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 21st 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.
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