If one grand cluster of questions now surrounds American institutions, another grand cluster surrounds America’s ideas. The latter grows out of the way a succession of ideas, theories, and ideologies passes through America, capturing the national imagination for a time and stamping its imprint on freedom. I have argued that America’s fractious and rancorous politics is the outward symptom of the conflict of ideas at the heart of American culture—the tale of two revolutions, 1776 and 1789.
That claim about the power of ideas needs qualifying, because the power of the systems and structures of modernity has an enormous impact on thinking and is sometimes as great as the power of any ideas. American consumerism is an obvious example, as “having it all” and the “life with goods” has completely eclipsed any notion of the good life. Connectivity is another example. Farsighted thinkers such as Jacques Ellul have long argued that technology and technique are the most important philosophy of our times. High-tech connectivity is only one small part of technique, but it is as influential in the current global world as any modern faith or philosophy. It means, for instance, that the city of London and its elites are far closer to Wall Street and its elites than London is to Birmingham or Wall Street is to Harlem and the Bronx, not only professionally but philosophically—a powerful reinforcement of modern elitism. Yet that is nothing compared with the future potential of the connectivity of the grand “Internet of All Things,” which is predicted to connect not only all humans but all animals and all nature. “Eventually,” one writer muses, “we may reach a point where it will be impossible to disconnect from this all-knowing network even for a moment. Disconnection will mean death.”1
But only a fool would go to the other extreme and underestimate the power of ideas and their impact on freedom for good or ill. “Ideas have consequences,”2 as Richard Weaver wrote, and that is especially the case when those ideas become dominant in elite institutions such as the universities, the press and media, and the world of entertainment. For then they become the ruling philosophy of the educators of the coming generations. And all the more so when in their extreme form they are funded by multibillionaires on the left or the right, and promoted through radical tactics, such as those of Saul Alinsky. It is at that point that today’s clash between the heirs and allies of 1776 and the heirs and allies of 1789 becomes clearest and most consequential.
It is naive to think that bad ideas die when the movements that carry them are defeated. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union may each have bit the dust after World War II and the Cold War, but the seeds of their bad ideas live on, and they may sprout again at any time—as we are seeing with Nazism, communism, and the evil of anti-Semitism today. It also goes without saying that there is a vital difference between disagreeing with ideas and public policies and disrespecting the people who hold those ideas or find themselves caught in them.
My concern here is American freedom, and for the sake of freedom, we must be prepared to identify and challenge many questionable ideas. But at the same time we must always respect the human dignity of those who hold the ideas and have sympathy when the ideas harm their lives. There may be people who are caught up in the movements surrounding them, often despite themselves, and we must have nothing but the utmost respect and compassion in engaging with them—for example, immigrants and refugees caught in the toils of controversies over multiculturalism, or the victims of the gender revolution who are faced with mounting temptations to loneliness and suicide. Challenging an idea does not mean disrespect for the person who holds the idea. Respect for the person, always. Acceptance of bad ideas, never.
After 1776, when the genius of the Sinai covenant had blended with the “ancient liberties of the English,” the first new philosophy to come forward as a suitor to American freedom was indeed 1789, the French Revolution and a broad constellation of its Enlightenment ideas. For a while, Paris and its thinkers captured the heart and mind of Thomas Jefferson, but fortunately Edmund Burke in England and the majority of the American founders did not follow the Sage of Monticello. And as we saw earlier, their judgment proved wiser than his. The character and consequences of America’s freedom were quite different from those of France, the French Revolution, and the Continental Enlightenment.
One lesson from those early days still applies now: Contrast is the mother of clarity. As free thinking people, Americans should always be open-minded, but for those who understand the uniqueness of their own revolution (never forgetting its blind spots), there is no natural affinity with philosophies that may look appealing but in the end lead to the poisoning of republican freedom.
Over the course of the last century, a number of such philosophies have come forward to present their credentials and offer themselves as indispensable to the American experiment. Many of them contributed some good points, and they were often a needed correction to the status quo of the day. But most of them were eventually seen to be rooted in the tradition of 1789, and while attractive for a time, their shortcomings became apparent in the end. (With the more recent debates, that grand assessment is still underway.) The challenge is therefore the same today as in the past. For all the promise each philosophy offers, Americans always have to ask whether the philosophies in question truly respect and augment America’s distinctive freedom, or whether their promise is deceptive and the existing resources of the republic are more than adequate to face the challenges raised. Here, then, is the tenth and final question on the checklist: Are Americans vigilant about guarding the ideas that are crucial to freedom? Every generation of citizens must ask and keep answering such questions if the American experiment is to continue and continue well.
Beyond the major philosophies shaping America today are two sets of philosophies that should be identified for discussion, but for the moment have less impact. On one side are the superprimitivists (or self-professed anarchoprimitivists), such as John Zerzan and his allies, those who hope to dismantle civilization and return to the harmony of the hunter-gatherer world before the rise of agriculture and technology. These ideas are prominent in the movements protesting globalization. On the other side are the superprogressives, such as Ray Kurzweil, who eagerly press in the entirely opposite direction, toward the world of superintelligence, singularity, and transhumanism. The former can be seen and heard in the antiglobalism protests. They represent the brakes on civilization. The latter, by contrast, are the accelerator. But they both agree in openly rejecting the philosophy and attitudes of 1776. In a forward-thrusting country such as the United States, the superprogressives are obviously more in tune with the times than the superprimitivists, and will appeal more widely, though for the moment neither is a major shaper of current American thinking. My focus will be on four philosophies that are currently more influential.
The first such philosophy in the last century was multiculturalism, with its three later variants, identity politics, victim politics, and tribalism. Beginning with Horace Kallen and his 1905 article “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” the then-new philosophy of cultural pluralism was an important reaction to the hyperindividualism of the late nineteenth century and the tacit coercions of the melting pot as they were argued by Israel Zangwill and demonstrated in melting pot pageants in the early twentieth century. Kallen charged that a key part of the idea of the melting pot was simply wrong. Ethnicity was indelible and unmeltable. No one can change their ethnicity. (“Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent; they cannot change their grandfathers.”3) The United States should be seen as a union of nationalities, cultures, and groups working together through common institutions.
Leading liberal voices, such as John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, opposed this new idea at the outset, and it was hardly congenial in the xenophobic climate after World War I. Later, it was equally contradictory to the core tenet of Martin Luther King Jr. and the early civil rights movement: People should be judged by the content of their character, and not by the color of their skin. So the idea languished until the 1970s when a new wave of immigration hit much of the Western world, and multiculturalism was hailed as the new, best way of negotiating the exploding diversity of the modern world. Indeed, multiculturalism was seen as the old ideal of seventeenth-century tolerance now dressed in more fashionable seventies language.
The results of multiculturalism have been disastrous for the West and for the American republic. We humans are social, so there is always a collective dimension to our lives. It is essential to us that we are members of families and many other groups and associations. But the overall impact of multiculturalism has been blunt, lopsided, and damaging in two ways. First, the stress on group identity has meant a diminished respect for the dignity and worth of the individual person, regardless of the group they belong to, and therefore a diminishing of the importance of individual human rights. Needless to say, other modern factors compound this problem—supremely the impact of big data. In a digital economy, we are all crunched into numbers and put into groups, analyzed by data scientists, passed around by data brokers, and microtargeted by businesses and political campaigns. As the mathematical modelers see us, we are only numbers, not individuals. We are “batched, bucketed, and bundled,” defined by our zip codes, our e-scores and credit ratings, and all the other externals of the “birds of a feather” flock the computers find that we fly with. In short, we are subjected to algorithmic profiling and assigned to new behavioral tribes. With big data, of course, the dehumanization is unwitting and often hidden, but with multiculturalism it is deliberate.
In addition, multiculturalism has upset any pretense at balancing three foundational tensions that are critical to the American experiment and to any free society. First, there must be a balance between unity and diversity, universality and particularity, commonality and differences. Second, there must be a balance between kinship and consent, the former being citizenship that comes through birth and descent, and the latter being citizenship that comes through belief and assent, as with an immigrant to the United States. And third, there must be a balance between the American unum and the American pluribus. In a free society there should of course be an emphasis on universality, commonality, the good of all, and the reciprocal responsibility of all for all—simply because of our common humanity and the solidarity of the American Constitution. All humans are free, in contrast to all animals and all machines. At the same time, there should be an equal emphasis on individuality and diversity, because our differences make us individuals, our differences give us our identity, and our differences make our societies diverse. Multiculturalism as a social policy betrays these needed balances, and particularly the dignity of difference. For all its vaunted claims about diversity, it quickly degenerates into an imposed uniformity that is the enemy of genuine diversity as well as true individuality.
