Yes, there have been major battles, like the Mapplethorpe thing. But by and large, the planned and coordinated rivers of doubt wash away some small part more of our shared inheritance each and every day. Every week. Every month. Every year.
The people fighting the battle consist on the one side people who simply want to preserve some form of the status quo, as they conceive it. Possibly, they want to return to some other time they envision as more clear and more simple (which was usually also more abusive and less free).
Such people really want nothing more than to preserve some form of common sense, in the form of ideas like “if we want to help people born here it is not helpful to import millions more people who also need help.” That’s not radical. It’s not even controversial, if one is trying to think clearly. It’s obvious. It’s common sense.
On the other side, unfortunately, they have learned how to turn people into abusive, repetitive machines, who rat-a-tat the days propaganda relentlessly against any and all targets they see. Marriage, family, the notion of biological gender, the sanctity of national boundaries, the value of the Constitution, the value of the concept of universal human rights, the heritage of free philosophical inquiry: all are on the chopping block.
It is really quite impossible to retain any normal sense of human dignity and restraint in the face of machine like abuse. People get rigid, tribal. They contract. They get angry, and act out, although so far in very, very few cases. It’s the other side, trying to prod us with hot rods continually, which is heaping the abuse, and we who are taking it.
But absent some major development, it’s hard to see how common sense wins this battle. The machines on the one side demand of us that we, too, become hard, rigid, unseeing, violent, brittle. It’s a really horrible situation.
I don’t have an answer, at least for all of us. I personally will likely be contracting soon somewhat from the public sphere, and focusing on my own indivisible and private reality.
Something large is going to give at some point. In large measure, it already has. We are a decayed, decadent, stupid people, and I speak of most of the developed world, at least, not just the United States. Most of us have been trained like obedient dogs to hearken to the words of “experts” and brook no disagreement from their orations and pronouncements from anyone.
This line of thought and feeling is a bit grim, but that’s how I feel at the moment. Perhaps I will lighter in an hour or a day. Or when Hillary Clinton is arrested and charged with as many felonies as she is CLEARLY guilty of.