Who Has The High Ground?

The radical left's message is powerful, but unnatural

Tomorrow night we’ll have a summer edition of our Transom Book Club for paying subscribers, which focuses this time on the first half of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff — we can consider that as up through chapter 7, “The Cape” — at 8:30 PM Eastern. Watch for the Zoom link, and I hope you can join us!

I had the welcome opportunity to join Mark Levin over the weekend for his Fox broadcast. I always like talking to Levin, he gives people the opportunity to speak for more than a minute, which is an eternity in television time. His questions were on the radicalism of the moment, a follow-on to the violence we’ve seen emerging against politicians, justices, and citizens. Here’s a portion of my answer.

A key question that I don’t know the answer to in this moment is: Who has the high ground?

There are arguments that can be made on both sides of this. For one, the overwhelming pressure from America’s corporate world, the education bureaucracy, and the established media is toward acceptance of the agenda of gender radicalism.

That is: a message designed to deploy race and grievance as tools of authority and control, designed to crush religious belief and drive Judeo-Christian ethics from the public square, and of course, designed to encourage your children to redefine themselves as non-binary or trans.

Except: one of the key aspects of this agenda is that it is designed. It has creators, many whose names are known to us, the output of a laboratory designed to wreck the lessons of the Enlightenment combined with the faith of our forefathers and place the likes of Ibram X. Kendi on the pedestal of power, as sponsored by Silicon Valley.

This designed narrative goes against the natural tendencies of the American people, who instinctively have accepted the lessons of the past as beneficial to all, that capitalism and individual liberty and the strong families and neighborhoods are things that are good and worthwhile pursuits. The construct the radical left advances, against free speech, against parental rights, and against faith in things above, seems oddly inhuman.

If the corporatist right at its worst reduces men and women to cogs within an uncaring form of capitalism, the corporatist left reduces you to gears within a crushing grindhouse of victimhood, guilt, and resentment. The power of the latter is real, don’t doubt it. But it is also limited by its inorganic aspect, by how at odds it is with the natural law and the flow of the American spirit through response to challenge.

The cross, the dollar, and the flag can coexist with American individualism. They have since before the Founding. But the anti-racist cannot. And this may prove to be a meaningful difference.