These two initial outcomes are pernicious to freedom, even before the rise of identity politics, and the poison spreads from there. All citizens are now viewed, polled, analyzed, and treated as members of groups rather than as individuals. All Americans are tribal now. But then, the postmodern assumption of relativism is added to the mix of groups, giving rise to the notion of different truths for different tribes—feminist truths, black truths, homosexual truths, Hispanic truths, millennial truths, Left and Right truths, Fox truths, CNN and MSNBC truths, and the like. Each group sees the world its own way, lives in its own world and wants its own perspectives confirmed, so each is automatically suspicious of the perspectives of others. Next, the original notion of ethnic groups has been further subdivided, and the tribes now include age cohorts (boomers and millennials) and people of different sexual orientation (gays and straights). Then crucially, with both persuasion and civility discarded as unrealistic, identity becomes its own reason and its own justification. And last, the experience and legacies of victimhood have also been stirred in, and the result is today’s American variation on Orwell’s Animal Farm. All tribes are equal, but formerly oppressed tribes are more equal than others.
The outcome of all these trends is disastrous for America’s identity and unity as a nation. Throughout Western history, it is plain that that factionalism, tribalism, and sectarianism are common responses to the perceived failure of politics and public life. That is certainly true of America after the Watergate crisis, though other factors have been added to the multicultural mix. The old notions of melting and assimilation have been thrown out as coercive, and there is no longer any national, core, or mainstream identity for anyone to be assimilated into. In the jargon of today, talk of the melting pot is aggression against immigrants. But along with the melting pot, out went any recognition of the need for American identity and American unity, and therefore for proper integration and Americanization. Instead, people from different cultures were encouraged to go their own way, with little or no understanding of how they should relate to their host country or to each other, and with no necessary loyalty to anyone apart from themselves and their group. The result became the fever of identity politics, then victim politics, and most recently open door immigration politics (which in the present situation is tantamount to forced multiculturalism).
There are three distinct but closely related Ps at work in these trends. If pluralization was the underlying process, and relativism was its accompanying philosophy, then multiculturalism has been the political and social policy of choice in response. The outcome has been not so much Samuel Huntington’s macroproblem of “civilizations in conflict” (the West versus the rest) as the microproblem of “cultures in conflict” (the West versus itself). For the Dutch, the English, the French, and the Swedish, the results of multiculturalism and identity politics were quickly disastrous and led to tension, conflict, and open violence. Multiculturalism and its follies were behind the banlieues and terrorist attacks in Paris, the no-go zones in the north of England, the murder of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, the 7/7 bombers on the London Underground, and the crime and riots in “dish cities” (with their sprouting satellite antennae keeping them in touch with propaganda from their countries of origin), such as Rinkeby and Rosengard in Sweden.
For a long time, the result of such cultures in conflict was less dramatic for America. But the earlier contrast with Europe disguised the fact that multiculturalism was deadly for the United States in terms of national character, democratic institutions, social stability, and sovereignty—and deadly for the character of American liberalism. This last point is often overlooked, because liberals presently tend to espouse multiculturalism without a thought, when in fact its implications can be highly illiberal.
Standing Martin Luther King Jr. on his head, multiculturalism and identity politics see everyone as a members of groups and classify them according to their age, the color of their skin, or the choice of their lifestyles—whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, straights, gays, lesbians, boomers, millennials, and so on. There lies the fatal flaw of multiculturalism for a true liberal. It fails to do justice to the dignity of the individual person and the dignity of difference that makes up the diversity of society.
At the heart of true liberalism there is an eye for the identity and freedom of each individual person and the content of their character, regardless of their membership of any group or tribe. For the true liberal, each individual person is absolutely unique, and each has their own special worth. The individual may be only one member of a far larger group or tribe. Such a person may be replaceable in a task force and can be substituted in a sports team, but each person is irreplaceable and unsubstitutable in their individuality. That is the heart of genuine liberalism and of its concern for individual freedom. The Jewish sages expressed this truth in an unforgettable way: “When a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out alike. God makes every human being in the same image, His image, and they are all different.”
The damaging impact of multiculturalism on American identity and unity is more obvious. The fatal blend of multiculturalism, identity politics, victim politics, tribalism, and open door immigration has led to a brazen contradiction of America’s original motto and enduring challenge. Under the influence of multiculturalism and identity politics, America has become all pluribus with little or no unum, and a hurt and angry pluribus at that. The outcome is that America’s sense of shared identity started to fray in the sixties, and has been fraying ever since. With the notion of the melting pot scorned, with civic education abandoned, and with a de facto open border policy in place, there was no unity and no clear national identity to balance the diversity. Indeed, notions such as sovereignty, unity, and identity were themselves viewed as coercive or white colonialism, and therefore to be rejected. Newcomers no longer needed to adapt to their new country or even to gain a legal standing if it was difficult. The country needed to adapt to them, and sanctuary cities were opened.
In sum, with the American founding already under a cloud, the result has been fateful: Immigration is now more decisive for America than the Revolution, and the republic of the founders is assaulted from yet another side. Lenin’s “Who? Whom?” applies to immigration too. Without civic education to balance immigration, America faces the question: Who is assimilating whom?
Multiculturalism advances hand in hand with identity politics and victim politics. With America’s growing inequalities addressed clumsily, grievances have festered, factionalism has deepened, and group after group now claims its place in the sun as more victimized than thou, citing ancient injustices to justify present conflicts. Not surprisingly, the uniting symbols of the country came under suspicion. The result was that what the British could not do at Fort McHenry in 1812, multiculturalism, identity politics, victim politics, and certain political activists have succeeded in doing. And this time, the Stars and Stripes has not emerged from the night of battle unscathed. As the “kneeing crisis” in the National Football League showed, Old Glory no longer speaks for all Americans as a uniting symbol and a “promissory note” that waves above the fray and beckons across the chasms.
Woe betide the day if the Stars and Stripes descends further still and is viewed in the same way as the Confederate flag. There is no question that identity politics from one side and globalism from another side have together begun to erode American identity and unity. Certain politicians and journalists dismiss talk of sovereignty and identity as “dog whistles” for racism, and those who object find themselves attacked as racists, bigots, misogynists, xenophobes, and white supremacists. Yet with no Abraham Lincoln to speak for the better angels of the American experiment, all the talk of the wall on one side and sanctuary cities on the other side simply avoids the core question of American identity, unity, and the vital issue of transmitting American ideals and principles to future generations.
In short, multiculturalism, identity politics, victim politics, and tribalism are relentlessly driving nails into the coffin of the founders’ republic, and there are fewer and fewer Americans who seem to know how things have gone so wrong and what to do about it. Neither a border wall nor sanctuary cities touch on the core of the real problem. Once there was an American unum to balance the American pluribus. Once there was a prizing of the individual that counterbalanced the significance of the group. No more. But the fact is that a passion for American unity and identity must always partner with a passion for true individuality and genuine diversity if 1776 is not to give way to 1789 with disastrous consequences for freedom.
A second philosophy to beguile Americans is political correctness. “Fake news” is the current concern, though the shift in reporting news is far from new. R. G. Collingwood, the Oxford philosopher, complained that the Daily Mail had led the way in shifting from “news that responsible readers ought to know” to “news that might amuse its readers to know.”4 But political correctness is far deadlier than that. The term can be traced back to 1930s communism, but its roots go back to the French Revolution and the notion that controlling language is the way to control people. More recently, it owes much to Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, and his use of Niccolò Machiavelli and the power politics of The Prince. Thus the term political correctness is the natural expression of post-truth politics, where everything is reduced to power, and controlling language is made the key to mastery or cultural hegemony. The term PC describes the way a ruling elite, “the modern Prince,” attempts to exert its power and advance its cause by using language to prioritize the interests of the movement over reality itself. As it develops, political correctness becomes party-line thinking that both closes down other ways of thinking and dictates how people should think and express themselves.
George Orwell recognized that all revolutions start with control of language, and he introduced the term Newspeak as part of his attack on totalitarianism in 1984 (tellingly barred in China). Reality is “regime-defined reality,” and it may change from day to day. But for all these radical roots, PC also entered recent Western conversation in a far less threatening way. When the Jewish and Christian consensus held sway in the English-speaking world, there was an unspoken etiquette, a courtesy, and a civility that characterized the general way of speaking, at least for most people and in public. Not only did this consensus erode and collapse in the 1950s and 1960s, it was assaulted and overthrown as being the dead hand of tradition and yet another instrument of repression.
On the one hand, the collapse of the old consensus led to an eruption of the “rude, the crude, and the lewd” as natural and necessary expressions of freedom. Locker-room language became living-room language, the F-word became commonplace, tedious, and meaningless, and slogans arose, such as “Violence is the voice of the voiceless, and the cry of the silenced.”
