Our ruling class’s forceful exaltation of the persons, proclivities, and symbols by which it defines itself, along with its pretense that its preferences trump reality, defeat themselves by their absurdity. That absurdity stems from its members’ conceit about who they are.
Led by Barack Obama’s Democrats, echoed by the media, backed by big corporations’ muscle, and trailed by Republicans with tail tucked between legs, our rulers demand no less than the paradigm of totalitarianism in George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”
Recall that Big Brother’s agent berated the hapless Winston for preferring his own views to society’s dictates, then finished breaking his spirit by holding up four fingers and demanding that Winston acknowledge seeing five. Our rulers, like Big Brother, hector us to accept their rewritten history and to superimpose their scales of value on ours. They end by demanding that we substitute their will for what our very senses tell us is reality—because they please to be who they are.
There is a sense in which the ruling icons of political correctness—lesser Americans are racist, sexist, religiously bigoted, and infested by pathologies for which they must make amends—are petty partisanship meant to squeeze the last drops of voter participation out of the Democratic Party’s habitual constituencies. But our Progressive rulers’ partisanship is more. It is identity politics waged as war.
Ignoring the irony, Obama described what the war is about by accusing Americans unlike himself (and the progressives to whom he was speaking) of being inferior because of their “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” Specifically, he said, they “cling to guns or religion.” Hence, pursuing identity war requires breaking the American people’s grip on their sense of worth, on their very connection to reality. That is why, over decades, our Progressive ruling class has penalized Americans who say the wrong thing in front of the wrong person, re-written schoolbooks, etc.