Optimism, Inc.: The Crushing Weight of Lie

Victor Davis Hanson August 2, 2021 @ Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers

One reason why I remain optimistic about the impending end of wokism and the failure of the cultural revolution is that the dangers they pose are unsustainable. And by that I mean that they require such dissimulation, that the load of lies eventually will snap the spine of those asked to carry and disseminate them. 

Star Trek’s John Gill

Joe Biden last week gave a series of speeches, answers and riffs that were nonsensical. By that I don’t just mean that he has no clue about how to arrest inflation, or the dangers of a spiraling violent crime rate or of an open border. 

The problem is that he increasingly cannot finish a sentence and at times seems entirely incoherent. And the media, the Left, and the Democratic party—all once so eager to seek Trump’s removal as unhinged, and all but forced to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or the target of a supposedly wired-up Rod Rosenstein, or diagnosed in absentia as nuts by Yale Professor Bandy Lee—seem determined to hide, but cannot, the all too obvious truth.

Why? They know there is no comparable alternative media that can replace their celebratory lies by the reality of Biden’s insidious dementia? The specter that Kamala Harris is unpalpable even to Democrats? The more Biden performs the role of an empty vessel, the more neo-Marxism can be poured into it? They are desperate and panicked at Biden’s decline, but have no viable alternatives other than masking his cognitive challenges, and so will lie to the bitter end?

But Biden’s performance or lack of it is not sustainable. By 2022 his lack of cognitive ability won’t be hidden. The public will know that it was lied to in the fashion of Edith Wilson assuring the country that a bedridden and near speechless Woodrow Wilson was completely fit to continue his duties as president. 

Borderlash?

An open border will take years to fix. We will suffer a trillion-dollars in entitlement costs, and legal, education, food, housing and transportation assistance to accommodate the 8-10 million who during this administration will cross illegally into the United States. 

But an open border cannot be hidden by the media forever. The consequences of allowing those in whose first act is to break US law, second is to reside illegally in the US, and third is to fabricate identification to perpetuate their illegal residence will force Americans finally to close the border. If there is a fairness to impeachment, then Joe Biden certainly has by its standard violated his oath of office to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” by simply allowing or indeed encouraging law-breaking on a massive scale.

So far Biden has offered no defense of his open-border policy other than to blame Trump’s closed-border policy and cry “Racism!” The Democratic Party is ever so slowly alienating tens of thousands of voters of all races, religions and ethnicities, and seems oblivious in their arrogance to the sort of comeuppance on the horizon. 

One reason why tribalism will cease is that it is unsustainable and that all other groups are starting to see where it leads and want no part of it. “La Raza” seems to have lost much of its resonance, the more, in counter-intuitive fashion, Latinos enter the US illegally and alienate US citizens of Hispanic ancestry. 

Why? Three reasons. One, the wages of illegal immigration—gangs, crime, overtaxed social services, poorer schools—fall most heavily on Hispanic-American citizens. 

Two, shouting about skin color or language or place of origin is not as common among the Latino middle classes as is now considering voting conservative for the first time in their lives—a fact known to and feared by the Left. In California, oppressive income, sales, and gas taxes, terrible roads, water shortages, failed high-speed rail, unchecked fires, sky-high fuel and energy costs, and dismal schools are not conducive for welcoming in millions to further tax state social services.

Three, there is no such thing as an omnipotent, omnipresent nefarious “whiteness.” In my seven-decade life in the Central Valley, most of the racism I saw and heard, at least after 1970, was among Mexican-Americans—the majority of the population and of two types: one directed at darker, more indigenous immigrants from south of Mexico City, and in particular aimed at African-Americans. Implicit tribalism is now seen as ecumenical in getting an edge in admissions or hiring, but explicit tribalism in which tribes act out their violent chauvinism is quite another, and far more dangerous, phenomenon. If we are to self-select by superficial appearance, there will be no rainbow coalition of the nonwhite, but a bellum omnium contra omnes. I think most accept that bleak trajectory if present trends don’t cease.

Moreover, if it remains acceptable to talk of intrinsic “whiteness” that forever brands, in a near genetic sense, its accursed, then soon the tribal mentality will extend to everyone as it becomes permissible to talk of “brownness” and “blackness” and Asian-ness”—as collective stereotypes. 

The United States of Yugoslavia?

We new Yugoslavians will soon be assessed by not just our superficial appearances but the sum total of our resulting stereotyped good and bad victimization and victimizing. When Secretary of Defense Gen. Lloyd Austin defends his woke racial internal audits, and states that the US military should in all respects look like and mirror image US demography, does that extend to the battlefield? 

By that I mean white males currently make up about 35 percent of the US population, at least to the degree in our multiracial society anyone is really white or black or brown. 

So in our multiracial, and male and female military, are we to expect that whites will be 35 percent of those to die in Afghanistan and Iraq, in proper proportional numbers? 

Will General Austin’s mentality become so entrenched that at some point in such wars, he or his successor would say, “I’m pulling back racial group A, because it has met its quota of death on the battlefield.” 

Translated such a Woke Chair of the Joint Chiefs would say, “Whoops, 82 percent of the combat deaths in Iraq were white males and that doesn’t begin to look like America where they are only 35 percent.” 

Or “Dammit, why was I not told that 85 percent of our combat dead in Afghanistan are white males. And that sure as hell does not look like America?”

Is that our collective future?

Most Americans more or less support the idea of natural diversity; that is, within general parameters, professions, jobs, and down time reflect a multiracial society. They don’t get worked up that Asians are overrepresented in many of the medical professions, or whites in Wall Street and Silicon Valley or blacks in the NBA, NFL and MLB. But once any one particular group insists that all professions must be either proportionally represented or now disproportionally represented, without regard to demonstrable merit—or else!—as a way of providing reparatory action for supposed historical sins, watch tensions rise. 

Professional sports are bleeding viewers not because whites are a majority in the country, but a distinct minority in professional sports. The culprit instead is the fact that athletes are becoming politically weaponized. Translated, I mean it is unprofitable and unsustainable for multimillion-dollar-a-year players, who do not “reflect” percentage-wise the demography of America, to scream, demonstrate, or virtue signal their charges of racism against a largely middle class, less well-off viewership, on the sheer basis of their skin color, not on any demonstrable racist act. 

So we have almost reached peak wokism. To continue the arc leading to tribalism will unravel the county and I think the majority of all races will not tolerate that. 

I have friends who are Latino or black, and when in the spirit of the times, a very few have interjected “As a Latina” or as “a black man,” I sometimes answer, well “as a white guy,” and usually either laughter or anger or stupefaction follows, almost as in “How ridiculous you sound identifying by race.” OK—but it is either always or never stupid to virtue signal anyone’s race, but not sometimes.

Imagine after Barack Obama’s dramatic victory in 2008—with a greater tally of white voters than John Kerry earned in 2004—if someone had emulated the now quite wealthy Van Jones’s slur of “white lash” (or so he characterized the 2016 Trump victory), and thus had said that the 95 percent black vote for Obama was a “black lash.” Would that inanity have been permissible?

The greatest fear of the race industry is the present, not of 1825 not 1861 not 1950, but the here and now—and the growing anger they know they are sowing for the short-term careerist gain of a few pampered elites. So in this pessimistic rant, I am optimistic that woke comes to a close soon. You see its untruth and dangers are unsustainable and most Americans in the 233^rd year of the best nation in history will not simply surrender and sigh, “RIP.”