occupation which required little training or previous experience. 

'I'll open a book store', he said.  'A small boutique place, offering high-toned fiction and coffee'. 

Anything to avoid becoming a Starbucks server.  'I could be a MacDonald's manager what with my managerial experience', he said to his wife, 'or write my memoirs'. 

In short Bob like anyone who had never really worked for a living, who had lived off of ideas and their supposed political salience, cannot be too harshly criticized for such fanciful ideas.  To be out of work as a steam fitter is one thing - small tool-and-dye outfits would always need them - but a liberal activist? No, the landscape was as dark and gloomy as an Anselm Kiefer tableau. 

All the Washington cabals, cliques, and claques offered no shelter.  Everyone Bob knew was leaving Washington - back to Boise, Ames, and Chillicothe.  One former colleague was going to take over his father's mattress discounter business, another as a gofer on an offshore Louisiana oil rig, and a third as an apprentice stylist in his brother's hair salon.  Each on his own.  The old political camaraderie had no place anymore.  The old ideas - collaboration, cooperation, solidarity, uniformity - were more irrelevant in the new America than ever.

'What about a trailer park in North Carolina?', Bob asked Corinne.  A no cost solution, drawing down little of their meager savings, good climate, good fishing. 

They ended up in a reconverted garage in the back of their daughter's house in Ardmore, took over childcare for the family, did a little cooking, and tried to make themselves scarce; but the old American can-do, do-it, make-something-of-yourself ethos bit hard, and Bob had to find something, anything to give him a measure of identity - Hah, there was that word again, so often used as a rallying cry for black, brown, and Chicano people’s and now applied to him, how ironic. 

Nothing showed the transparency of progressivism more than this turn of events - a progressive without his nostrums and Utopian dreams was a nothing, a cipher, a zero.  A conservative, born and bred in an environment of individual enterprise, hard work, and private opportunity was fungible.  A Darwinian survivor. 

Alas, little was heard from or about Bob after he left the garage, and your guess is as good as mine where he landed; but the moral of the story is not about Bob, but about the floating fantasy palace he thought would always be home.

Everyone Has A Pull-By Date - Most Ignore It And Go Rancid, The Particularly Sorry Fate Of The Idealist

Bob Frampton ignored pull-by dates.  They were nothing more than marketing ploys to get consumers to buy more.  And what if a few months or even a year or two were added to shelf life?  Nothing dire would happen, botulism would not suddenly multiply in the canned corn.  Perhaps there would be fewer suds in the shampoo, the frozen peas might be a bit frosty, and the Cheerios a tad stale; but the savvy consumer ignored such blandishments and was proud of it. 

 

Bob had been a sexually vigorous younger man and as he edged into late middle age, wondered when women would stop noticing him - the jowls, turkey wattle, thinning hair, and increasing girth could certainly not match the six-pack abs, rich, luxuriant hair, and energetic good fortune of the young male.  Yet he was convinced he had something which endured as an attractive quality - sensitivity.  Women, always tossed about, given the bum's rush, desired for their looks and sex appeal and far less often for their brains, appreciated men who took them seriously, ignored the superficial, and went straight to the core. 

If older men were alert to these probability curves of mating, they would find that profitable niche where young women were nudging towards their pull-by date and needed special handling and when men's physical decline was overlooked for their caring interest.  It was a narrow window of opportunity, but one which would be satisfying for the woman and transformative for the man. 

The December-May relationship is a thing of marvel - a man thinking that his days of sexual revelry and fulfillment are over, meets a young woman who finds him attractive.  His maturity, savoir faire, experience, and sexual know-how are winners in this particular arena, and although when the affair is over he is more existentially worn out than he was before, he will never regret the experience. 

Not so with more pedestrian affairs - job, business, politics - which are more hard and fast when it comes to relevance and desirability.  Although one might think that a political philosophy maintains its rigor and justification over the decades, nothing could be farther from the truth.  

The 1920s progressivism of LaFollette, Brandeis, Debs, and Gompers while still fundamentally sound - the integrity of the worker, the rights of the poor, the evils of rampant capitalism - has radically been transformed and is now characterized by the ethos of inclusivity and diversity.  Factories have become automated, unions disbanded, and social guarantees for the poor in place - so idealism must find a different playground. 

