Change Is Coming ... Maybe

The New York Post recently published a piece by Victor Davis Hanson entitled "Institutions have violated the trust of Americans, and a new revolution is coming." It could have been about the 1 million members that left the United Methodist Church in a single day after the church's leadership approved having gay pastors and officiating homosexual weddings, but it was not. It could have been about how religiously affiliated NGOs such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), Catholic Charities USA, Church World Services (CWS), Global Refuge (fka Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services), collude with the government and wealthy Democrats, and use our tax dollars to aid and abet illegal immigration into the United States, but it was not.

    Instead, Hanson discusses the role of the pro-Hamas/anti-Israel protests, together with Biden's handling of the southern border, are shifting attitudes toward immigration. Hanson begins by noting:

    Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so.

    But the post-Oct. 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed difference.

    Masked left-wing protesters were unashamedly and virulently antisemitic.

    Students on elite campuses especially showed contempt for both middle-class police officers tasked with preventing their violence and vandalism as well as the maintenance workers who had to clean up their garbage.

    Mobs took over buildings, assaulted Jewish students, called for the destruction of Israel and defaced American monuments and commentaries.

    When pressed by journalists to explain their protests, most students knew nothing of the politics or geography of Palestine, for which they were protesting.

    The public concluded that the more elite the campus, the more ignorant, arrogant and hateful the students seemed.

In not so many words, todays protests and protestors are just as stupid as those in the 1960s, except that those in the 1960s were led and organized by Jewish communists hating on the Christian controlled West, while those of today are led and organized by POC communists hating on the Jewish controlled West. 

    And combined with the de facto absence of a southern border, "Americans are reappraising their entire attitude toward immigration." Hanson concludes: "Expect the border to be closed soon and immigration to become mostly meritocratic, smaller and legal, with zero tolerance for immigrants and resident visitors who break the laws of their hosts." Yeah, I won't be holding my breath. As Peter Turchin has documented, what the majority of voters want has zero impact on the policies adopted by government.

    Hanson's second topic concerns the weaponized justice system, the FBI's involvement in suppressing conservatives, and DEI in the military, with Hanson asserting that "Americans are also reappraising their attitudes toward time-honored bureaucracies, the courts and government agencies." At least in regard to the military, due to declining enrollment figures, Hanson predicts that the military "will have to return to meritocracy and emphasize battle efficacy, enforce the uniform code of military justice, and start either winning wars or avoiding those that cannot be won." There is more money to be made in dragging out wars than winning them, so this is another area that I doubt we will see much change.

    Finally, Hanson addresses the rise of populism, explaining:

    Finally, we are witnessing a radical inversion in our two political parties.

    The old populist Democratic Party that championed lunch-bucket workers has turned into a shrill union of the very rich and subsidized poor.

    Its support of open borders, illegal immigration, the war on fossil fuels, transgenderism, critical legal and race theories and the woke agenda are causing the party to lose support.

    The Republican Party is likewise rebranding itself from a once-stereotyped brand of aristocratic and corporate grandees to one anchored in the middle class.

    Even more radically, the new populist Republicans are beginning to appeal to voters on shared class and cultural concerns rather than on racial and tribal interests.

Thus, he concludes, "we may soon accept the reality that Democrats reflect the values of Silicon Valley plutocrats, university presidents and blue-city mayors, while Republicans become the home of an ecumenical black, Hispanic, Asian and white middle class." 

    Contrary to what Hanson asserts, there is nothing radical about this. The Democrats have long been the party of billionaires while the Republican party that of millionaires--certainly for most of my adult life. The Reagan revolution was the result of Reagan appealing to shared class and cultural concerns of the middle class and working class, bringing them into the fold faster than Democrats could import new voters. Under the current immigration regime, that is no longer possible.

    More to the point, however, is that populism is anathema to the elites--it is the modern equivalent to a peasant uprising and will only serve to unite otherwise disparate groups of elites. The only potential advantage that we have is that the Palestinian protests are splitting the elites (see "Why Joe Biden Has Gone from Friend to Enemy"--Commentary Magazine).