The Left's Next Demand: Demolish All 50s Diners

It takes a lot of courage for those who work in Academia to publish anything that contradicts liberal orthodoxy.  Two law professors recently demonstrated that courage.  Professor Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego made liberals’ heads explode when they published an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer last month titled “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture.”  The article argues that many of the country’s social and economic problems, including the opioid crisis, the epidemic of inner city violence, and low labor-force participation, stem from the breakdown of bourgeois culture. 

 

The authors define bourgeois culture as the set of ideas that reigned supreme from the late 1940s until the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s.  These ideas included getting married before having children, respecting authority and avoiding substance abuse and crime.  In other words, bourgeois culture encouraged personal responsibility; an idea the left finds quite repulsive.  The culture they have created in place of bourgeois culture seems to discourage personal responsibility.  “The pill” allows people to avoid taking responsibility for the consequences associated with sex while the entitlement culture created by the massive expansion of the welfare state allow people to make poor decisions without facing the social and economic consequences.  One need not worry about making a mistake since big daddy government would always bail them out.

 

The authors acknowledge the problems associated with the 1950s including “racial discrimination, limited sex roles and pockets of anti-Semitism.”  But the secular progressives decided that in order to eliminate those problems, you had to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Wax and Alexander pointed out that “steady improvements for women and minorities were underway even when bourgeois norms reigned. Banishing discrimination and expanding opportunity does not require the demise of bourgeois culture.”  Something tells me riots would break out if this dynamic duo received an invitation to speak at Berkeley.    

 

Perhaps the part of the op-ed that angered the left the most was the authors’ proclamation that “All cultures are not equal.”  That statement flies in the face of the cultural relativism that many on the left subscribe to.  Not surprisingly, it did not take long for the Penn Graduate Student Union to condemn Wax for writing the article, saying “The superiority of one race over others is not an academic debate we have in the 21^st century; it is racism masquerading as science.”  Professor Wax responded to their complaint by saying “Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people.  The irony is: Bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.”  Considering the astronomically high poverty and illegitimacy rates in the African-American community, would it really hurt for African-Americans to give bourgeois values a try?

 

In addition to condemnation from students, Professor Wax has also received condemnation from her colleagues.  33 of her more than 100 fellow law professors at the University of Pennsylvania Law School wrote a guest column in The Daily Pennsylvanian, the college’s newspaper, condemning the statements of their colleague.  Wax’s co-author Professor Alexander has yet to receive similar blowback from his colleagues.   

 

While it is certainly refreshing to find college professors who have not completely bought into the secular-progressive agenda hook, line and sinker, I would like to share some words from a few other culture warriors describing the breakdown of bourgeois culture.  In his recent book Old School: Life in the Sane Lane, Bill O’Reilly gives his account of the “stormy sixties.”  “The Old School belief system was getting hammered everywhere.  Bitterness, not patriotism, was the order of the day.  Restraint and moderation were laughed at.  Confusion reigned as country, church, and convention were all redefined in negative ways.”  Half a century later, the country still suffers from the harmful effects of abandoning the bourgeois culture.  As Lauren Southern points out in her book, Barbarians: How Baby Boomers, Immigrants and Islam Screwed My Generation, “Dismissing the guidance built for us over thousands and thousands of years in the form of gender roles, traditional lifestyles, hard work, objectivity, and cultural supremacy was, in fact, painfully stupid.  Because really, what have we got to show for it?  Nothing but infinite license to put who and what we want in our bodies, while our freedoms to speak, to think, to dream, and to build get more limited every day.”

 

With the demise of the bourgeois culture came the ascent of the thought police.  Serving as the gatekeepers of the cosmopolitan culture that has come to define post-1960s America, this self-appointed group of snowflakes tries to silence those who express any desire to give bourgeois values a fair hearing in the marketplace of ideas.  The mainstream media serves as their willing accomplice.  Unfortunately, this unholy alliance sometimes succeeds in their mission to shut up conservative or right-leaning speakers.  UC Berkeley has had to cancel events hosted by Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos due to fear of violence breaking out.  Knowing nobody wants a repeat of what happened at Berkeley in February, the thought police will continue to use the threat of violence as leverage to ensure that advocates of bourgeois culture will fail to get their message across.  The Berkeley College Republicans issued a statement on Facebook, saying “It is tragic that the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement is also its final resting place.”         

 

As liberals continue their nationwide crusade to either topple Confederate statues or cover them up with burqas, one can’t help but wonder if they will eventually start targeting anything and everything that pays homage to the time before “the Enlightenment” of the 1960s.  That has already happened at the University of Virginia, where a group of students covered a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the university who wrote the Declaration of Independence and served as the third President of the United States, with a tarp.  Should 50s diners start worrying that the left will come after them next? After all, they make money celebrating the “racist and misogynistic” culture of the 1950s.  Considering the hysteria that has come to define the modern left, it would not come as a surprise if 50s diners became their next target.        

 

Professors Wax and Alexander conclude their thought-provoking op-ed by saying “Restoring the hegemony of the bourgeois culture will require the arbiters of culture – the academics, media, and Hollywood – to relinquish multicultural grievance polemics and the preening pretense of defending the downtrodden.”  As of right now, I do not see that happening.  Today’s arbiters of culture lean overwhelmingly to the left thanks to the “long march through the institutions” that took place in the 1960s. The resurgence of bourgeois culture can only come about if conservatives engineer a similar “long march through the institutions.”  Many Americans on the political right simply lack the will to do this.  As long as the bourgeois culture fails to regain traction in the United States of America, the social and economic problems mentioned at the beginning of Wax and Alexander’s op-ed will continue to plague our great country.