On the other hand, the collapse of the traditional consensus led to a counterbalancing sensitivity movement that insisted there should still be certain ways of speaking with respect for people’s dignity, and certain ways that were wrong and insensitive. Sin was out, and evil was dismissed as judgmental. But categories such as racism, sexism, and ageism were used to replace sin as the egregious evils of the day that still needed confronting. The trouble was that this laudable attempt to create sensitive public speech was hijacked politically, not by communists but by liberals, progressives, and activists on the left. First, they used their ideological assumptions to define the only acceptable way of seeing things. Then they wielded their political interests in language that defied reality itself, with the result that the Left/liberals pulled off their own version of the earlier communist fallacy (“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.” “Yes, comrade, it is. But is it politically correct?”).5
The results have been disastrous. Words intended to describe reality have been subverted in order to express power and to cast their spell over independent thinking. Political correctness has become a deranged dictator as language has been mustered and manipulated to devalue, marginalize, and silence opposing views of truth and reality. The rich dimensions of disagreement have been reduced to a single approach—full-throated, implacable hostility. America and the Western world are still living with the consequences—speech codes, censorship, charges of microaggression, silencing, no-platforming, thought police, shaming, cyberbullying, and division after embittered division. Hate-speech laws are nothing less than a posthumous triumph for the censorship of Joseph Stalin and a slavish mimicry of the unfreedom of Islamist blasphemy laws. For the architects and enforcers of the hate-speech laws have caved in to the very menaces to freedom so magnificently resisted by Eleanor Roosevelt at the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and then at the later International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Nothing demonstrates more clearly how classical liberalism morphed into Left/liberal ideologies, and in the process has decisively abandoned 1776 for 1789.
Anyone disputing this claim has only to read Herbert Marcuse’s influential 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance” and his footnote in 1968, the year that was America’s annus calamitosus. Critiquing the Western liberal idea of tolerance as oppressive, he openly argued for a “discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction.” That meant simply “intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes and opinions and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.” Or, as he spelled it out, he favored tolerance toward minorities that are “intolerant, militantly intolerant and disobedient to the rules of behavior.” Fifty years later, Marcuse’s wish has been fulfilled and his selective intolerance has gone mainstream in the worlds of higher education, the press, and entertainment. His “inversion” is complete. The “intolerance of the tolerant” is the new orthodoxy, and his baldly stated goal has succeeded faster than he could have imagined. “Liberating tolerance, then,” he stated with a shameless candor, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”6
The day-to-day problems of PC at the ordinary level could be listed interminably. But the overall damage to American freedom, American education, and the Western mind is incalculable—the body blow to truth, civility, and persuasion; the muting of free speech; the stifling of dissent and alternative opinion; the muzzling of conscientious objection; the discouragement of civil disobedience; the hypocritical turning against the faiths of the West while turning a blind eye to itself; and the general poisoning of liberal democracy and free and open education at all levels. Imposing their own definitions, often through the diktats of courts and university administrations, and rarely allowing any opposing argument, progressives and the Left have used political correctness to enforce their ideas and to create whole categories of people that Hillary Clinton disdained as “deplorables,” the so-called clueless 95 percent who are therefore ruled out of the discussion by definition. The fact is that many of these dissenting voices are highly educated, respectful, well-reasoned, articulate, and strongly ethical. No matter. By definition, they are instantly and automatically excluded from the conversation and branded as racist, sexist, homophobic, or victims of false consciousness simply because they disagree with what some elite has decided is the politically correct position.
So much for Thomas Jefferson’s “Truth is great and shall prevail.” And so much for the time-honored Jewish and Christian understanding that lies behind Mr. Jefferson—that both truth and justice, and therefore debates, education, and law courts, require a proper hearing and due process. A hearing means that there are at least two sides to every issue, and one or other should prevail only after both have been heard and heard fairly. That is what political correctness denies, and that is why political correctness is so dangerous and so illiberal for the American republic and for the American universities. If it triumphs finally, it will mean the complete closing of the American mind. Already, far too many diverse voices have been silenced this way, their participation in debates conspicuous by their absence, their books never reviewed, and their ideas shouted down. The immediate loser is American political discourse. But when power replaces truth and a sneer replaces the seminar, the worst and most lasting damage is the catastrophic impact on American higher education, on American thinking at large, and above all on American freedom.
John Etchemendy, the former provost of Stanford University, is among the courageous voices warning of the dangers of politically correct intellectual blindness in the university. In a speech to his board of trustees, he said he was more worried by threats from within the universities than without.
Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country . . . a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for. It manifests itself in many ways: in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines; in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups whose views we find offensive; in constant calls for the university itself to take political stands. We decry certain news outlets as echo chambers, while we fail to notice the echo chamber we have built around ourselves.7
“Political correctness is neither,” it is said, and the reach of PC goes well beyond the purely political. In the Anglo-American-university world, political correctness represents a quadruple triumph—the triumph of identity politics (“I am in pain. Pay attention and validate me, or face the consequences of my justified rage”), the triumph of the therapeutic (to safeguard the purportedly vulnerable and assuage the injuries of cultural trauma), the triumph of the litigious (and aversion to risk), and the triumph of emotionalism (Rousseau’s feelings and the world of “Likes” again).
Specific results are often absurd and even comic—the banning of the word brainwashing, for example, because it might offend those who suffer from epilepsy. The charge of microaggression indicts people not for what they have actually said or done, but for what they are thought to have intended in what they said or did. In other words, the indictment is in the eyes of the beholder, and the accused are presumed guilty and cannot be proved innocent. Yet what matters are the overall results that are disastrous for freedom and academic freedom: the rise of a new paternalism, the deification of safety, the infantilization of students who cannot be trusted with daring ideas and tough-minded debate, the new intolerance, the recycling of victimization, and the ironic rise of a new form of censorship, self-imposed and from below.8
Colleges and universities have been rightly described as the finishing schools of the modern world, but in its PC form American higher education no longer represents a schooling in freedom or even aims to be the vital seedbed for the American republic. An article in the Harvard Crimson set out its position brazenly in its title: “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom: Let’s Give Up on Academic Freedom in Favor of Justice.”9 Devotees of political correctness often deny the PC label and claim they are merely being sensitive, aware, responsible, and morally attuned—for example, in their defense of the demand for trigger warnings. But social psychologist Jonathan Haidt aptly points up the dilemma that the PC movement raises for the universities: Is their mission to be a “Truth University” or a “Social Justice University”?10
There is a major but often unnoticed effect of such political correctness. It is doubly illiberal not only in silencing free speech but in undermining personal dignity. Human dignity is devalued when attackers use theoretical categories to reduce individuals to isms and then wipe them out with a single charge. This happens when people resort to the well-stocked armory of today’s ready-made labels. Their opponents are racists, sexists, or homophobes, often simply by definition because they disagree with them. Such attacks encourage laziness, because the attacker need think no more and need waste no more time on argument. But they are also a violation of human dignity, because the person is eliminated even before given the chance of a hearing.
To argue is to give voice and to reason, and to reason is to negotiate, but labeling obliterates the individual through the power of the ism. Such is the agenda and thought style of PC Newspeak that there must be no compromise and no concession. The accused so labeled is automatically beyond the pale, because the label has built the pale. Whether the person is now a deplorable, a reactionary, or an unfortunate victim of false consciousness because of race, gender, or age, they are simply not worth the effort of conversation. Thus the people who claim to give “a voice to the voiceless” end in reducing individuals to isms and silencing all voices not their own.
The truth is that political correctness and the truly liberal American republic cannot coexist for much longer. The illiberal liberalism of the Left has been so extreme that the American mind is gasping for air. A generation of political correctness has choked its free inquiry, its freedom of expression, and even its ability to think freely. For the purposes of discussing freedom, the conclusion is inescapable: Political correctness is a blot on the record on the liberal Left and a calamity for the American republic. But make no mistake: It must be said plainly that the Jacobin and brown-shirted tactics of political correctness are the child of 1789 and not of 1776. To paraphrase both Lincoln and Wycliffe, political correctness has become the governing style of the elites, by the elites, for the elites. Nothing could be further from Mount Sinai, 1776, John Milton, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, and America’s noble experiment in freedom and free thinking.
A third philosophy with potentially dire implications for freedom is social constructionism, a set of ideas that is the natural extension of secularism and postmodernism, with their bald insistence that God is dead, truth is dead, and knowledge is power. Social constructionism as a theory is rarely encountered at the popular level, though its consequences are strongly felt there too. Once again its origins are commendable, for it is vital to be able to understand how our ideas and the way we think are shaped by our social context—by the worlds in which we live, and not only by other thinkers. Such an understanding is essential to living an “examined life” and a “good life.” But there is a fully responsible version of the theory, led by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, and there is a far more radical version. The former analyzes “what passes for knowledge” in a social setting and then hands over that analysis to the discipline of philosophy. It is the task of philosophy to decide whether or not what passes for knowledge is in fact true.