Race has been front and center for progressives since the Sixties, but attitudes between black and whites have changed significantly.  Gone are the days of conciliatory men like Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, men of integration, peaceful protest, and racial harmony.  Gone too are the Black Panthers, militant, armed revolutionaries and their brand of violent protest, replaced by 'black marketing', the campaign that focusses on the inherent superiority of the black man, his sentient African forest roots, the mystical evolutionary side to his tribalism and animism.  

The movement is now placed under the big umbrella of diversity, an attempt to radicalize democracy and use race as its pivotal focus.  America should not be an integrated society which, like all societies, sorts out differences in ability, talent, promise, and ambition, but one engineered to reverse 'white supremacy' and replace it with 'colored supremacy'. 

All of which is to say that Bob, despite his long and passionate avowal of progressivism, had simply become, through no fault of his own, supernumerary.  While progressive principles had not changed, form, format, and content had.  His ideas, still tied to the old integrative ways of the past, were no longer of any use.  Civil rights was a young person's game, a black person's game. 

The same was true for his fidelity to feminism and the cause of women. In his younger days he had stood arm in arm with women who demanded equality and equal opportunity, but now he was lost in the gender transformation of the times.  It wasn't women so much as their permutations that needed support, promotion, and alliance.

While his views were in consonance with the progressive majority on certain issues - global warming and immigration among them - the seminal issues of race and gender which defined today's progressives were simply beyond him, too remote for his old fashioned sense of social harmony.

As much as he tried, he could not take Letitia Williams, aka Larry Williams, seriously.  To him she was a distortion, a gross exaggeration, a niche piece of American life, a denizen of the Cages Aux Folles clubs of Miami who should have stayed in boa feathers and high heels in South Beach rather than come to Washington.  Every time she flounced and pranced her way through the corridors of his K  Street offices, he winced, thinking only of the stinky man underneath.  

In short, Bob had long passed his political pull-by date and didn't know it.  He ignored the diminishing requests for his once popular, rousing speeches; and his infrequent invitations to conferences and seminars.  He hadn't had a paper published in months whereas in the past he was a regular contributor to America's top journals. 

Now, most people retire easily and gracefully.  A job is only a job after all, of which one might be proud, but not some irreplaceable piece of life.  Yet for idealists like Bob for whom changing the world had been his be-all and end-all, pull-by date meant psychic death, moral and spiritual anonymity, erasure.

He looked at his conservative Yale classmates and wondered at the ease of their elision from Wall Street to Palm beach, boardrooms to golf courses and sailing.  That was the rub - belief in progress, Utopia, and progressive change - was a trap, a No Exit room.  Bob would be saddled with guilt over the oppression of the black man till the end, would be as angered  as ever over the predation of the one percent, would shake his fist and global warming naysayers until the day he died.  There was no possible rest for anyone who truly believed. 

 

And so it was that he kept his Emeritus cubbyhole in an office downtown, wrote endless white papers on injustice, reform, and the demonic influence of the resurgent Right, and died in his traces, found one evening by the Salvadoran cleaning ladies

 Because the progressive landscape had so radically changed since his beginnings, his death was given scant notice.  Bob who? was the best that the movement could muster; and that was the fate of the true believer.  A life of unremitting purpose cannot end up well.  A few old friends attended his funeral, and nice things were said about him, but he was soon forgotten.

The Credulous, The Dumb, The Ignorant, And The Gullible - Alexander Hamilton And Governing America

It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right (Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers)

Alexander Hamilton was unequivocal in his judgement of the American people, versed as he was in Shakespeare's tales of the 'fickle mob.  Swayed by a silver tongue, without moral conviction, ruled only by febrile perception and personal self-interest, 'the people' could be counted on for nothing but inconstancy. 

 

Hamilton argued with Jefferson the idealist who said that the majority was always right - or at least could be persuaded to come to the right conclusions - and said 'show me'.  America was a nation of swindlers, snake oil salesmen, and itinerant shell game operators and a credulous populace with their wallets open.  The people could not be trusted to analyze, think, and conclude by themselves.  Their ignorance was legion; and while perhaps with some nobility as tillers of the soil, they were in the main dupes.  As such, a buffer of those who could think - the well-born, educated in the ways of philosophy, history, and religion - was absolutely necessary to filter the intemperate will of the majority. 

