When I was a boy of 11 in 1968, the musical Hair was a big deal. I thought I was cool singing its songs to myself. My father told me I wouldn’t if I knew what those Latin words meant. I looked them up, blushed, and stopped.
Hair shocked society because of its frankness about sex, its naked stage performers, hippie culture, progressive thinking on race, and opposition to the Vietnam War. But unlike today’s revolutionaries, it approached those issues emphasizing individual freedom.
Last week’s Democratic National Convention and all of today’s left-wing politics diverge 180 degrees from the sentiments of Hair’s lament about people“Who care about strangers/ Who say they care about social injustice/ Do you only care about the bleeding crowd?/ How about a needing friend?”
To the Left, people’s worth is not as individuals but as demographic statistics, members of one “bleeding crowd” or another. DNC organizers picked individual people to tell their inspiring, sad, or supposedly outraging stories, but they were there not as discrete people but as group representatives — the Hispanic girl whose illegal immigrant mother was deported; the two gay, black men who were useful because they were gay and black and married to each other.
In a TV discussion that night, one of my fellow panelists, a Democrat, praised the convention because it “checked all the boxes.” But to me, that was its overriding weakness; it made sure to check the race, class, and gender boxes of corrosive intersectional theory and appeal to Balkanized groups rather than to a united people with a shared identity as Americans.
The theme of the convention, “Build back better,” was endlessly reiterated, by former President Barack Obama, among others. But there is nothing in the Left’s dehumanizing identity politics that restores. Rather, it dispenses with the individualism of the past, of the sort expressed in the first summer of love, and opts instead for the bleak post-modern socialism of the summer we are now enduring. It presses onward toward a fractured society of mutually antagonistic groups. It has achieved it, and Democrats promise Joe Biden will bring more of it.
In this week’s magazine, we turn from the Democrats to the Republican National Convention under the cover headline “Four More Years?” We examine how or whether President Trump can right his listing campaign and win a second term, and what he’d do with it.
Lanhee Chen calls on Trump to lead from the front on foreign policy. The national security team hits the right notes, Chen argues, but their boss needs to sing in the same key.
Jim Antle examines a critical alliance: Evangelical voters and Trump. Antle looks at whether and why they’ll be back in the president’s corner in November, as they were in 2016. And Nihal Krishan documents how much of the president’s current economic approach relies on Trump himself.
Plus, we run an exclusive excerpt from Byron York’s new book, Obsession, which will become the definitive history of the Democrats’ single-minded and cynical determination to impeach the president.
