The Californication of America 25
The word “Californication” is coined by Victor Davis Hanson to describe the nihilist antinomian revolutionary movement gathering pace in America, and already governing California, which he writes about in an article at American Greatness.
He speaks of the next election “becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism”.
He warns that “in 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all—and the furious, often desperate, and unfettered pushback against it”. In two words, “Californication ahead!” – if it is not stopped.
He writes:
The Democratic Party as we have known it, is extinct for now. It has been replaced since 2016 by a radical progressive revolutionary movement that serves as a touchstone for a variety of auxiliary extremist causes, agendas, and cliques—almost all of them radically leftwing and nihilistic, and largely without majority popular support.
When … a number of Democratic presidential candidates sympathize with the New York subway jumpers who openly threaten the police, then what or who exactly is the alternative to such chaos?
When the media proves 90 percent partisan according to its own liberal watchdog institutions, or reports things as true that cannot be true but “should” be true, what are the forces behind that?
When the violence of Antifa is quietly—or sometimes loudly—condoned, who are those who empower it and excuse it?
If a late-term abortion results in a live baby exiting the birth canal only to be liquidated, who exactly would say that is amoral?
If the leading Democratic presidential candidates openly embrace the Green New Deal, reparations, abolishing the Electoral College, welfare for illegal aliens, open borders, amnesties, wealth taxes, a 70-90 percent income tax code, Medicare for all, and legal infanticide—what is the alternative vision and who stands between all that and a targeted traditional America?
In California, the nation’s largest utility preemptively shuts off power to multibillion-dollar industries and two-million customers, given its ossified grid and over-regulated operations, and the deliberate policy of the state not to clean up drought-stricken dead forests and underbrush that are ignited by wind and antiquated transmission cables. So, who or what then in 2020 would oppose all that?
In a state where half the nation’s homeless use the streets as open sewers and receptacles for refuse, incubating medieval diseases and public hazards, who exactly says that is unacceptable? The California attorney general openly boasts that he believes the state is the home for 10 million immigrants of undetermined legal status; is there any pushback to that agenda? If not, would 20 or 30 million immigrants be acceptable for Californians? Why not 50 to 60 million additional residing foreign nationals legal or otherwise?
Can even a leftwing Facebook, Google, or Apple operate within a landscape that cannot ensure reliable power to run its businesses? Do the progressive masters of the Silicon Valley want to hand over millions per year in wealth taxes on money that has already been taxed—but which is considered by the Warrenites and Sandersites as veritable public property given their own past use of state roads and infrastructure to build their businesses? Do these billionaires really think conservative state policies encouraged tens of thousands of homeless people to sleep in cars and streets near their businesses?
On the social front, we are bombarded with celebrities dreaming of various methods of assassinating the current president. Who speaks out against such incendiary smears? …
… Higher education is now controlled by a revolutionary clique. It institutionalizes racially segregated dorms and safe spaces, matter of factly promotes censorship, and either cannot or will not prevent students from disrupting lecturers with whom they disagree. What or who exactly say not to all that? Who would dare say that America in its third century is not going to change its use of English pronouns or decide that there are not three and more biological genders?
When a progressive mom takes her kids to walk and play in a California municipal park and, instead of relaxing comfortably with her fellow mom friends, finds blood-tainted needles sticking up out of the grass, what sort of policies does she imagine allowed that? When a small business owner in San Francisco finds vagrants defecating near his breezeway or mobs of shoplifters swarming his store, what sort of politics and ideologies will he consider led to that?
On the national level, what or who created a landscape in which the highest echelons of the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department sought to surveil American citizens, undermine a presidential campaign, and abort a presidential transition and then a presidency? If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, would anyone have objected? Do any object today that she hired a foreign national to work with foreign sources to discredit and smear her political opponent?
Who or what is behind the constant remonstrations that the American people are racist, sexist, homophobic, nativist, xenophobic, and oppressing the transgendered? Who lodges such charges? Who believes them to be true?
Who exactly wishes to pack the court, to repeal the Electoral College, to nix the difference between residency and citizenship, to promote identity-politics tribalism over collective affinities, to nullify federal immigration law, to hunt down and disrupt political opponents as they eat and sleep—and who not?
Whose ideologies logically lead to promoting iconoclasm and statue-toppling, the Orwellian renaming of streets and buildings, the defacing of public murals?
The new progressive party is Jacobin. It sees politics in all-inclusive French revolutionary terms—encompassing every aspect of American life from entertainment, sports, academia, religion, and family matters to politics, foreign policy, and individual rights.
Who fights back? “In his own way”, Professor Hanson writes, President Trump does.
The result is not just that there looms a choice between two different agendas, but two quite different American lifestyles and experiences—and histories.
Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. One side advocates a complete transformation not just of the American present but of the past as well.
The Left is quite eager to change our very vocabulary and monitor our private behavior to ensure we are not just guilty of incorrect behavior but thought as well.
The other side believes America is far better than the alternative, that it never had to be perfect to be good, and that, all and all, its flawed past is a story of a moral nation’s constant struggle for moral improvement.
One side will say, “Just give us more power and we will create heaven on earth.” The other says “Why would anyone wish to take their road to an Orwellian nightmare?” The 2020 election is that simple.
That simple, that critical.
Americans must choose to live, thrive, and soar into an ever more prosperous and splendid future.
Or to sink, Californicated, into socialism, stagnation, ignorance, poverty, crime and disease.
Go here to see a video of California now. All America soon (minus the fine climate)?
Warning: It is disgusting.