SOME LESSONS FROM THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION:
More than 70 years ago, George Orwell explored the intention behind the dystopian determination to deprive the individual of his true self. Emptied of all his former ideals, meanings, and priorities, he would become an empty vessel for totalitarian dogmas: “You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
Intellectual subversives have left American youth with no ideal that cannot be dismantled. And the young are angry—at their parents, who failed to empower them with deeply rooted values; at their semiliterate and confused school teachers, who beg for respect and try to win it by teaching children to respect nothing; at their college professors who, having forsaken their commitment to education, assist political efforts “for a peaceful and just society.” Professors fail to provide knowledge or to teach critical thinking; instead, they urge students to scorn outmoded beliefs and send them off to adult life with a farewell message that life is meaningless. Losers—in a morphological sense of the word, for they are as lost as have been their “dislocated” peers in the past—the young are famished for new principles to fill the yawning hollowness. They are perfect material for political demagogues.
“A sacred place cannot be empty,” affirms a Russian proverb. To the new “progressive” creed the rebels must hold on for dear life: Aside for allowing them to redirect their accumulated anger toward newly defined enemies, it offers a brand-new core identity, an illusion of values, and a sense of belonging. Revolutionary activity is highly addictive, and unlike other narcotics, the perpetual pursuit of visionary ideals provides a never-ending sense of exhilaration, backed by the promise of an impending grand triumph.
Meanwhile, Matt Taibbi explores The Sovietization of the American Press:
We now know in advance that every Biden address will be reviewed as historic and exceptional. It was only a mild shock to see Chris Wallace say Biden’s was the “the best inaugural address I have ever heard.” More predictable was Politico saying of Thursday night’s address that “it is hard to imagine any other contemporary politician making the speech Biden did… channeling our collective sorrow and reminding us that there is life after grief.” (Really? Hard to imagine any contemporary politician doing that?).
This stuff is relatively harmless. Where it gets weird is that the move to turn the bulk of the corporate press in the “moral clarity” era into a single party organ has come accompanied by purges of the politically unfit. In the seemingly endless parade of in-house investigations of journalists, paper after paper has borrowed from the Soviet style of printing judgments and self-denunciations, without explaining the actual crimes.
The New York Times coverage of the recent staff revolt at Teen Vogue against editor Alexi McCammond noted “Staff Members Condemn Editor’s Decade-Old, Racist Tweets,” but declined to actually publish the offending texts, so readers might judge for themselves. The Daily Beast expose on Times reporter Donald McNeil did much the same thing. Even the ongoing (and in my mind, ridiculous) moral panic over Substack ties in. Aimed at people already banished from mainstream media, the obvious message is that anyone with even mildly heterodox opinions shouldn’t be publishing anywhere.
Those still clinging to mainstream jobs in a business that continues to lay people off at an extraordinary rate read the gist of all of these stories clearly: if you want to keep picking up a check, you’d better talk the right talk.
Thus you see bizarre transformations like that of David Brooks, who spent his career penning paeans to “personal responsibility” and the “culture of thrift,” but is now writing stories about how “Joe Biden is a transformational president” for casting aside fiscal restraints in the massive Covid-19 bill. When explaining that “both parties are adjusting to the new paradigm,” he’s really explaining his own transformation, in a piece that reads like a political confession. “I’m worried about a world in which we spend borrowed money with abandon,” he says, but “income inequality, widespread child poverty, and economic precarity are the problems of our time.”
Maybe Brooks is experiencing the same “evolution” Biden is being credited with of late. Or, he’s like a lot of people in the press who are searching out the safest places on the op-ed page, the middle of the newsroom middle, in desperate efforts to stay on the masthead. It’s been made clear that there’s no such thing as overdoing it in one direction, e.g. if you write as the Times did that Biden “has become a steady hand who chooses words with extraordinary restraint” (which even those who like and admire Biden must grasp is not remotely true of the legendary loose cannon). Meanwhile, how many open critics of the Party on the left, the right, or anywhere in between still have traditional media jobs?
Having seen centrist liberals like Bari Weiss and Donald McNeil utterly defenestrated by their now-former colleagues at the Times, no wonder Brooks is toeing the party line. And/or he simply likes the tailoring on Biden’s trousers.