A howling wind

 

So, a tumultuous weekend, wasn’t it. And that was only the weather!

And while the wind was howling over here, over in the Land of the Formerly Free the new president and his team were basking the glow of taking on the media over the crucial issue of who can count best up to 1.5 million.

And the world’s women (or at least 1.5 million of them) were out there in Washington and around the world howling against Trump and for “women’s rights.” Except, since the march was organised by a practicing Muslim, whose religion routinely practices the subordination of women – about which practices the marchers were resolutely silent – you do wonder how seriously we should believe women’s right’s to be their animating issue. Not to mention that of the folk dressed in black burning cars and breaking windows.

It’s all both fascinating and sort of frightening. The left having won their “long march through the culture” they are so used to having one of their various versions as figurehead they now erupt in a tantrum every time things don’t do their way (so maybe they shouldn’t have nominated one of the most corrupt women on the planet as their figurehead, you think?), or they don’t recognise the new overlord as one of their own (so maybe they shouldn’t have been quite so keen to make a position of overlord with so many executive powers, you think?).

Which is all pretty fascinating. Especially so because the new president is so keen to grasp those powers, and so many who are genuinely deplorable are keen to cheer on his doing so. Which makes his occupation fairly frightening.

Sure, he’s done the day-one “visual impact” things that might suggest something different like signing an executive order banning all new Federal regulation until he says so. And he’s had the White House climate change website taken down. All good as far as that goes. But now he’s rolling up his sleeves to get on with his serious business of declaring war on free-market economics and building both a physical and economic wall around a country originally made great by free trade and free immigration – while, bizarrely, dressing up his programme of economic protectionism, white supremacism and tribalism as a defence of western civilisation.

It’s the last bit that gets the rubes excited. It’s the former part of the programme that keeps the cronies happy. It’s all of it that gets the tantrum-mongers so unhappy, because they can’t see in the programme the focus on the special interests they’re so used to.

For those of use as unhappy with the current presidential programme as the left’s own cultural programme, that leaves us enjoying watching their tantrums emotionally while being rationally concerned about what the presidency itself will lead to.

Charlotte Cushman reminds all groups of a profound truth that really did Make America Great that has been all-but forgotten as the winds of identity politics have blown through the culture:

[America] used to be unified by the principle of individual rights—not women's rights, not black's rights, not gay rights, but individual rights. Now, thanks to Socialism people view themselves as a member of a group that fights against other groups. People need to rediscover the meaning of the Declaration of Independence that [recognised] each and every individual with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Wouldn’t that be a wind to see howling through the culture once again.

Here’s Graham Parker:

 

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