The more radical and dangerous version claims that there is no objective reality or external truth at all. In their view, everything without any exception is socially constructed and can therefore be constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed at will. The web of meaning may be compelling for a while—“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” for example—but the meaning exists solely in the common imagination. In a word, it is a fiction, and when it unravels, later generations are amazed that anyone could have believed it. According to this view, the world may be divided between different religions and different ideologies, but Islam and Buddhism, capitalism and communism, all share the same hollow status: they are “shared fictions” and nothing more.
This radical form of constructionism is unmistakable in the “battle of the binaries.” “Male” and “female” are seen as entirely social constructions, mere conventions and not biological realities, so they are there to be re-engineered at will. Plainly, the sexual revolution thrives on this, especially as it flowers in the limitless freedom of the internet underworld. (Rule 38 of the 47 Rules of the Internet: “No real limits of any kind apply here—not even the sky”; Rule 42: “Nothing is sacred.”)11 Fueled by this spirit, each wave of activists vies not only with the status quo but with their own fellows in their rush to abolish all conventions in pursuit of ever greater and greater freedom. Others are caught up in the utopian drive to conquer death itself and therefore to challenge the greatest boundary of all that has defined us as mortals—the distinction between life and death, and heaven and earth.
Yet for all the thrusting drive of the new Prometheans, their self-interest is striking, for the one binary distinction that they never attack is the difference between the rulers and the ruled, between themselves and the rest, the enlightened experts and elites and the great unwashed. And if their day comes, even that yawning gap will be swallowed up in the coming inequality between the so-called “ens” and “uns,” the biologically and technologically enhanced and the unenhanced. Talk of the future is where their radical claims can be heard most clearly. There, like the builders of Babel but using biological engineering and cyborg engineering rather than astrology and glazed bricks, social constructionists are setting out to break down the distinction between life and death, heaven and earth, and even God and humanity.12 Zoltan Istvan, a leader in the transhumanist movement, is candid about his ambition: “to live forever, or as long as possible—10,000 years or so.”13
The title of Yuval Harari’s bestselling Homo Deus says it all, and his later descriptions of the coming “Gods of Planet Earth” and the “new godlings” are merely commentary.14 For thousands of years of history, humanity has been a constant, but the grand project of the twenty-first century will be “attaining divinity”—to “acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”15 Man can now be God, Harari says, for everything is socially constructed, and humanity can therefore deconstruct and reconstruct itself at will. There are “no givens,” “no rules,” and “no limits.” “Scientists today,” Harari writes strikingly as a Jew, and from Jerusalem, “can do much better than the Old Testament God.”16 Anders Sandberg, a Swedish transhumanist, argues that since there is no natural state of humanity (no givens), freedom is the capacity to go as far as our imaginations can take us. “I believe that humans are acorns that are unafraid of destroying themselves in order to become oak trees.”17
Boosted by notions such as big data, superintelligence, and transhumanism, social constructionism now makes a promise to humanity that is unprecedented in history and represents the epitome of 1789 at its highest reach: Humans have the total freedom to become whatever they want to be and do whatever they want to do. Nothing imaginable is impossible. It may take time, but if anything still holds humanity back from the complete and natural freedom that is its birthright, it must be what still remains of Monsieur Rousseau’s chains. All that humans need to do to throw off these last chains is to summon up their courage and imagination, recast Pico’s On the Dignity of Man in a secularist framework, march out with comrades who also have Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in their pockets, and trust that one of them has the cool resources of a Larry Ellison, an Elon Musk, or a Mark Zuckerberg.
Once again the differences between 1776 and 1789 could hardly be wider and more decisive. Rabbi Heschel pointed out that definitions of humanity are always expressions of human self-understanding—“man’s way of identifying himself, holding up a mirror in which to scan his own face.”18 Is there any question that constructionism speaks of human invention and human self-sufficiency taken to the highest level? According to the Jewish and Christian view, which inspired 1776 and gave it its cautions about the abuse of power, the grand pretensions of social constructionism are sheer hubris. They are a repeat of the ancient folly of the Tower of Babel and will invite a similar confounding. In particular, the deliberate obliteration of boundaries and distinctions, male and female, heaven and earth, is a final rejection of what the rabbis call “the Author of all being” and therefore of the final authority behind all morality and the notion of just society.19
Yet when that day comes, where will the checks and balances be that once grew from the realism that knew how such a power could be abused? It is always the greatest utopians who produce the vilest hells, and the wildest dreams of reason that create the worst monsters. Today, we are forbidden to discriminate and judge. We are trained to get used to everything and shocked by nothing. Soon the day will come when evil itself is cool and all the barriers to evil will once again be gone. To wake up then will be too late, so now is the time to sound the alarm. As many have noted, there was less than a century between the soaring aspirations of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, dreamed up in Swiss Alpine air, and Hitler’s subhuman applications that constructed the horrors of Belsen, Dachau, and Auschwitz-Treblinka. Those who set out to flout all boundaries eventually crash against the final boundary of reality, and the lesson for these brave new transgressors will be plain. In Rabbi Sacks’s words, “the ontological divide is fundamental. God is God; humanity is humanity. There can be no blurring of the boundaries.”20 The best and brightest of Silicon Valley will no more breach heaven and become gods tomorrow than the best and brightest of Mesopotamia managed to do in their day.
It is noteworthy that the builders of Babel had premonitions of their coming confusion before they built the tower. Just so, today’s constructionists sometimes drop dark hints about the end of Homo sapiens and sometimes forecast it blithely as if it will be no big deal. (Harari: “Yet the rise of humanism also contains the seeds of its own downfall. While the attempt to upgrade humans into gods takes humanism to its logical conclusion, it simultaneously exposes humanism’s inherent flaws . . . attempting to fulfill the humanist dream is likely to cause its disintegration.”)21 But more often their dominant note is a soaring superconfident insouciance, especially when their pretensions are no more modest than their vision of upgrading humanity. If everything, absolutely everything, has been socially constructed, then there is no truth, no bedrock reality, no natural or created order, no man or superman, and certainly no male or female. What we call reality is only “reality” as socially accepted, and if it was socially constructed in the first place, then it can be socially deconstructed now—and reconstructed as we wish, whenever we wish, and as many times as we wish. We are free, totally free, to be whatever we want to be.
The constructionist philosophy is an open invitation to storm the ramparts of the status quo and attack any aspect that anyone does not like as repressive to the way that they feel or see themselves. This means that in today’s America social constructionism is an invitation to total revolution in the name of total freedom, but with no standard of objective truth to cramp the creator or to judge the results. According to this view, the will to live is the will to power, truth is only power, freedom is the powerful player’s capacity to move and exert their will against all other wills, and justice whatever serves the interests of the powerful.
Social constructionism is most attractive and most accessible at the point of individual identity. No longer fixed, a matter of fate, or tethered to science, personal identity is now seen as self-chosen, subjective, and shifting, so Americans are endlessly promised that they can be whomever they want to be regardless even of biology. But as Camille Paglia notes, there is an absurdity to the basis of this claim:
Liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women’s studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth gender for life.22
Stated in its full-blown form, the promise of social constructionism is simply false. No one is ever completely free. For though there is a sense in which we can choose our identity, it is always within limits, and there has to be a counter-reminder. Freedom means freedom of identity, but it is not arbitrary. There is an important sense in which our true identity chooses us and challenges us to live in a certain way if we are to be true to ourselves. The same is true of American citizens collectively. Americans are free, “autonomous individuals,” whose self-creation is crucial to their freedom. But Americans are also citizens of a free republic. As such, American citizens are carriers of freedom in the world, so they are as free as any people in history. But that very identity also determines Americans. It lays on them the responsibility not to live as they please but to respect what it takes for their freedom to stay true to itself and to last. Once again, 1776 is more realistic than 1789, 1917, and 1949. Freedom is not the permission to do what you want, but the power to do what you ought. And the quickest way to find this maxim to be true is to flout it and face the consequences.
One of the more pernicious effects of postmodernism, constructionism, and identity politics is rampant today but often missed. If truth is dead and everything is socially constructed, nothing need be discussed in terms of true or false, right or wrong, wise or foolish, rational or irrational. Instead, everything is a matter of “where you come from.” It is all about the unconscious baggage formed by the motives of your class, your race, your politics, your religion, or your generation. (One young American woman said to a friend of mine recently, “Every time I hear an older white male speaking to us, I bristle.”) Needless to say, this is merely another form of cultural profiling, and clearly the playing field is no more level now than it was before. Certain classes (the middle class), certain races (white), certain political affiliations (conservative), certain faiths (Christian, especially Evangelical and Catholic), and certain generations (the middle aged and older) have replaced the old categories as automatically reactionary, and prime suspects for the crimes of racism and sexism, unless proved innocent. Such attitudes are the intellectual equivalent of New York’s infamous stop-and-frisk policy for young blacks. They are a form of cultural profiling that is highly illiberal in that they silence whole groups by definition. But that tactic is not only wrong, it is irrational and antidemocratic because it silences the real debate that Americans need to conduct if republican freedom is to remain healthy.
