Take Me To Your Leader
Yesterday, one expert* noted that there is an interesting feature of America’s current spasm of societal implosion that distinguishes today’s “protests” and “calls for change” from all the more legitimate, i.e., sincere, moments of upheaval in the past: this supposed “movement” has no visible leaders.
Past uprisings, such as in the 1950s or ’60s, had highly identifiable (and sometimes competing) figureheads, individuals whom one could name, who were giving inspirational (or rabble-rousing) speeches at rallies, whom one could often hear in interviews, whose ideas were represented in popular books written by or about them, and whose names and faces appeared on the covers of magazines and on the front pages of newspapers.
Who, by contrast, are the leaders of today’s “protests”? Black Lives Matter, with branches throughout the formerly free world, remains a slogan, not a person. Antifa is an illiterate and cacophonous abbreviation of “Anti-fascism,” a name borrowed from a Nazi-era German organization, but which in modern political discourse essentially means “Eat the rich,” i.e., communism. Those are abstract umbrella terms or convenient internet hashtags. They are not people. Where is their Martin Luther King Jr.? Where is their Malcolm X? Where, for that matter, is their Saul Alinsky? Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, and a hundred other insignificant tools and mouthpieces of the American Left are jumping on the bandwagon to aggrandize themselves by association with this madness; but they are clearly late arrivals, tagalongs, opportunists. There is no easily recognizable spokesman or front man for today’s widespread, calculated assault on normalcy. There is no one in particular to ask for an interview, no one to romanticize with a portrait on the cover of Newsweek.
What does this tell us? It certainly does not tell us what the media and political apologists for this mayhem would have us believe, namely that “the people have had enough.” No, they obviously have not had enough, or else they would be organizing and protesting against lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, government-induced unemployment, and the nation-bankrupting “stimulus packages” with which the wealthy and powerful elite pay off “the people” for the practical hardships caused entirely by the elite’s own lawless power grab.
No, what this lack of recognizable and inspirational leadership tells us, primarily, is that this is not a real popular movement. It is a well-orchestrated, presumably well-funded, mock uprising, a purposeful subversion and disruption of normal life — much like the government-imposed lockdowns it is exploiting — in the name of pushing a distracted and self-absorbed population several irreversible steps closer to some transitional form of post-revolutionary “social democratic” rule, government by competing committees of neo-Marxist activist-theorists, unbound by previous constitutional limits on state authority or previous rational and moral limits on the cowardice and compliance of “the people” in the face of such an aggressive onslaught of propaganda and intimidation.
What the lack of prominent and well-spoken leaders tells us, most directly, is that the actual leaders and fomenters of this subversion wish to remain hidden behind the anonymity of masked mobs shouting incoherently, malleably, angrily, ignorantly, for “change” — with the precise meaning of “change” to be revealed later, when it is too late for anyone to undo it, and when the social and political structures are established to ensure than no alternative voices can gain a hearing any longer.
*The expert in question was my wife during our after-dinner conversation; but these days, if one hopes to be taken seriously, there is no point expressing an idea at all without ascribing it to an expert. She is certainly more credible on this issue than any of the approved experts being cited on other issues today.
