In the past, I’ve mentioned how David Horowitz and Peter Collier aptly pegged their fellow Baby Boomers’ “New Left” as the “destructive generation.” Yet, it must be conceded that the now-aging radicals have managed, indeed, to create something—a paranoid, alternate reality known as “Our Democracy™.”
As with so much of the Baby Boomers’ old (née New) Left rhetoric, one must recognize how they’ve hollowed out the word “democracy” and reloaded it with their own partisan and personal meanings. For the Boomer Left, “Our Democracy™” is translated as “Our Legacy™.”
The fear that one’s life’s work may have been in vain is a powerful one. While most people measure their time in this vale of tears through the personal prism of faith and family, the Boomer leftist’s identity is subsumed by politics and sustained by external validation from their like-minded collective. This is true not only for the secularists among them, but for the believers who have subordinated and tailored their revealed religions to suit their leftist civil religion. When weighing themselves in the balance, the crux becomes “did you further the ‘progressive’ project?” Consequently, as the Boomer Left’s septuagenarian narcissists “rage against the dying of the light” (which is not synonymous with “speaking truth to power,” for introspection isn’t their forte), their greatest fear is that all their earthly works will be undone.
So too, the Boomer Left’s all-consuming, narcissistic fear has proven capable of being inculcated generationally through sundry, escalating degrees of indoctrination. In both rhetoric and reaction, the Boomer Left has led and fed the collective “progressive” Left with a steady diet of paranoia, ironically rendering FDR’s heirs as the party peddling fear itself—not to preserve our actual democracy but their legacy.
And what is the Boomer Left’s legacy to which they so desperately cling as, wine and reefer in hand, they confront their own mortality and their legacy’s precarity?
What the Boomer Left confronts is a paranoid collective wherein God-given, constitutionally recognized, enumerated, and protected rights, such as the free exercise of religion, free speech, the freedom of association, and the right to bear arms are eviscerated.
Where the police and surveillance tools of the state are weaponized against all dissidents, many of whom are falsely branded [fill in the blank]-phobes and -deniers, and/or domestic terrorists.
Where schoolchildren are indoctrinated, not educated and are preyed upon as pawns for the Left’s latest cultural crusade, while their parents’ rights are deceptively trammeled by teachers and administrators, who consider “Mom” and Dad” both to be passé terms and impediments to the child’s “development.”
Where justice is no longer blind, but colored through a political prism for the benefit of the leftist collective; and criminals are the creation and victims of an “unjust” society.
Where immigrants who follow the law and assimilate are treated as suckers by open border policies and officials who not only refuse to enforce federal statutes, but reward illegal entry into the country.
Where rolling energy outages, rising household costs, reduced personal mobility, among other consequences are imposed to stem the scientifically unproven “climate apocalypse.”
Where woke capital, corporations, and the legacy and much of the social media are willing, well remunerated tools of the Left’s fascism.
Where liberty and equality are replaced by the DIE cult’s worship of “diversity, inclusion, and equity.”
Where the freedom of conscience and the pursuit of happiness are crushed beneath dictates of the totalitarian state, that is the Boomer Left’s legacy.
This is a lengthy—but far from comprehensive—enumeration of the Boomer Left’s “legacy.” One can see why they fear it will not stand the test of time.
The Boomer Left’s attempt to transmogrify the American revolutionary experiment in self-government into a totalitarian socialist collective has been instituted by their “long march through the institutions.” But as a “top-down” effort to foist its harmful leftist agenda upon America, the precarious nature of their movement and accomplishments have only served to further fuel the Boomer Left’s paranoia that their legacy—“Our Democracy™”—will be undone by their fellow citizens, the vast majority of whom “Progressives” deem “Nazis.”
Further, their paranoia combines with the failure of their radical policies, which leads a majority of the populace to reject the results. As a result, to retain power the Boomer Left and their acolytes in the inch-deep progressive collective have weaponized the police and surveillance power of the administrative state, and have leveraged their “information dominance” within Big Tech and the popular culture to demonize their opponents, stifle all dissent, and try to spread their paranoia to the rest of the population.
Irony abounds. Consider the Left’s violent reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, which rectified an unsound usurpation of the public’s power to decide how their state should or should not restrict abortion. Rather than praise a decision that replaced the court’s unappealable judicial decision with one that allowed the public to democratically make their own determinations in the individual states, the Left decried this expansion of democracy. They consider abortion on demand to be a pillar of their democracy—i.e., again, the Boomer Left’s legacy. Indeed, in the phrase “we’ve had this right for 50 years” one can hear the nostalgic lament of the Boomer Left not only for unrestricted abortion on demand, but the fear that their political legacy is already circling the porcelain bowl of history.
Evidently, what most endangers the Boomer Left’s legacy is . . . democracy. True, “died of democracy” isn’t the Boomer Left’s desired legacy. But it is their deserved epitaph.