In the middle of the 20th century as traditional liberalism neared its zenith with President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” William F. Buckley said, “a conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop,’ at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
Today, history’s tide has turned. Clinging to a destructive 19th-century collectivist ideology of envy and misery—the Left cannot or will not accept it. This is an ironic dilemma for those on the Left who once thought the triumph of socialism was “scientific.”
Their solution? The Left now stands athwart history, yelling “cancel!”
Moreover, because those who will cancel your history will cancel your liberty, the Left is coercing and punishing those who refuse to abet their efforts. But as their socialist ideology has done time and again, the Left will fail.
We’re living in the midst of a communications revolution. From the palms of our hands or on our desktops, human beings are able to make our own decisions and express our views to extents undreamt in human history. Every second of every minute of every day, people are creating, expressing, scheduling, purchasing, and every other imaginable form of intra- and interpersonal activity in cyberspace. In sum, people exercise their exponentially increasing power to control their own destinies and pursue their own happiness.
Yet, the communications revolution has experienced an odd outcome. A solid majority of Americans believe that government is broken and must be fixed; and solid majorities of conservatives, independents, and liberals hold views they are afraid to express publicly. Consequently, at this historical moment when exponential increases in personal empowerment should be a cause for universal celebration, who is trying to control and silence the majority of Americans?
It is the Left that wants government to control your decisions by making them for you—your pursuit of happiness be damned. It is the Left that wants to tell you what you can and cannot say—the First Amendment be damned. In short, the Left wants to damn the tide of history.
But the tide of history will damn the Left.
Given the Left’s cultural echo chamber, it may appear as if history can be told. The wannabe totalitarian Left has spent decades insidiously infiltrating the cultural levers of power. While their elected power varies by election, what has only increased is the Left’s hold on relatively unaccountable positions within the government’s bureaucracy, media, academia, and corporate suites. This “long march through the institutions” has given the Left an enormously disproportionate power to demand and coerce history’s cessation.
Enthralled with their half-assed secular religion, which in reality constitutes a bargain bin mishmash of lowbrow Marxist cant like intersectionality and its identity politics, leftists are foisting cancel culture, government-mandated indoctrination and reeducation sessions, among other coercive measures aimed at controlling the actions and the thoughts of Americans. This mirrors evil regimes such as communist China, North Korea, and barbarous Iran that are doing their level worst to curtail and reverse the current revolution in human personal empowerment.
But it is this very need to coerce Americans that reveals the futility of the Left’s attempts to reverse the tide of history. The diurnal empowerment of people cannot and will not be stopped. With every stroke of a key, human agency is reinforced; people increasingly are free; and the Left and their global comrades are a day closer to eradication. Despite this trying, passing moment, heed the sweeping tide of history and take heart: the future is freedom.
Thus, while the Left stands athwart history, yelling “cancel!” rest assured. It is the Left that is going to fall on its ass in the ashcan of history.