We have met the pigs…

In the 1960s and 1970s, a totalitarian movement almost destroyed the republic. Now it threatens to do so again.

Photo: David Wilson/CC BY 4.0/Flickr

Recently, I wrote an essay on the late 19th-century Russian pogroms that forced my great-grandparents to flee to the United States. I observed the striking and foreboding parallels between that old eruption of Jew-hatred and the rise of Red-Green Alliance antisemitism in the United States. I did so to highlight a peculiar irony of history: None of this is new.

It speaks to the historical ignorance of most of us today that this remains a radical statement (and I am hardly the first one to state it), perhaps because it flies in the face of the progressive ideology that dominates today’s intellectual and academic establishment.

Progressives believe that almost everything is new. As a result, they must reject history. They dislike the fact that human beings have been largely the same for thousands of years; that throughout history, they have felt and done largely the same things for largely the same reasons.

So, progressives tend not only to ignore but to erase history. They prefer not to know the past, and so they pretend it does not exist. After a short while, the past is contained only in books, so progressives make sure to not only write the books but burn all the other books should it prove necessary—and it usually does. This is especially true in academia, which is ruled by a totalitarian dictatorship of the professoriate that not only wants to control history but to destroy it when it proves inconvenient.

Sadly, events in recent days have illustrated this irony once again. At New York’s Barnard College, a gang of antisemitic protester-terrorists briefly conquered and colonized a major university building, assaulted staff, terrorized students, and prevented classes from taking place. Of course, this criminal behavior went unpunished. After the administration capitulated and engaged in negotiations with the criminals, the protester-terrorists finally left, apparently after being given assurances that, unlike the rest of us, they would not be held responsible for their crimes.

This demonstrates, once more, that negotiating with terrorists—even those who are protesters—is a serious mistake. However, it proves more than that. I think the administration conceded because, deep down, it sympathizes with the protester-terrorists. It views them as “one of us,” thus exempting them from accountability and punishment.

It must be said that the administration is correct. The protester-terrorists are them, and they are the protester-terrorists. Indeed, the entire regime they serve, this dictatorship of the professoriate that has demolished American academic and intellectual life and raised up a totalitarian death cult in its place, is fundamentally founded and based on protester-terrorism. It has been from the beginning and will remain so until it is, hopefully, finally smashed.

Many view this professoriate regime and its ethos of protester-terrorism as relatively new, emerging in the 2010s with the rise of “woke” ideology and its accompanying frenzies. While liberal bias in academia has existed for a long time, the shift toward leftist totalitarianism is considered a recent development.

This is, one regrets to say, untrue. The dictatorship of the professoriate and its totalitarian regime are of long standing. Over the decades, the regime has penetrated deeply into the institutions it conquered and colonized to such an extent that, if they are to be saved, American academia and American intellectual life as a whole must be completely remade or dismantled to smash the regime.

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A glossary might start, for example, thus:

Democracy is a phony word to be sneered at unless carefully modified by such phrases as democracy of the streets, democracy of direct action or participatory democracy. Otherwise, democracy is a trick played on the people by the establishment.

Establishment is, of course, one of the most fashionable words in American politics today, and was to be heard as frequently from Barry Goldwater’s thinkers as from the Students for a Democratic Society. Establishment in the new lexicon is the synonym for any group of leaders anywhere—in the press, in the government, in business, in education, in finance, in the Senate, in the House. On certain occasions, when discussing an entrenched political organization, as in Chicago, New Jersey or Indiana, the establishment becomes the machine. Most hated of all establishments is the military-industrial complex which dominates the American government, manufactures napalm, and sends boys off to die for gross corporate profit. (The inventor of the warning phrase military-industrial complex, that thoughtful scholar and historian Malcolm Moos, now President of the University of Minnesota, is himself frequently attacked as a member of the establishment.)

The glossary becomes operational when it moves on to its action words. Action opens by insistence on dialogue. A dialogue is begun (usually by a self-appointed delegation meeting with an official) when demands (non-negotiable demands) are presented and communications channels opened. The best ambiance for communications is something called creative tension, which is designed to reveal buried hates and unspoken prejudice. The rhythm of dialogue, creative tension and communications reaches its climax in what is called confrontation, a riot condition. In confrontation, force (styled by the provokers of confrontation as non-violent force) is arrayed against the force of the establishment (usually styled police brutality); and as shoving, pushing, cursing and obscenity rise, bloodshed frequently follows, imposed by the pigs (a term which scarcely endears demonstrators to the police), and the cruelty of authority is exposed.

