Although we can look back with hindsight and see how this Long March Through Our Institutions has been infiltrating our schools and bureaucracies since the start of the Progressive Era, it’s almost as if we just woke up one day at the dawn of the twenty-first century and there they were; these weird pod-like people in charge of our entire education system. And we soon discovered also that they had changed the curriculum from the traditional Three R’s to pumping our kid’s heads full of hateful CRT and insane LBGQRTPX+ lies. Education had become indoctrination almost overnight.
This educational class has now become the wicked cleric officiating the wedding between an entrenched ruling class which lusts for power and a superrich corporate class which lusts for wealth. The goal of this unholy union is the consolidation of the levers of power to run the market machine in a way that it will dispense magnified power and riches to themselves at the expense of their business competitors and political opponents (psst, that is called fascism, y’all).
The really sick part of all this isn’t that politicians were corrupt or that some leading businessmen were avaricious. We’ve come to expect greed from them. Greed, understood as a form of irrational excess, should not be confused with rational self-interest which powers the market. What these greedy men crave is the power to control the market.
What horrifies and disturbs me most is that it was our teachers, the class of educators to whom we entrusted our kids with the exceedingly important specialty of transmitting the heritage and wisdom of our ancestors to emerging generations—have turned their backs on, and even trained their sights on that very store of knowledge. And they aim to do more than smear it, but to raze it to the ground like the library in Alexandria and erect a massive rainbow-colored unicorn in its place. We have always wanted to believe confidently that our teachers are a special people who love kids and love knowledge and feel a nearly-divine calling to raise our kids in wisdom. The Long March infiltrated their hearts and minds along the way and persuaded them through the unions to goose-step along with them. I have faith that many of them wish to return to the traditional ways when they see how well teachers are doing at the charters. The professoriate's postmodernity will be eventually exposed as nonsense and the world will rediscover the canon with the help of its remnant of loyalists.
It only takes a couple generations to deplete the civilizational competency the people hold in store together. If you deprive emerging generations of that cultural knowledge and distract them with bread and circuses, the millennia of institutional knowledge contained in our hallowed halls of wisdom will be all but forgotten within decades having never been taught what it is or why it’s important. And without a culture of people who value it, it has no defenders. The keep is left unguarded. It’s even easier to eliminate the wealth of knowledge if you somehow transform the image of it into an oppressive villain, because then you’ll be able to marshal all of the world’s alienated, agitated, resentful naredowells to your annihilating cause.
The hope for the preservation of western civ, perhaps, is to convince the wokesters who they think they are rebelling, that they are, in reality, just doing what the ruling class wants. It’s not a revolution and they aren’t freedom fighters. It’s a coup d’état and they’re useful idiots. They aren’t marching forward toward a twenty-first century, they’re rehearsing a thoroughly debunked nineteenth-century ideology which has wrought disaster wherever it has been tried. And once they see that, they may shed their stupid ways along with the scales from their eyes and they might just join the real rebellious counterculture which is trying to stand up to this new emerging tyrannical class and maintain the old culture and its institutions which have provided us such tremendous success, wide-spread wealth, liberty, and opportunity that we can afford to have an entire educational system run and taught by people who are quite venomous toward the very culture they’ve been tasked to transmit.
Fortunately, there are signs that the gig is up and that the world is wise to their game. Universities aren’t teaching and they’ve become expensive adventure parks more than schools. Parents have kicked up rumpuses at school board meetings. Everyone will remember how the teachers stood with the unions and this Covid hoax and barbarically forced outrageous restrictions upon our kids and stole a precious year of their childhood from them. Big Ed’s bubble is bursting. The charters are beating the public schools, and people are becoming fed up with the crippling debt and lack of knowledge that comes with the typical university degree. There are better alternatives at much lower prices elsewhere. The Long March might end with a long off a cliff.
There are only a few things that a healthy, vigorous competition can’t improve. Schools without competitors have no reason to improve, and testing shows that we are spending much more but getting far less achievement. Universities compete but remain uncompetitive so long as students and parents don’t truly grasp the debt it requires or the actual employment opportunities it bestows. They’re flooded with wealth today, but they are going to soon wonder if it was wise to turn traitorous on the western canon, teach all these gender and race studies to be perpetual parasites and ignite generations of roaring crybullies blinkered by ideology and who cannot get a good job because they have no real wisdom nor real-world skills.
Reagan feared that history may record that the people with the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Thomas Sowell predicts that historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how so many organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence. With the Left no longer able to scream and whine about Trump, and having nothing to cheer in Biden and Harris, the united chorus of the majority Right against these wicked pedagogies is being heard more loudly and clearly than ever. It still may merely be shouting into an irrepressible maelstrom, but they can’t confiscate all our guns or burn all our books.
I finish with Professor Kirk’s famous opening:
"If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite."
An excellent articulation of a rather depressing state of affairs.
Our hope lies in the fact that the revolutionaries always end up eating their own, that the Robespierres always end up with their heads in the same guillotines that they built for others. Nothing about Wokesterism is logically coherent and, eventually, the mutually exclusive premises upon which each leg of Intersectionality is constructed will become a casus belli ... Far Lefty civil war will ensue. The question is how much damage will be done to the culture and the country prior to this occurring?
To end on a positive note, I see many signs that the façade is collapsing. Most notably, the Silent Majority has, FINALLY, started to find its voice. The push back has begun and courage is contagious.
Quill