PROGRESSIVISM, WHERE TIME STANDS STILL: Benjamin Kerstein: We have met the pigs… In the 1960s and 1970s, a totalitarian movement almost destroyed the republic. Now it threatens to do so again.

Put simply, the professoriate regime is the 1960s New Left. That is, it is the New Left in its decadent and hopefully final form as an institutionalized totalitarian movement. It has now collapsed into the antisemitism that appears to be the endgame of almost all totalitarian movements. It has decimated its enemies within the institutions it controls and, as a result, has found a new and ultimate enemy. It has finally arrived where it was always going: the Elders of Zion.

Like all things, this is illustrated by the fact that none of this is new. Even a brief examination of an unbiased historical account of the late 1960s proves as much.

II.

One of the best of these histories is Theodore H. White’s extraordinary The Making of the President 1968, which chronicles the tumultuous presidential election that witnessed the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the escalating Vietnam War, the devastating Chicago New Left riots that shattered the Democratic party and the New Deal consensus, and ultimately, Richard Nixon’s victory.

White’s book is of immense value for two reasons: First, he was a brilliant writer with a gift for pithy insight and revelatory aphorism. Second, he wrote before the professoriate regime conquered and colonized academia and American intellectual life. As a result, he did not attempt to rewrite history in the New Left’s favor.

The professoriate regime that now controls the writing of that history has long since whitewashed and falsified the history of the New Left. However, it has yet to completely burn all the books that bear witness to what really happened. Consequently, White remains to tell us something like the truth.

In doing so, White provides conclusive proof that none of this is new. The monstrous crimes we witness on US campuses today were occurring decades ago, and the ideology that “justifies” them already existed in full. It was partially institutionalized at that time and is now completely institutionalized, yet it remains unchanged.

A single passage in White’s book provides conclusive proof of this. It details the rhetorical strategies and underlying ideology of the 1960s New Left students’ movement, which had already laid out and made public its stunningly successful plan to conquer and colonize the universities. Not all members of the student movement were totalitarians, but the totalitarians eventually emerged victorious in the struggle for leadership, with devastating consequences.

White is ruthless in his deconstruction of the movement. He does so in a lengthy excerpt that cannot be truncated without damaging its insights. I reproduce it in full below:

I don’t want to quote the whole passage by White for Fair Use reasons, but note this:

In this new rhetoric, normal contradictions of thought vanish. Thus, the old virtues of tolerance and free speech becomes repressive tolerance, a sinister effort by the establishment to smother the truth by indulgence; this, apparently, justifies the denial of free speech to those who disagree. To steal, seize or destroy offices or files becomes to liberate. The old Marxist adverbial phrase objectively speaking becomes, in the new rhetoric, a transitional phrase to any statement that cannot be factually proven; when a speaker begins a paragraph with objectively speaking, it means that any construct of the imagination he thinks should be true is indeed so. The word non-violence is turned inside out. If what can be won by the massing of bodies, the occupation of buildings, shoving, and the use of brawn is yielded immediately, it proves the validity of non-violence. (Stone-and-bottle-throwing can be classed, in this vocabulary, as non-violent.) If the non-violent aggressors are resisted, then those who resist are styled violent and brutal. Eric Sevareid [a prominent television news reporter] was recently reminded, in one of his broadcasts, of his European experience: “They [the student activists] have the same approach, ” he said, “as the early Nazis and early Communists. ‘We are right,’ they say, ‘we are progress. If you resist us, or defend yourself, you are the instigators of violence.’ ”

If this infamous Orwellian moment from CNN in August of 2020 took you by surprise, it shouldn’t have; it was totally predicted by the worldview of the ’60s New Left, which as Kerstein writes, has burrowed deeply into 21st century academia:

At American Greatness, Roger Kimball explores: The Politicized Mind: How the University Lost Its Way.

As Kerstein writes at the first link, it lost its way a long time ago indeed.