Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
The revolution of 1776 sought to turn a colony of Great Britain into a new independent republic based on constitutionally protected freedom. It succeeded with the creation of the United States.
The failed revolution of 1861, by a slave-owning South declaring its independence from the Union, sought to bifurcate the country, More than 600,000 dead later, slavery was abolished, a Confederacy was in in ruins, and the South was forced back into the United States largely on the conditions and terms of the victorious North.
The 1960s saw efforts to create a new progressive nation by swarming democratic and republican institutions. The sheer force of a left-wing cultural revolution would supposedly transform a nation, in everything from jeans, long hair, and pot to rock music and sexual “liberation.” It was eventually diffused by popular weariness with the extremism and violence of the radical revolutionaries, and the establishment’s agreements to end the Vietnam War, give 18-year-olds the right to vote, phase out the draft, expand civil rights to include reparatory action, legalize abortion, radicalize the university, and vastly increase the administrative state to wage a war on poverty, a war on pollution, and a war on inequality.
Our present revolution is more multifaceted. It is a war on the very Constitution of the United States that has not yet brought the Left its Holy Grail: a state-mandated equality of result overseen by an omnipotent and omniscient elite. The problem for today’s leftists is that they are not fighting Bourbon France, a reactionary Europe of 1848, or Czarist Russia, but an affluent, culturally uninhibited, and wildly free United States, where never in the history of civilization has a people attained such affluence and leisure.