Social constructionism is especially appealing because of its promise to the sexual revolution: be whoever you wish to be—he, she, zhe, or several other possible pronouns for starters. But when the same ideas are applied politically, their poisonous effect becomes deadly at once. They eviscerate the Declaration of Independence and hand down a death sentence for the American experiment. Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence were wrong, they say. There are no self-evident truths. No one has inalienable rights, dignity, or equality. Such claims only worked for a while because a sufficient number of Americans “colluded” in believing them. But we now know better, they say. All that counts is power. Right is another word for might. In sum, under the conditions of social constructionism, America’s republican freedom would be turned inside out and upside down, and summarily ended forever. Social constructionism may sound abstract and theoretical, but its consequences are concrete and catastrophic. Once again, the influence of 1789 is unmistakable and its harm to 1776 irreparable.
A fourth, and somewhat overlapping philosophy is the liberationism of the sexual revolution, and here again the links to 1789 are plain and undeniable. This revolution has immense implications for American freedom, and though seemingly unstoppable in its present momentum and appeal, it will surely prove destructive for the republic. The appeal lies in the word liberation, as it does with all revolutions, for the call for freedom triggers an insatiable desire and carries an argument that sounds unanswerable. There is no one who does not at some point desire freedom. This means simply that, however spurious the claims and however disastrous the results, there will always be more freedom to be claimed and always more people to respond.
As we saw in discussing question two, there was all the difference in the world between 1776 and the American Revolution, whose understanding was essentially biblical and classical, and 1789 and the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, whose understanding was essentially secular and antireligious. The former believed in incremental change and worked from the inside out, taking seriously the potential for sin and the abuse of power, and achieved a substantial, if incomplete, measure of freedom. The latter, in contrast, believed in instant, total, political transformation, working from the outside in and from the state down, and believing in the adequacy of reason and the essential perfectibility of humanity, but routinely ended in the mass slaughter of millions of people.
The sexual revolution now sweeping America and the West is a direct child of 1789, and one of its central ideas is that freedom is won by removing everything considered repressive. (Again, Rousseau’s famous opening words of The Social Contract: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”) It is a multigenerational project that from the beginning was a close twin to Enlightenment ideas of political revolution. Both revolutions trace their roots to the ideas and theories behind the French Revolution and carry much of the same baggage. Yet most Americans ignore the roots of the sexual revolution and view it as more recent and more benign than political revolution. They see it either as a genuine advance in freedom or as the slow and steady release from the uptightness of previous generations, or at least as the somewhat wayward child of the sexual big bang of the 1960s: the pill, Playboy, and permissiveness. They therefore view its impact as merely the bumpy and uneven process of liberalization that any society is bound to undergo as part and parcel of its becoming modern.
That sunny and myopic view is naive. The sexual revolution started as the twin to the French Revolution, and it remains the most calculated, deliberate, radical subversion of the American republic and Western civilization since the French and Russian revolutions. It had its clear designs and its fundamental animosity to religion from the beginning. Its origins must be remembered even though the most comprehensive manifesto of the sexual revolution came years later in Wilhelm Reich’s The Sexual Revolution in 1930. This book was described as “the Mein Kampf of permissiveness” in that it was published in the same era as Hitler’s manifesto in 1924. Like Mein Kampf, it promised nothing less than a new cultural order and set out to deliver what it promised, and at the present moment is carrying all before it.
The architects of the sexual revolution were unambiguous about their goals. They hailed it as “an authentic revolutionary upheaval of our cultural existence . . . awakening from the sleep of millennia.”23 True to its origins, it goes back to eighteenth-century Europe, it comes from the militantly secularist tradition set off by the French Revolution, and it fiercely opposes the Jewish and Christian faiths and all the tenets of the biblical tradition that have been the primary shaper of American freedom and of Western civilization.
There is a sense in which the sexual revolution is neo-Marxist, in that its present form is an odd combination of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. It owes its success to its own Rudi Dutschke–style “long march through the institutions” and its scaling of the power centers of American culture. But its roots are earlier than Marx, Freud, or Gramsci, and it has important differences from the purely political versions of Marxist and communist revolutions, as well as from Freud. There is a simple reason why it has a better chance of succeeding in America than Marxism, communism, and fascism ever had—its obvious appeal to sex and to the popular culture.
It is important to recognize the distinctiveness of the sexual revolution. For a start, the sexual revolution has different prophets from the political revolution. Rousseau stands behind it, but its other leading proponents are not Hegel and Marx so much as the Marquis de Sade, “the apostle of eroticism”; André Breton, “the pope of surrealism” and author of The Surrealist Manifesto (1924); and Wilhelm Reich, the man who coined the term sexual revolution in his book by the same title. Many other radical thinkers have taken the movement forward in different ways, including William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alexandra Kollontai, Magnus Hirschfeld, Alfred Kinsey, Simone de Beauvoir, Herbert Marcuse, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Judith Butler (the architect of the current gender revolution), and of course Hugh Heffner.
Importantly too, the ideals of the revolution were to be sexual freedom, which is much more appealing and much less demanding than economic justice and political revolution. (Reich: “Today, the principal social question no longer is: ‘Are you rich or are you poor?’ but ‘Do you endorse and do you fight for the greatest possible freedom for human life?’”)24 And the revolution’s new terms, progressive and reactionary, were chosen to replace the old terms that were clumsy and foreign-sounding, proletarian and bourgeois. Most important of all, the chosen agents of the revolution were to be neither the working class nor the vanguard of the intellectual elite, but Mr. and Mrs. Average Consumer and their children in the affluent society. For surely, the allure of sexual freedom, unlike the cost of mounting the barricades and risking your life, would be a temptation impossible for the average consumer to refuse. (Reich believed that to be healthy, people needed at least three orgasms a week, because “The core of happiness in life is sexual happiness.”)25
The day-to-day results of the sexual revolution have been spectacularly effective in America—a three-hundred-year-old revolution from France that has led to a titanic fifty-year revolution in America over sexual ideas, morality, behavior, language, publishing, dress, music, modesty, and social conventions. Through an energetic network of richly funded American elites, organizations, and international conferences, the revolution that was sparked by France and England spread to the United States, and then to the United Nations and back to the European Union. It now quite literally seeks to impose its gender agenda on the entire world, colonial style. Anyone wishing to understand its goals in its own terms has only to read An Activist’s Guide to the Yogyakarta Principles, the manifesto of the gender revolution that was set out in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in November 2006 as a toolkit for activists. The principles were then to be translated into policies around the world—so that, for example, when Hillary Clinton was US Secretary of State, she planned to advance the gender revolution by replacing “Mother” and “Father” on the US Customs forms with the more gender-neutral terms “Parent 1” and “Parent 2.” (“Passport Change Will Be Inclusive,” the Washington Post declared.)26
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud argued strongly (and somewhat hypocritically) that civilization depended on the restraint of instincts and in particular on the “sublimation of the sex drive.” Later anthropological research, for example, by J. D. Unwin in 1934, confirmed his thesis. The stronger the sexual restraints in a society, the higher the level of culture it achieved and vice versa. But the sexual revolution has fought to stand this claim on its head. Critics rightly point to its fundamental relativism with regard to truth, and its permissiveness with regard to moral restraints, and the chaos that results. They then argue the obvious point that in loosening restraints the permissiveness is ripening a harvest of personal and social ills, from broken families, identity confusion, loneliness, pornography addiction, mounting suicides, the sexual abuse of children, and endless rationalizations. (When Margaret Sanger’s husband, Bill, found out all that she was up to, he described it as a “hell-hole of free love, promiscuity, and prostitution masquerading under the mantle of revolution.”)27 It was an earlier form of such social chaos, and the massive backlash that sexual liberation produced in the Soviet Union after the revolution, which Lenin and Stalin stamped out ruthlessly in their purge in the mid-1920s.
This point about the link between unbridled passions, unfettered freedom, sexual anarchy and social chaos is cogent, but a different and deeper critique has also been raised since the French Revolution. Sexual liberation attacks all moral and cultural restraints on passions in the name of increased freedom, but often its unintended or ironic effect has been to introduce new controls and new forms of bondage. As we saw with the paradox of freedom, “liberation” can often lead to bondage, not freedom. Sometimes the bondage is the result of increased freedom for the passions that, when unbridled, lead to deeper enslavement and addiction, as with alcohol, drugs, and pornography. Sometimes the bondage is the result of political passivity, as the government’s indulgence of the passions keeps citizens happily diverted and submissive, allowing the elites to continue undisturbed in ruling as they wish (“bread and circuses” in a suburban form).