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

Discussion in the new language has the quality, frequently, of a game of intellectual tag—the man who can first pin the proper label on the enemy wins. The best label to pin, for example, on any adversary is racist. Once that tag is pinned, no denial can wipe it away, and moral sanction has been set up for any action that follows the pinning of the label. It is important, always, in any issue or confrontation to establish this moral sanction first; however large or small are the procedural obstacles on the way to the confrontation, the moral sanction arms the demonstrator to violate them, and his strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure.

The rhetorical style is important—because the rhetoric imprisons minds, the rhetoric identifies grievances, abrades restraint, leads to action.

As should be obvious, literally everything described in this passage is true of today’s progressives and especially the professoriate regime:

1. Democracy is dismissed as a conspiratorial lie. This is often done by asserting that the American republic is fraudulent, rooted in slavery and genocide, and controlled by a cabal of billionaires.

2. Any form of legal or political authority—except for the professoriate regime—is portrayed as inherently oppressive and evil, thus absolving the regime and its minions of any responsibility to adhere to the law and their own codes of conduct. In particular, the police are depicted as a malevolent force that must be entirely dismantled.

3. Violence is consistently used under the guise of non-violence, leading to the justification of mob actions, physical assaults, incitement to genocide, and similar activities as forms of “protest.”

4. The professoriate regime, its minions, and progressives in general should never be held accountable for their crimes and transgressions. Therefore, absolute impunity is demanded as a moral right.

5. Freedom of speech, except for that of the regime, is considered the enemy of the good and must be suppressed.

6. Rational thought itself is dismissed in favor of “lived experience,” emotional reactions, personal “truth,” and so on.

7. The ultimate goal is fundamentally totalitarian, as evidenced by the totalitarian nature of today’s academia. The regime aims to extend the system it has established in academia to the rest of society by “any means necessary,” including both legal and illegal methods.

8. The term “racist” is used so broadly that it can mean almost anything. Thus, it can be employed to undermine any opposition to the regime and its supporters while also justifying their actions—regardless of their ethical, moral, or legal implications. Whether or not something is actually racist is irrelevant, and questioning it can only be seen as evidence of the questioner’s own racism.

In other words, none of this is new. America has been grappling with this movement for decades. The country failed to address it effectively then, and many American institutions are failing to do so now. Despite the movement’s numerous crimes and transgressions, it has not been effectively marginalized and has, consequently, institutionalized itself in positions of significant power and influence over American life..

III.

It is possible that even in the 1960s, this was a sign of a broader phenomenon, possibly beginning with the founding of the republic. We can pin various labels on it forever, but perhaps we can just refer to it as “American totalitarianism.”

The United States is often seen as an essentially republican, democratic, and even libertarian society. For the most part, this is accurate. However, there has always been a quiet strain of totalitarianism throughout American history. This likely dates back to the theocratic settlements founded by the early Puritans. Indeed, the American tradition of liberty may derive not only from the American Revolution but also from the struggle against the pockets of totalitarianism spread throughout its society, which demanded such measures as the constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion.

All societies have mini-totalitarianisms within them, such as cults, coercive secular organizations, messianic political factions and movements, and utopian ideologies of absolute unitarianism and universalism. The American founders recognized this danger and took great care to ensure their government could prevent the rise of a tyrannical leader or movement.

It is not clear whether they anticipated that such a tyrant might not be solely dedicated to his own power but could also be a true believer in building an ideal society that will not and cannot tolerate those who do not wish to live in it. Nonetheless, the system the founders built is designed, perhaps unintentionally, to impede the construction of such a society.

Today, a new form of American totalitarianism has risen. In many ways, it is the most degraded and dangerous of all, due to its antisemitism. So, Americans must recognize what is at stake.

To understand this, they only need to look at what happened last time. The American totalitarianism of the 1960s and 1970s failed to fully conquer and colonize American society, but it caused significant harm in the attempt. It helped engineer America’s defeat in war and the rise of a communist tyranny in Southeast Asia; killed numerous people in acts of mob violence and outright terrorism; introduced social pathologies that still beleaguer the US today; poisoned and polarized American political, social, and cultural life; corrupted and compromised the institutions it infiltrated; and then rewrote history to claim that none of it ever happened.

In short, the legacy of those White so eloquently described is littered with bodies. The proof is how diligently they have worked to erase those bodies and recast themselves as a caste of saints, the finest and most moral people in the entire history of the known universe. But the ashes of the books they have burned indict them.

The current form of American totalitarianism is, fortunately, widely opposed. However, it controls several major institutions and exercises political and cultural power well beyond its numbers. Therefore, Americans must read the books that have survived and draw the appropriate conclusions.

The conclusions are self-evident: The totalitarians called their enemies pigs, but they were the pigs. As pigs do, they fouled the sty. Then they fouled everything else.

There is a warning in this too, because pigs will eat anything. The question before Americans today is whether they will allow themselves to be devoured.