Revolutionary cannibalism to ensure purity

Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review,

…we are watching a rare revolutionary phase in American politics as leftists have devoured Democrats. Progressives ate liberals. And progressives are now being devoured by socialists, and soon no doubt socialists will be eaten by hard leftists, Communists, anarchists, and nihilists.

…The result is that the 2020 election will offer the starkest choices in the past 50 years, far eclipsing the radical contrasts of 1972. The current parade of would-be Democratic presidential hopefuls is already apologizing for their past sins of Democratic centrism, in fear of being politically guillotined.

Senator Kamala Harris has pledged to follow the “New Green Deal” currently championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In other words, if enacted, the Democrats, within ten years of passing the bill, would favor ending all “nonrenewable” sources of electrical generation (natural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear) — or 83 percent of all the current ways that we produce electrical energy.

…We get almost no information about the real costs, much less the effect on the now booming U.S. energy sector. America is currently the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. Energy production is a vital source of national wealth, central to millions of American workers, and perhaps the greatest subsidy of middle-class lifestyles, through inexpensive fuel. Would fracking and horizontal drilling become like corn-mash stills during Prohibition?

The New Green Deal would wipe out the economies of a broad swath of states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Such legislation would make Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign blunder—“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—seem in comparison not a major gaffe, but timid and counterrevolutionary.

Open borders and the elimination of ICE will also be the stuff of 2019–20 Democratic debates. But they will be “debated” only in the sense that all contenders will either agree or go well beyond both positions in order to support blanket amnesty. In other words, the problem of illegal immigration would not be 20 million or so illegal aliens who have entered and resided in the country unlawfully, but no problem at all.

Millions more could arrive as they pleased. Caravans would become not the stuff of dramatic news accounts, but rather dreary daily events as thousands of the “other” exercised their global “rights” and “migrated” to the U.S. Or as Univision’s Jorge Ramos put it, the border is “nothing more than an invention.”

…The elderly are not historically illiterate. They grasp that all universal “free” health-care scams eventually hinge on culling out the costly and bad investments, i.e., themselves. They know that “Medicare for all” translates into “Medicare for no one,” especially in an age of open borders. So they will not be paranoid to also assume that in an era of euthanasia and “managed” and “rationed” care, it makes more progressive social sense to “invest” in our youthful future than in “prolonging” already-spent lives — especially when we will be adding more ethnic and racial fuel to the generational inferno.

A society that approves of killing an infant shortly after it emerges from the birth canal might similarly have little compunction about pulling the plug on a 90-year-old who was deemed “unproductive” or suffering from “severe deformities” — albeit of course after a “conversation” with family and their “doctor.” To the Margaret Sanger mind, abortion and euthanasia are twins, and both are cost-effective means to free up dollars for more “moral” purposes.

Once revolutionary movements accelerate, they must devour their own to ensure revolutionary purity, whether in fifth-century Greece, Republican Rome, revolutionary France, 1919 Russia, or Mao’s China.

…Will adults who have driven a semi-truck since they were 18 pay for the debts of hipster Pajama Boys who dabbled in six-unit semesters ad infinitum?

Will Maxine Waters’s idea of racial “reparations” become a mandatory position for Democratic candidates? If so, will Jay-Z, Oprah, Eric Holder, Louis Farrakhan, or LeBron James qualify?

Abortion is already being reconceptualized as a new Jacobin issue, but new only in the sense of pushing back the limit when babies can be “terminated” — oddly (or not so oddly) at a time when science is itself lowering the age of fetal viability ever closer to the moment of conception. Will Dr. Gosnell be given post factum amnesty?

Leftists believe that Lois Lerner — retired with full multimillion-dollar benefits and no threat of a trial let alone jail time — got a raw deal. They like the idea of surveilling, unmasking, and leaking of the names of “right-wing” Americans. For left-wingers, James Comey went from villain to hero once we learned that he had used the FBI to attempt to emasculate the Trump presidency. Ditto for the left-wing pundits James Clapper and John Brennan. Just as Jacobins worship billion-dollar Silicon Valley fortunes, so too they revere rogue bureaucrats who have warped their enormous powers of surveillance and prosecutorial abuse for correct leftist agendas.

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