Pigs on Two Legs Turn on Each Other

American Greatness/Victor Davis Hanson  

Tennis great Martina Navratilova until recently had long been coronated as a social justice trailblazer. She was one of the first marquee celebrity athletes to come out as gay, and then to advocate lesbian issues in and out of sports. But suddenly the icon seems out of step with her progressive legend status.

Navratilova had the temerity to suggest that one’s sex is biologically determined. In other words, transgenderism, even with the imprimatur of the social and biological sciences, cannot trump our innate genetic codes.

A frustrated Navratilova was editorializing mostly in the context of men “transitioning” to women, while in many cases still enjoying innate muscular and size advantages over females in same-sex sporting events. As a result, she is being demonized unfairly as an intersectional traitor (“transphobic”) and thus increasingly disinvited from a number of events by what is known as the LGBTQ community.

 

In other words, her intersectional femaleness and gayness are revoked by improper ideology.

Barack Obama, once the progressive “god” who was acclaimed to have the power to cool the planet and halt the rising of the seas, had the recent audacity to suggest, quite understandably, that young black teens need not ostentatiously show their wealth with gaudy chains, or highlight their sexuality with a cadre of “twerking” girls. Worse, the now multi-million-dollar-mansion-residing Obama sort of suggested that young inner-city African-Americans who do such gauche things might be insecure about either their income or their sexuality.

Now even the divine Obama is having his  ankles bitten on social media as a counterrevolutionary, despite his prior denunciations of white bitter clingers, “the 1 percent,” and greedy capitalists who delusionally believed they had built their own businesses.

The new generation has forgotten that the now graying Obama once had the audacity to invite Kendrick Lamar into the White House. He also celebrated as his official portrait painter Kehinde Wiley. Remember the former was lauded for his album-cover showing a dead white judge, with eyes x-ed out, whose demise was being celebrating by toasting rappers on the White House lawn, while the latter for a while had a cachet of taking a couple of Old Master paintings of decapitations and redoing them with black decapitators and white decapitated—e.g., “It’s sort of a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing.” Was that not revolutionary enough?

No, no—that was yesterday. Today the revolution has passed over the once-edgy Obama (“bring a gun to a knife fight”). Now to the Left he sounds more like a crabby Bill Cosby ranting about falling-down trousers.

At 86, six-term U.S. senator and lifelong liberal Dianne Feinstein should have no reason in her twilight years to remind progressives that she has been a front-line social justice warrior, most recently as an inquisitor during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. After all, to bring down Kavanaugh, she had her staff improperly leak the accusations and name of the once anonymous accuser Christine Blasey Ford, while doing her best to present as fact 35-year old uncorroborated rumors and allegations.

Omnis effusus labor as the poet Virgil once wrote. “All labor for nothing”—given that Feinstein recently grew snarly with some school-age kids who were being used as props by a radical green group called the Sunrise Movement to embarrass her into accepting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s unhinged “Green New Deal.”

Feinstein, in apparently white-privilege establishment style, barked at her multiethnic visitors that she would not be bullied (“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’m doing. You come in here and you say, ‘It has to be my way or the highway.’ I don’t respond to that.”) She added that she had just won a sixth term by 1 million votes, and had had enough of their whining. In other words, she was a dinosaur expecting deference due to her age, her office, and her progressive bona fides.

Instead, she was roundly denounced as emblematic of last-generation Democrats heading for the tar pits. As the 2020 race nears, Feinstein only confirmed that identity politics will be the new Democratic gospel, and that being a fabulously rich, elderly, and in-the-way politico makes one a rather low rung on the new intersectional ladder pole of progressive authenticity.

Senator Bernie Sanders, 77, also does not get it that the socialist moment of 2016 is now ancient history. Its ephemeral icons have largely been devoured by 2019 identity politics revolutionaries.

Yet in classic Marxist style, and in a fashion reminiscent of the ossified bolshies of the 1917 Russian revolution, the “democratic-socialist” from Vermont maintains that class will always trump all other racial, gender, and age claims. Or rather it will unite these disparate identities in a Manichean fight of good poor people against bad rich people—as if blacks, gays, Latinos, women, Asian, Native people, the transgendered and a host of other “sections” are like Cossacks, Ukrainians, Crimeans, and Georgians who inevitably could be pounded into the harmonious Soviet proletariat.

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