Richard Fernandez ponders an interesting question in his latest column for PJMedia.com.
Yet the real mystery — one which even Orwell himself did not anticipate — is why, despite having won every culture battle, the Left has lost the war.
Look around you. Every single country which adopted socialism as an economic system went bankrupt. The Soviet Union collapsed. Now the Western Gramscian project is self-immolating in the fires of its own absurdity. The current political crisis is the collective shudder of mortality passing through “every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation”. The left may have “wrapped up the culture war two generations ago” but it is rotting inside the wrapping. …
… The Left is losing because it failed, it lost the Mandate of Heaven, as the Chinese would say; went the way of the buggy whip and the slide rule; missed the boat in the paradigm shift.
Orwell’s metaphorical boot on the human face rotted away as it has done so many times before, because time moves on and every dog has its day. Politics may be downstream of culture but history is downstream of them all, the river which bears away the all-conquering creeds. 1984 has come and gone many times before. The annals of humanity are littered with the tales of kings and politicians who thought they could control destiny, always won the culture wars — yet ultimately failed before the mysterious complexity of reality.
