The Great Awokening and the Second American Revolution.

by Eric Kauffmann for Quillette.com 22 June 2020:
       

Statues toppled, buildings renamed, curricula “decolonized,” staff fired. The protests following George Floyd’s killing have emboldened cultural revolutionaries in America and Europe. The iconoclasts are changing minds, and could be in a position to enact a root-and-branch reconstruction of America into something completely unrecognizable to its present-day inhabitants. Imagine a country whose collective memory has been upended, with a new constitution, anthem, and flag, its name changed from the sinful “America” to something less tainted. Far-fetched? Not according to data I have collected on what liberal white Americans actually believe. Only a renewed American cultural nationalism can resist it.

According to multiple surveys, the effect of the riots which occurred at around the same time as the BLM protests is quite different from what occurred with previous waves of rioting. First, many of the participants in the major riots were white. Second, there has been no clear call for Nixonian law and order following the riots, but rather greater public acceptance of the BLM movement’s unsupported claims that contemporary structural racism explains why police shoot unarmed black men or violent crime plagues inner-city neighbourhoods. While 57 percent of Americans disagree with the protestors’ radical slogan, “defund the police,” an astounding 29 percent support it. This is so despite the deaths of a number of black people during the riots and the fact the riots have coincided with a steep rise in the number of black homicide deaths in inner-city neighbourhoods due to a “Ferguson Effect” of police reducing their presence in these areas.

Meanwhile Trump is polling well down after the riots, having dropped 2.5 points to Biden since Floyd’s death on May 25th. Trump’s repeated mistruths, unstatesmanlike behaviour and nepotistic employment of family members may have eroded the truth-based environment to such an extent that evidence-free shifts in issue position become increasingly easy. His sinking popularity tarnishes issue positions associated with his presidency, even when they are backed by the weight of evidence—as with the idea that indiscriminate police brutality rather than racism accounts for violence against unarmed blacks. The power of corporate and celebrity endorsement, magnified by “trendy” social media herding, has resulted in unusually high approval among whites for the activities of the rioters. This is an important departure from what occurred during, for example, the late 60s race riots, 1992 Rodney King riots, or even the 2014 Ferguson riots.

Statues, memory, and the social construction of harm

Progressive scholars are fond of emphasizing the socially-constructed nature of perceived reality. This is overstated, of course. Human minds are not blank slates. Gender can’t be readily reconstructed to make males dominate the caring professions and females the majority of ditch-diggers. Similarly, Americans can’t easily be convinced they are actually Russians.

But you don’t need to follow social construction to its postmodernist extreme to acknowledge that social construction does play a role in how we perceive the world. To a partial extent, there really is a “social construction of reality,” as Berger and Luckmann put it. Psychological research, for example, shows that flagging certain issues repeatedly, or framing them in particular ways, affects attitudes and feelings.

Let me interject here to make a correction in Kaufmann’s assessment of the abuse of social constructionism. The agentive aspect of social constructionism can be overstated [and I am sure that “progressive scholars” like to do that], but this would be an abuse of social constructionism indeed. As I like to emphasize, there are three important aspects to proper deployment of social constructionism: 1) The more literal, for example, as in people constructing a building together. 2) The metaphoric, for example, “a couple and a village socially constructing a child together”...or the social (re)construction of the narrative of a people’s history and 3) Post Hoc attribution as to how more brute facts come to count - e.g., fact, ‘my cousin was hit by lightning and killed’ but now there is a negotiation (social construction) as to whether the lightning strike was an act of god or triggered by events of physics; whether he has gone to heaven or is now just worm food, up for beatification or a good riddance, etc. ...is there something to be done to prevent lightning strikes or not?

...and poignantly, the fact of immigration, to be treated like a force of nature, a flow (as our enemies might like us to passively accept it), something that just happens? or rather an egregious social policy instantiated by hostile and irresponsible elites?

For Kaufmann to say that “social constructionism is overstated” is not accurate then. He might say with accuracy, that the agentive aspect of social constructionism can be overstated where it might attempt to say that it can make just whatever it likes of brute facts. But then that is neither particularly social nor anti-Cartesian indeed, but rather solipsistic, violating the corrective raison d’être of social constructionism and its means to harness social accountability.

Besides a red caping for the sake of Jewish interests, to dissuade Whites from this vital instrument (viz. for Whites to organize as a group), I believe much of the abuse of social constructionism has to do with the university being in the big business of selling talk and undergraduates being the paying customers that can be lured into liberal tenured professors’ language games by appealing to them with an “empowering” sense of overstated agency and liberal activism.

That correction at hand, back to Kauffmann

What society chooses to focus on and care about, the emotions it feels, the objects it sacralizes, the boundaries between groups, vary a lot across time and place. For instance, choosing not to shake someone’s hand is offensive in Western culture, but not in Japan, where a bow is the common greeting. Leaving food on one’s plate is treated as an insult in Japan, but not in the West. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning show that in Western elite culture in 1800, as in violent inner-city neighborhoods today, insults were treated as violence, which can only be avenged by physical violence. But for most of us, who haven’t been inculcated into a touchy honor culture, verbal slights don’t carry the same emotional punch. We either ignore them or respond with a counter-insult. As the sociology of emotions tells us, the way societies and individuals emotionally respond to words is, to an important degree, socially constructed.

