Imagine being Joe Biden. At 78 you finally get the job you’ve wanted half your life (he first ran for president in 1987 and then again in 2008). You’d have quite the ‘to do’ list, wouldn’t you? Important matters dear to your heart that you would be just itching to use your new presidential powers to set right.
On his first day of taking office, President Joe Biden cancelled a commission on patriotic history education and removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the White House (given his reputation, perhaps the first ‘bust’ he hasn’t liked the look of).
Why were these priorities?
I doubt very much Joe Biden lies in bed at night wrestling with matters of historical interpretation. Possibly because most of the key facts of twentieth century history were current events to him. No, what he’s doing here is throwing a bone to the rabid Utopians.
Old Joe, just like our esteemed Prime Minister, knows that the success of his term depends on pacifying the radical elements in his party. And they know that the reimagining of their country they are committed to begins with a subversion of its history.
The commission for patriotic education so speedily discarded by Biden was the Trump administration’s response to the ‘1619’ project. This was a push by left wing writers and academics (first published in The New York Times and then sent out to schools) to change the true founding of the country from the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the year when African slaves were first brought to the country. If it could be shown that the US was a nation conceived in sin, then any attempt at its radical revision, any utopian project, could be justified. With a flick of a pen, Biden has cleared the way for a generation of American school children to be taught that they are the inheritors of a malign nation steeped in ‘systematic racism.’
Churchill got moved to a broom cupboard because, in the view of these same utopians, his imperialism and paternalistic racism matter more than the integral part he played in ridding the world of Nazism. Or perhaps Biden just didn’t like a daily reminder of what a leader of courage and conviction looks like.
2021 is going to be a great year for the Utopians. With the US Congress now marginally in the hands of the Democrats they have a shot at introducing some of their loonier schemes. The ‘Green New Deal’ championed by the likes of Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders would replace every combustion engine and every house in the country with their carbon neutral equivalents. Biden is already committed to introducing legislation on immigration that would grant an amnesty to 10 million people and by handing out green cards, allow them to import their dependants as well.
The changing of the demographics of the country seems a high price to pay just so Nancy Pelosi can find someone to clean her pool.
Corona hysteria has been the excuse for mad plans aplenty mooted among the international elite for the coming year. ‘The Great Reset’ proposed by the financial wizards at the World Economic Forum (and that well-known economic expert, Prince Charles) would create ‘responsible capitalism’ by directing investments to sustainable technology and ‘fairer results’. How exactly this would be implemented other than through a government takeover of private enterprise that would make the Russian revolution look like a liquor store hold up, is unclear. I look forward to Charlie converting Balmoral into tenement apartments for Scottish day labourers as a sign of his commitment to these ‘fairer results’.
Where America and the world goes NZ will surely stupidly follow. Ardern is in a stronger position than Biden in terms of her majority but (as the recently resurrected New Zealand Listener points out this week) many of these incoming wet-behind-the-ears first time parliamentarians are ‘hungry for change’. Uh oh. To avoid a revolt or a mass exodus to the Greens she will do as her US counterpart did and toss them a few bones. But which ones? To avoid panicking the frightened horse that is middle New Zealand from bolting to National, ‘prosperity’ issues like taxation or housing will be out of bounds. That leaves ‘cultural’ issues that middle New Zealand gives scant attention to, leaving it to geeks like myself to worry about.
And worry I do.
Ardern has already committed to a compulsory NZ history syllabus that I’ve no doubt will be more an exercise in shaming the more melanin-deprived among us than an accurate account of our past. Hate speech laws are an obvious area, particularly given our ‘pink parliament’. Expect the telling of gay jokes to be made punishable by a sound caning of the buttocks on the steps of parliament delivered by either Tamati Coffey or Grant Robertson (whoever wins the arm wrestle). A second look at the currently shelved ‘Sex Self-identification’ law is also likely. This would make getting a new gender identity as easy as getting a new car rego. So no radical change to the fundamentals of our society there then.
The conservative British writer Peter Hitchens makes a convincing argument that political utopianism now fills the cultural space formerly occupied by Christianity. They may cringe to hear it but the Chlöe Swarbricks of this world, in their end time, save-the-world zeal have much in common with the bible-bashing street corner preacher of old. Both believe they have the only road map to paradise and are equally intolerant of any straying from this path to righteousness.
The worst of Brexit and the Trump years certainly had their dumb revanchist elements (Make America Great AGAIN) but they at least won their majorities by appealing to the commonly held cultural values of a nation state. The utopians, in their determination to reject these values and remake the nation according to their ideology risk sowing more discord than Brexit or Trump ever managed.
Buckle up.