Earlier: The Not So Great Reset: “Build Back Dumber”
On the New York Times’ op-ed page, Ross writes about what I call the Not So Great Reset:
The Pandemic’s Gift to Radicalism
When normal life recedes, ideology fills the vacuum.By Ross Douthat
Opinion ColumnistJan. 30, 2021, 2:30 p.m. ET
This week, the San Francisco School Board of Education voted 6 to 1 to proceed with a plan to rename 44 of the city’s currently shuttered schools, wiping away notables like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Paul Revere, Robert Louis Stevenson and even Dianne Feinstein, California’s senior senator, for various forms of cooperation with white supremacy and patriarchy.
… It is precisely because the city’s public school classrooms are closed, precisely because normal educational tasks and interactions have been suspended, that radical projects find themselves more easily and naturally fast-tracked. If there’s anything we’ve learned about pandemic life, it’s that suspense of ordinary life creates a vacuum that ideology rushes in to fill. …
What’s happened on the far left is somewhat different. The right’s pandemic-era dreamscape reflects a fear of growing powerlessness, with paranoia about malignant and all-powerful elites coupled with a fantasy of eucatastrophic victory. The left’s pandemic ambitions, though, are all about using newfound power to transform institutions in which their influence has been increasing. That makes them utopian but not fantastical, extreme but not a fever dream.
The right’s fears are reasonable, but the narrowness of the current Overton Window blocks them from conceiving of the threat as manifesting itself from America’s new most sacred value Diversity!, So they make up various fears that strike them as noncontroversial and nondivisive (pedophilia) and loves, such as a dynastic cult of personality, intended to solve the problems of a multiracial empire through nonracial expedients.
The left of course knows exactly what it wants: Tony Montana’s trifecta of money, power, and women. But since it controls the Overton Window, nobody is allowed to articulate the obvious.
For instance, the San Francisco school board’s grasp of history may be shaky and its history-erasing ambitions radical, but it really does have the power to carry out a school-renaming project or a dramatic curricular review or any other step deemed necessary to instantiate the new era of awokened liberalism….
So an interesting question is which sort of radicalism is more likely to persist once the pandemic is gone and semi-normality returns. Does the fantasy aspect of right-wing radicalism make it more resilient and dangerous post-Covid — or more likely to dissolve, like an enchantment after midnight? Do the more realistic ambitions of left-wing radicalism enable its entrenchment, or inspire a swifter backlash against its overreach?