Sometimes the bondage is deliberate as the consumer’s sexual desires are used to sell a product. (In the early Lucky Strikes commercial, the subliminal appeal was intentional, as Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, acknowledged: “The cigarette is a phallic symbol, to be offered by a man to a woman. Every normal man or woman can identify with such a message.” Encouraging women to smoke cigarettes, another colleague said, would be “like opening a new gold mine right in our front yard.”28) Sometimes the bondage is the result of tacit or overt forms of social and political control, because “someone somewhere” knows too much about the behavior of everyone else for anyone to have the freedom to stand against them. (Such tacit blackmail moves upward in the case of intelligence and downward in the case of the tabloids.) As ever, giving the public what it wants is a sure way to control what it wants. Control the stimuli, and you control the stimulated. Or in the words of an eighteenth-century architect of revolution, “Study the peculiar habits of each, for men may be turned to anything by him who knows how to take advantage of their ruling passion.”29
The third criticism is more personal and concerns the understanding and experience of love and human personhood. As we saw earlier, covenant love is reciprocal and mutual, the I-Thou relationship in its highest form. Each person speaks and acts with a love that carries unspoken respect for the dignity of the other person, including the heart, the mind, the body, the aspirations, and the frailties of the other. Thus the institution of marriage harmonizes the foundational relationships between men and women throughout society as a whole. But when the sexual revolution destroys the notion of one man–one woman marriage, strips away all barriers to sexual relationships, and cancels all binding ties and responsibilities, as in the hookup culture, the uncommitted sex that follows is only about the subjective self that seeks partners for its own satisfaction. The other, whether the sexual partners are few or many, is simply there for the sexual satisfaction of the self. All others are only instrumental and temporary. With no ties to bind and no responsibilities that are mutual, the “other” becomes merely an aid to sexual satisfaction for the self—in effect, a toy. Lenin’s words about sex fit the hookup culture perfectly: “So we simply take advantage of the few short hours of release that are granted to us—there is nothing binding, no responsibility.”30
To put the point bluntly, sex within the terms of the full-blown freedom of the sexual revolution is reduced to a form of masturbation—as its architects asserted from the beginning. It is Keith Richards’s “making love to your best friend,” even if countless others also happen to have taken part. “The philosopher,” the Marquis de Sade wrote of the freethinkers of his day but anticipating the cheap sex of the hookup culture of our own, “sates his appetites without inquiring to know what his enjoyment may cost others, and without remorse.”31 In a world dominated by the ethos of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand, the self, not the “other,” is the prime consideration.
Yet this point is the reason why, in rejecting the integrity of both love and personhood, the hookup culture so often ends in one of two outcomes—either the boredom, disappointment, guilt, and restlessness of cheap sex, or the abuse and sexual aggression of powerful males. In the end the myriad relationships lauded by the sexual revolution spell out the logic of the culture of death, for without procreation, which is the natural logic of love, there is no perpetuation. The same is true, needless to say, of the American republic itself. Without transmission, as a generation lives thoughtlessly only for itself, there is no enduring freedom passed on.
Nothing is more damning to the sexual revolution than the personal stories of the sexual revolutionaries and their unsatisfactory experiences of free love. Again and again they swung restlessly between an extreme rejection of convention in the name of freedom (throwing off Rousseau’s “chains” of marriage, fidelity, and respectability) and an equally extreme dissatisfaction with free love (sometimes leading to unacknowledged guilt, sometimes to resentment when others treat them as they treated others, and sometimes to despair and suicide—as with Mary Wollstonecraft and others).
The fourth and final line of criticism is more publicly significant, and again concerns the perpetuation of the American republic. Great nations need great citizens to become great leaders, but if the nation’s greatness is not to be fleeting, the nation needs to hand on the secrets of its greatness from generation to generation. And that, it should go without saying, requires not only civic education but parents, and especially mothers. As history has underscored with countless variations, from the Bible to the Greek and Roman classics to the comments of Alexis de Tocqueville on American women and democracy, it takes women to bear children and to bring up children if every new generation is to have the same dedication to the ideas and ideals that made the nation great. In other words, mothers (and families) are uniquely indispensable for both their generative power and their educational role. Yet in America today, these essential tasks have been decimated by the lifestyles and the confusions of the sexual revolution. For both nations and religions, as demographers note, there will always be a link between faith and fertility. The sexual revolution and its multiple confusions are quite simply sapping the ongoing vitality of 1776 and the American republic.
These four arguments are powerful, but the fact is that no mere argument will settle the issue. The wrangling over the stories and results of the sexual revolution will continue angrily until the evidence becomes incontrovertible, either to the individuals involved or to American society as a whole as it picks up the pieces or is itself broken in pieces. But many people forget that the course of the sexual revolution has been stopped in its tracks twice before, and it can be reversed again if Americans recognize the dark and loveless future that the hook-up culture represents. For all the talk of “the right side of history” (and often from those who have no basis for either right or meaningful history), history is shaped by freedom, not fate. The first reversal of the sexual revolution took place in England and came as a result of principle and persuasion, when the spiritual revival of 1739 under John Wesley and the “reformation of manners” under William Wilberforce led the nation to a decisive turnabout that turned its back on the mores of 1789 and grew into the Victorian Age.
The second and different kind of reversal took place under the Soviets, a savage and draconian purge in the mid-1920s that was purely pragmatic and coerced. Such was the social chaos triggered by Alexandra Kollontai and her fellow sexual liberationists that Lenin and Stalin put a halt to the spread of free love. (“To be truly free,” Kollontai had announced, “woman must throw off the contemporary, obsolete, coercive form of the family that is burdening her way.”)32 In particular, Lenin put an end to their “glass of water” theory that free sex should be as easy and casual as satisfying your thirst. (Lenin: “This glass-of-water theory has made our young people mad, quite mad. It has proved fatal to many young boys and girls.”)33
Anarchy and madness lurk in the extremes of the sexual revolution in America, but its outcome is not inevitable. The free-love culture depends on the free choice of its citizens to say yes or no. In a democracy, the sexual revolution depends on collective cultural consent just as sexual intercourse depends on an individual’s personal consent, and being forced is rape in either case. To consent or to refuse to consent culturally means making that choice wisely, which requires assessing the “freedom” the sexual revolution offers the American republic. It is therefore important to stand back and consider many aspects of the sexual revolution that have been prominent features of 1789 since the beginning.
First (echoes of 1789 and in complete contradiction of 1776), the sexual revolution is built on the utopian assumption that complete and absolute freedom is possible, that humans are essentially good and need only to be freed from sexual and cultural repressions to be happy, peaceful, and fulfilled. This notion was once understood as human perfectibility. (The only perversion left is the use of the word perversion. “There is no pornographer except in the eyes of a puritan.”)34 This point is important for three reasons: Utopianism directly contradicts the realism of the American experiment and the concern for the abuse of power, it is a leap of faith that far outstrips any religious belief, and there is always a straight line between utopianism and violence for a simple reason: when the gap between the ideal and the real cannot be bridged by persuasion, it will be bridged by force.
Second (echoes of 1789), the sexual revolution goes on to offer the utopian promise that sexual permissiveness will produce the greatest human freedom. (“Class will be no more,” the Marxists promised; “Jews will be no more,” the Nazis promised themselves; and “Repression will be no more,” the sexual revolutionaries promise us all.) After all, the Marquis de Sade argued, “No passion has the need of the widest horizon of liberty than sexual license.”35 By themselves alone, these first two utopian features of the sexual revolution are likely to prove as harmful to “liberated” society as the purported male chauvinism, paternalism, and misogyny that represent the other extreme that the revolution set out to combat.
Third (shades of 1789 yet again), the sexual revolution advances the claim that gender identity should be decided by subjective feelings rather than objective science and biology; that all other judgments, such as true and false, good and bad, are a matter of discrimination; and that any other human rights should be subordinate to the rights of gender orientation. In the battle of the binaries, it has been said, there are no longer two genders, male and female, but as many possible genders as there are days in the year and feelings in the day. As with Rousseau in Emile, what matters is how you feel. (What I feel to be good is good, what I feel to be bad is bad.)
Fourth, and in open contradiction to the previous point, the sexual revolution argues that naturalistic science is adequate to answer all the questions of life, and all other sources of knowledge, especially those that are transcendent, are redundant. (Reich: “Natural science confronts its greatest task: to assume the responsibility for the future destiny of a tortured humanity.”)36 Science is therefore called on to trump religion, though if necessary, feelings alone can still trump science, as is happening now with transgenderism.