Hamilton's vision was uncannily true - the American electorate is as given to folly, blandishments, fairy tales, false promises, and fantastical idealism now as it was in his day.  What Hamilton did not see was the invasive, infectiousness of democracy.  Those who were to be temperate, sagacious, intelligent filter of the mob's vanities, are just as morally and intellectually corrupt.  Not only are the unwashed dumb, but their elected representatives even dumber. 

 

The intellectual and moral corruption in the country knows no party affiliation, no class, no race, gender, or ethnicity.  It is pervasive, perennial, and permanent.  America's intellectuals - academics - are surprisingly the cheerleaders for such emotionalism.  They who are supposed to parse every text for veracity, grounding, and historical evidence ('on-the-one-hand-on-the-other') do nothing of the kind, put the cart before the horse, start with a conclusion and then work to justify it, and end up shills for the very fake news bought and sold by the media. 

Presumption, a priori judgment, truth by belief is the rule of thumb everywhere.  Revisionism and limited vision are the soupe du jour. The moral legitimacy of historical figures must be determined by today's standards; and because of the narrowness of its definition of morality - everything must be judged through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity -  the trash heap of history is immeasurable.  Jefferson and Washington must go because of their slaveholding and miscegenation.  Kant must be removed from the shelves because of his anti-Semitism. The South - an ignorant, backwoods, bass boat and gun rack racist region -  should never have been readmitted to the Union and must be shunned and marginalized for its horrific legacy and persistent hanging on to its old ways. 

In the election of Donald Trump, America finally came to grips with its anti-intellectual, mob mentality. It bade farewell to the Eastern Establishment, the Prince of Camelot in the White House dancing to the the tune of Pablo Casals, lyrics by Robert Frost; goodbye to Beacon Hill, Rittenhouse Square, and Park Avenue; ta-ta to literary criticism, Biblical exegesis, and solving for 'X'.  

A new lowbrow administration was in - a White House of glitz, glamour, yachts, mansions, and arm candy.  Las Vegas and Hollywood replaced Harvard and MIT.  Image, fake news, circus acts, and sides shows were in.  'The people' would finally accept Hamilton's picture and embrace it.  Everything is fake news, the majority said, so why not have fun watching academia go apoplectic about 'the truth'?

They - the majority - are ironically exactly right.  The fulfillment of Hamilton's vision could not be more true with the onset of virtual reality and artificial intelligence.  The truth has always been fungible, debatable, and a matter of who's looking, so now the liberal treasure hunt to find it has become even more impossible.  The majority - the mob - has always been ignorant, given to fanciful offers and pie-in-the-sky dreams, and now its ethos has become America's.  The whole country has jettisoned reason, and 'truth, justice, and the American way' are now parts of gaming, comic books, and Tinseltown. 

Donald Trump's election represented not only a return to conservative values and policies, but a vindication of the unwashed.  Life was one bad vaudevillian act after another.  There was no place for sanctimony on the stage.  All the real, true, definable elements of America - Mardi Gras, the runways of Vegas, the imagery of Hollywood, and the melodrama of the soaps - came together in one fell swoop. 

Don't call it ignorance anymore. That's somebody else's term, an outmoded, totally unfashionable, and wrong one.  The new American revels in the world of virtuality where anything goes, where your fantasy is as real as any other.  Fantasy itself is a valid signifier of the new ethos.  Ignorance (that old, bad word) is now indeed bliss, for it has been elevated to new heights, the foundation for live in a virtual (fake) world. 

Oh, sure, Joe Biden tried to rein in the enthusiasm for Donald Trump and his world of virtual, fantastical America; but the harder he tried, the harder and faster it runs.  Biden's way - the old chestnut, boring, faded, and totally outdated vision of America - is a thing of the past, detritus, a broken down stove left on the curb for hauling to the dump. 

Hamilton was absolutely right - the unwashed are indeed intellectually ignorant, credulous, and unstable - but absolutely wrong in his hope that this ignorance could be contained; and that with tutelage and guidance, the mob would become reasonable.  Not only could this dumbness never be corralled, it has become the ethos of the day.  America has always been this way since the first huckster, con artist, and card sharp.  The man who sold the Brooklyn Bridge to a fool should be given a plaque. 

The ethos of virtuality, fantasy, and fake news is here to stay. The 'ignorant' have become the elite.