The same sensitizing dynamic works for history, literature, film, statues, and even words. Like Red Guards with a hair-trigger sensitivity for sniffing out the bourgeois, today’s [*internationalist left ergo liberal-modernist] offense archaeologists outdo each other in trying to reframe the world as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and so on. Turning the principle of charity on its head, they insist on the most suspicious interpretation of a person’s motives when the subject matter is associated with their canonical totems of race, gender, sexuality. A Hispanic man flicking his fingers outside his truck window gets fired because this was photographed, tweeted, and spun as the “OK” white power sign. The result is an atmosphere where inter-personal trust is as low as humanly possible while discursive power flows to the accuser. The new cultural revolutionaries have constructed our emotional and conceptual reality.

Once “harm”, “racism” and other concepts become unmoored from reality, more of the world is remade. Statues which were long ignored become offensive. Complex historical figures like Jefferson or Churchill, who embodied the prejudices of their time, or elites like Columbus or Ulysses Grant, whose achievements had both positive and negative effects, are viewed through a totalizing Maoist lens which collapses shades of grey into black and white. If a historic personage transgressed [liberal internationalist] left-modernist sacred values, their positives instantly evaporate and activists myopically focus on their transgressions.

Suddenly, an entire Orwellian world opens up: place names, history books, statues, buildings. When you’re equipped with the anti-racist hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. In this brave new world, it doesn’t matter whether a symbol like the Rhodes Scholarship has acquired a completely different meaning, or whether a statue has become a symbol of something completely different. All must be levelled to bring forth utopia.

What has occurred across the West, especially in the English-speaking world, is a steady [liberal internationalist] left-modernist march through the institutions. Beginning in the 1960s, former radicals entered universities and the media, capturing the meaning-producing machines of society. Once boomers became the establishment in the 1990s, the ethos of institutions started to shift. For good and ill, equality and diversity rose up the priority list. As these ideas filtered through Schools of Education and into the K-12 curriculum, older ideas of patriotism faded and the new critical theory perspective began to replace it. Sixty three percent of millennials (aged 22–37) now agree that “America is a racist country,” nearly half say it is “more racist than other countries” and 60 percent that it is a sexist country. Older generations are less radical, but 40–50 percent of boomers and Gen Xers agree with these statements, reflecting the long march of the [Internationalist Marxist] Left through American culture.

The deculturation of America

In order to find out how willing liberal Americans are to jettison the country’s cultural identity, I decided, on May 7th, to ask what I thought were outlandish questions—almost to the point of inflicting a Sokal Squared-style hoax on survey respondents. The answers I received amazed me. I then repeated the exercise on June 15th, after the George Floyd killing and subsequent protests to see whether things had gotten even crazier. It turns out they have.

After the preface, “To what extent do you think that the following should be done to address structural barriers to race and gender equality in America,” I presented 16 statements that an amalgamated sample of 870 American respondents could agree or disagree with. The sample is not representative of the American population—I used the Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific Academic survey platforms that thousands of academics use. Respondents on these platforms lean young, liberal, and white. But as this is precisely the group I wished to study, this is not a major limitation. Indeed, I have removed conservatives and centrists to focus only on liberals. Liberals are defined as those who rate themselves as a one “very liberal” or two “liberal” on a five-point scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” The liberal sample, consisting of 414 people, was 86 percent white and 53 percent male. Forty percent of liberals identified as “very liberal” and the other 60 percent as just “liberal.”

Responses ranged on a seven-point scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” I’ve simplified the seven categories into a binary agree-versus-disagree score. Those who scored a four—“neither agree nor disagree”—were dropped from the analysis, permitting me to gauge where the balance of committed opinion lies.

Here is what I asked people to agree or disagree with:

1. Rebalance the history taught in schools until its voices and subjects reflect the demographics of the population and heritage of Native people and citizens of color.

2. Move, after public consultation, to a new American anthem that better reflects our diversity as a people

3. Rename our cities and towns until they match the demographics of the population

4. Rebalance the art shown in museums across the country until an analysis of content shows that it reflects the demography of the population and perspective of Native people and citizens of color

5. Move, after an open public process, to a new name for our country that better reflects the contributions of Native Americans and our diversity as a people

6. Rename our states until they better reflect the heritage of Native people and citizens of color

7. Gradually replace many older public buildings with new structures that don’t perpetuate a Eurocentric order, until a more representative public space is achieved

8. Respectfully remove the monument to four white male presidents at Mount Rushmore, as they presided over the conquest of Native people and repression of women and minorities

9. Allow our public parks to return to their natural state, before a European sense of order was imposed upon them

10. Move, after public consultation, to a new American flag that better reflects our diversity as a people

11. Consider adopting a new national language, that will be forged from the immigrant and Native linguistic diversity of this country’s past

12. Remove existing statues of white men from public spaces until the stock of statues matches the demographics of the population

13. Gently remodel the statue of liberty to make it better reflect the diversity of America

14. Rename our streets and neighbourhoods until they match the demographics of the population

15. Move, after public consultation, to a new American constitution that better reflects our diversity as a people

16. Begin changing the layout of our cities, towns, and highways, moving away from the grid system to follow the more natural trails originally used by Native people