Fifth (echoes of 1789), the sexual revolution claims that the two decisive sources of repression are the monogamous family (because of its role in generation, education, and tradition) and religion, the Jewish and Christian faiths being considered the most repressive of all (“disgraceful medieval sexual legislation,” and “medieval irrationalism”).37 The two institutions should therefore be attacked together. (Marx had argued earlier that the secret to the Holy Family is the earthly family. To make the former disappear, the latter must be destroyed, in theory and in practice. Breton later: “Everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order to lay waste the ideas of family, country, religion.”)38 Breton therefore urged surrealists to “laugh like savages at the French flag, to vomit their disgust in the face of every priest, and to level at the breed of ‘basic duties’ the long range weapon of sexual cynicism.”39
Sixth (echoes of 1789, the Marquis de Sade, and Wilhelm Reich), the sexual revolution holds that, contrary to Freud’s understanding of civilization, all sexual repression should be removed completely, starting at the youngest age. This means that parents must be replaced decisively as the primary shapers of their children, assisted by comprehensive sex education for all school children (compounded by the reinforcing influences of advertising, the internet, the media, music, and film). It appears that even the once-trusted and sophisticated Conde Nast now subscribes to this doctrine. In 2017, its Teen Vogue published “anal 101 for teens, beginners, and all inquisitive folk,” complete with diagrams and counsel. (Such sex is hailed as “the great equalizer” in the sexual revolution.) In response to the outrage that followed, the magazine’s digital editor, Phillip Picardi, tweeted his response: “Here’s my only reply I’ll be giving to any of the messages,” his tweet accompanied by a photo of Picardi kissing another man while holding up his middle finger to the camera.40 Clearly the sexual revolution regards parents as a nuisance and considers itself beyond the need for approval or subtlety.
Seventh (echoes of the Marquis de Sade), the sexual revolution teaches that no forms of sexual relations of any kind should be prohibited, lest the machinery of discrimination and repression (Rousseau’s “chains”) would come back in action again, and that sexual freedom should be entirely divorced from procreation. (Yet those in favor of sex without children become more and more concerned about those who are not—and they are therefore committed to control them in the name of a greater reproductive freedom, also known as nonreproductive sex.)
Eighth (echoes of the French Enlightenment), the sexual revolution represents an aggressive, systematic, and uncompromising assault on all surviving sources of transcendent faith. (Voltaire’s famous “Écrasez l’infâme! ” was seconded by Shelley’s “Oh! I burn with impatience for the moment of Xtianity’s dissolution, it has injured me.”)41 The belief is that if freedom is to succeed at all, nothing, absolutely nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of the freedom of the sexual revolution. There must therefore be severe social, political, and even legal penalties for those who oppose the gender revolution (“the price of citizenship”). Worst of all, all other human and civil rights must be subordinated to the fundamental right of sexual orientation—sexual freedom over freedom of conscience.
Such features of the sexual revolution are obvious to anyone with their eyes open, but too often the significance of the revolution is only considered anecdotally. (Who am I to judge my son/grandson/friend/sister-in-law/neighbor/colleague?) And of course, not everyone following these ideas goes to every possible extreme. (We all know magnificent exceptions.) But a moment’s thought and a look at its three-hundred-year history, as well as the full-blown range of its philosophies and policies, would show the extent of its radical vision. The sexual revolution is truly a complete subversion of the old order and its replacement by a different world and a different way of life—Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” in a sexual and cultural form. Three thousand years of Western history and its accepted consensus about reality, humanity, marriage, the family, and freedom are being obliterated, and not as a matter of democratic decision and consent but as an imposition by an elite that is often unelected and unaccountable—the government’s “rape” of the people once again. In short, the will of a minority is being imposed on the majority through coercion, not persuasion. In the grand manner of Rousseau, the elites know best, and the majority is “forced to be free”—a grotesque contradiction of true freedom if there ever was one.42
The last point requires underscoring in light of the different “whiffs of totalitarianism” in certain Left-wing statements today and the violence in their actions. For one thing, it has been argued that the decadence of the sexual revolution in the Soviet Union and then in Weimar Germany helped to create the revulsion that brought Stalin and Hitler to power. For another thing, the progressive philosophy echoes Rousseau’s ideas of the battering ram of the “General Will” of the people through which citizens can be “forced to be free.” For yet another thing, the same dire animosity to transcendence was at the heart of the earlier, secular, and political paths to revolution, and in each case it led to tragic consequences. In 1789, for instance, the “bloodless terror” waged in the republic of letters preceded and led to the “bloody terror” of Robespierre and the guillotine.
I am not predicting that tumbrils will roll down New York’s Fifth Avenue or Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. But long before that prospect, the danger is that the militancy of the antireligious animosity will spell the end of genuine Western liberalism and robust American freedom, including freedom of religion and conscience, and the fundamental right to political dissent, conscientious objection, and civil disobedience. Hence, as highlighted earlier under questions eight and nine, there is a vital importance to the cobelligerence between secularists, Jews, and Christians who genuinely love freedom and who see the foundational importance of freedom of religion and conscience for all, for the good of all.
To be sure, the sexual revolution claims to be all about love and freedom, but what kind of love and what kind of freedom? Does anyone really think that liberating sexual vitality, animal impulses, and physical urges will provide the key to full human freedom, including political freedom? Where has such pagan vitalism led before? What of all the missing themes, even in the area of love, such as romantic love, lasting love, or the sacrificial love of covenantal love loyalty? And have today’s devotees of their love and revolutionary freedom considered the actual lives of their high priests and priestesses—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexandra Kollontai, and Wilhelm Reich, for example?
Reich was passionate about the claim that his vision was all about freedom. He called for “Revolution, Now and Forever,” and originally announced its launch as “the European freedom movement.”43 But he deliberately flouted Freud’s warning that civilization can be built only on the restraint of instincts. And if the radical form of social constructionism calls into question the character of the American republic, the radical form of the sexual revolution poses an even greater challenge to the West and its Jewish and Christian roots. (Breton, his fellow surrealists, and his Surrealist Manifesto made no bones about the showdown. “The decisive battle against Christianity could be fought only at the level of the sexual revolution. And therefore the problem of sexuality and eroticism is today the fundamental problem from the moral point of view.”)44
Many who read the wilder claims of the sexual revolution wonder how anyone could believe such ideas that are variously radical, irresponsible, unrealistic, and directly opposed to the freedom on which America was founded. “Complete and absolute” freedom? The words of Jesus of Nazareth form the motto of more universities and colleges around the world than any other, and express the heart of the classical Western understanding of freedom: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32 NIV). Freedom assumes and requires both truth and ethics. Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez of Spain (2004–2011), a socialist and radical proponent of the gender revolution, was candid about his entirely different objectives and understanding of freedom: “We stand before a global project of social transformation with the goal of destroying the old order and building a new order. We have never passed so many laws in such a short time that change the lives of the individual.” He therefore proposed his own countermotto to replace that of Jesus: “It is freedom that makes us true. Not the truth that makes us free.”45
The mind boggles at such reasoning. What comes to mind is Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale for children, “The Emperor has no clothes!” But the emperor’s naked vanity hurt only himself, whereas from 1789 on, failed revolutions have consistently crushed millions in their wake and guillotined the genuine impulses toward freedom. Will 1789 and the neo-Marxist, neo-Freudian sexual revolution prove to be any different?
For Jews, Christians, and all who take the Bible seriously, there is an additional reflection that the sexual revolution prompts. There are two stark and enduring contrasts in the Bible. The first is the contrast between monotheism and paganism, and their attendant views of life, history, and human worth. The second is the culture of covenantal love, ethics, and responsible interpersonal relationships in contrast to the culture of sexual anomie that destroys covenantal relationships and leads to powermongering and chaos-producing violence—including men dominating women. The sexual revolution is pagan in its espousal of rampant sexuality. The main difference is that the extravagance was once justified in the name of ensuring fertility, and now it is promoted in the name of reducing fertility.
There is no question on which side the American republic was born, and no question which of the two sides America is now openly choosing to live in. Nor is there any question what the consequences were for those earlier cultures and what the outcome will be for the Americans and for the American republic if the present generation does not call a halt to the madness of sexual lawlessness. Under the banner of First Amendment rights and spurious claims for natural instincts (“born to porn”), unbounded sex will continue to be shamelessly commercialized, men will be left as dissatisfied as they are desensitized, and women and children will be degraded and trafficked.
That last point and the logic behind it must not be minimized. A potent blend of permissiveness, promiscuity, profit, and pornography has created the so-called American “pornado” and transformed America from Puritan to “pornified.”46 But as the furor over sexual aggression shows, that is not the end of the problem. Vile as male aggression is, there is an element of hypocrisy in the recent shock over its prevalence. As with the post-truth power worlds of politics and economics, dominance in the post-truth, porn-saturated world of sex goes to the strong (or the older, the richer, and the more famous), while the weak (or the young, the inexperienced, and those starting out) find themselves on the receiving end of unwanted aggression.
The Hebrew prophet Amos attacked the powerful men who ground the faces of the poor in the dust, and feminists are absolutely and unequivocally right to attack the powerful men who assault the women within their reach. Outrage over sexual harassment is long overdue. But to anyone who recognizes the crooked timber of our humanity, that is what the powerful always do, and will always do—unless their power is restrained by truth, their might is curbed by right, and their temptations are tamed by character and moral behavior. “Consent” as the sole remaining justification for anything and everything sexual is ethically deficient, because there are too many reasons why “consent” can be coerced.
The danger as well as the hypocrisy of the present situation is becoming apparent. Hugh Hefner had just been lionized after his death for his role as a sexual revolutionary, but Harvey Weinstein was roundly castigated for excusing his behavior by blaming it on the sixties (“I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different”). The New York Times was justified in calling it his “get-out-of-jail-free card” and a “poor excuse,” but the links between the earlier ideas and the later consequences were undeniable and have still not been faced.47
Out of words come worlds and ways of life. Out of the philosophy came the culture, and out of the culture came the behavior. To men who saw themselves as an end to themselves, all women are purely a means to their end. The Holocaust did not begin with the building of the crematoria; the sexual abuse did not begin with the founding of Miramax. In the name of the sexual revolution, permissiveness was widely lionized, moral restraints were thrown off as reactionary, male entitlement was empowered and popularized, and the only people to be challenged were those who challenged the consequences.
But then in a sudden about-turn, as if to camouflage the earlier direction, the unfreedom of the permissive-born abuse was roundly outed. One generation had flouted the moral standards of its forebears, but the next still had the moral capacity to be horrified by the consequences of that flouting. But without the restoration of the ethics of their forebears, new problems have been stirred. Sex has now been weaponized, as race was earlier, and the result is making sex as controversial, divisive, and incurable as race has long been in America. Among various disastrous consequences, the completely innocent and the slightly guilty have found themselves as vulnerable to suspicion, accusation, and instant ruin as the egregiously guilty—with little or no evidence required, and with no due process allowed. Careers of a lifetime can be vaporized in a second, and all on the basis of unproven accusations from unknown accusers.
Where is Nathaniel Hawthorne when we need him now?
Half a century of the sexual revolution has achieved the reverse of expanding freedom. Freedom as “obedience to the unenforceable” has been systematically assailed and broken down. But instead of rebuilding the restraints of dignity and respect, character and ethics in order to restore the freedom of the unenforceable, Left/liberalism has gone in the opposite direction. Sex has become fraught, relationships have been poisoned, yet another intractable division has opened in American society, and intrusive new rules and regulations are being trundled out to solve the problems—all of which only plays into the hands of greater social control and less real freedom.
Every man in America is now every woman’s potential aggressor, and every woman in America is every man’s potential accuser. Fortunately, as with the dark excesses of anticommunism earlier, history will prove more truthful than propaganda and the excesses of the new sexual McCarthyism will be seen for what they are. But innocent men and women will suffer along with the guilty, just as the innocent suffered earlier under the aggression that followed from the loosened moral restraints on the sexually powerful.
America’s brave new pornucopia has been pouring out the blessings of its purported liberation since the 1960s. God was declared dead, and everything was declared permitted. Yet permissiveness for all turned out to be a permit for the promiscuous and the powerful to play the predator. Thus the different precedents set by Hugh Hefner, Ted Kennedy, Larry Flynt, Bill Clinton, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer, and others are not an aberration. Unfettered sexual desire blended with post-truth power without principle means that the powerful alpha male will always treat less powerful women as the means to their ends and the objects for their lust—and then use the same power to silence would-be whistleblowers who might challenge their unbridled conquests.
Certain behaviors have now been highlighted and outlawed as currently unacceptable, but the post-truth philosophy is far from dead. Post-truth power may be rooted in race, money, athletic prowess, political power, or gender, but whoever and whatever it meets, power exploits and manipulates. To the powerful, people and objects are valued not for themselves, only for their usefulness. They have instrumental worth, not intrinsic dignity. Thus in the post-truth power world, reality means availability, and manipulation leads to consumption, whether plundering nature or women. Post-truth ideas have consequences. As a friend has remarked pointedly: ideas have consequences, but bad ideas have victims.
Make no mistake. The sexual revolution has run true to form in degrading, objectifying, and abusing American women. The logic should surprise no one who knows its eighteenth-century roots. The “divine marquis” blazed that trail long ago, as any reader of Justine will know. Since then whole industries have been built on the exploitation of women, but what is not logical is that so many women have been cheerleaders for the very culture that has done it to them. As Caitlin Flanagan argued in The Atlantic, Bill Clinton was championed by feminist icons such as Gloria Steinem (shielding him from rape charges) and “rescued by a surprising force: machine feminism. The movement had by then ossified into a partisan operation, and it was willing—eager to let this friend of the sisterhood enjoy a little droit de seigneur.”48
The plain truth is that permissive, pornified, and commercialized sexual freedom will never be freedom for women, and it will certainly not be love. The present war between the sexes therefore spells disaster for America. A free and open society requires trust, and especially trust between men and women. The harvest of the sexual revolution is ripening, “diversity” as virtue signaling is not the answer, and America needs far more than new “rules, regulations, and codes” to right the current wrongs. (A current headline and sign of the times: “U.S. Congress Requires Anti-Harassment Training.”) What America really requires is a national about-turn over the sexual revolution itself. It needs a genuine change of mind and heart (a.k.a. the Hebrew teshuva or “repentance”) and the restoration of solid foundations for respectful and trusting relationships, and for love and loyalty, none of which is possible within the stated terms of the sexual revolution and the logic of 1789.
England in the eighteenth century turned back from the logic of 1789 and the sexual revolution in a peaceful way. The Soviet Union turned back in the twentieth century, though in a hypocritical, violent, and authoritarian way. Will Americans be so infatuated by false freedom that they press on blindly to the point of disaster, or will they return to their right mind and call a halt to the lemming-like rush to the precipice?
Which leads back to the point stressed at the beginning of this look at the sexual revolution. There is a world of difference between the villains of these ideas and the victims of their thinking. There is also a practical difference between “hating the sin and loving the sinner.” For those who follow the way of 1789, there is no such distinction. The exposure or even the accusation of sin leads at once to the short and logical step from greatness to guillotine for the “sinner”—all with a merciless suddenness and no hope of reprieve, as the French aristocrats discovered in their time. For those who follow the way of 1776 and the very different truths of grace and forgiveness that lie behind it, genuine wrongs can lead to genuine repentance, and then to genuine forgiveness and the possibility of a genuine second chance in life and restoration in the community.
That said, there must be no reprieve for either the core principles or the extreme policies and practices of the sexual revolution itself. There is little disagreement that the sexual revolution is the spawn of 1770’s Paris, 1910’s Greenwich Village, 1920’s Vienna, and 1930’s Weimar and Berlin. It goes far beyond Hugh Hefner and carries grave implications for America and for its republican form of freedom. (A New York editor announced that March 15, 1913, the year of the Armory Show, was “sex o’clock in America.”)49 By their choices and in their lifestyles, Americans today are casting their vote in an election even more important and decisive than any single presidential election. At the least there should be no question that there must be an open debate on the issues, and a debate that is worthy of the gravity and immensity of the stakes. Freedom itself is staked on the outcome.
Once again, will it be said that freedom was too hard a challenge for Americans to overcome? Here, then, is the tenth and final question on the checklist that Americans must answer constructively: Are you vigilant about the current ideas that are crucial to freedom today?
Why has there been such a decline in trust and in mutual respect in so many American institutions and so many ideas and ideals? How would you draw up your own balance sheet of the impact of such forces as multiculturalism, identity politics, political correctness, postmodernism, and the sexual revolution? Which beliefs and customs best serve the interests of human flourishing, and which ideas and ideals do you believe are most needed for the perpetuation of the American republic? Which of the two revolutions do they serve?
The overall lesson from this last question is impossible to ignore. Advanced modernity is throwing up an unprecedented series of challenges to the American republic and to American freedom, and they must each be weighed and assessed. Powerful trends and developments are swirling through the social and political terrain, and the differences between 1776 and 1789 are vast and consequential. All these issues need to be monitored with care and decisions made as to their significance. Quite simply, the decisions Americans make in the next generation will shape the course of American freedom and decide the fate of the American republic.