After seizing power, the architects of the French Revolution
instituted a new calendar, declaring the beginning of their regime
”Year One,” thus symbolizing their total contempt for tradition.
They wanted the world to know that they were rebuilding French
society from scratch.
The left under Obama is approaching that level of revolutionary
arrogance. Regarding itself as vastly enlightened, it seeks to
institute a kind of cultural and political Year One in which
America rises above all traditional understandings of human nature
and embraces such changes as women in front-line combat, gay
marriage, and transgender identities.
Conforming to this mood, CBS recently aired a commentary in
which a Georgetown Law School professor said “Let’s get rid of the
Constitution.” America has no need of tradition, he argued. The
country can be based on nothing more than the limitless wisdom of
this generation. Of course, the professor’s argument has already
been adopted through Obama’s “living Constitution,” which treats
the written one as dead.
In the left’s Year One, man is freed from all laws, visible and
invisible, as he determines good and evil anew. “Human nature” is
treated as an outmoded concept, as it implies that humans receive a
fixed nature rather than determine one through pure choice. Some on
the left even consider the category of “transgender” too confining,
as it assumes male or female. They prefer “agender,” since that
suggests more existential possibilities.
Under this culture, one isn’t permitted to notice physical
differences between the sexes, much less acknowledge that children
need a mother and father. The idea that the good can be deduced
from anything prior to human choice is offensive to this culture.
America is “beyond” such trivial considerations—a refrain heard
frequently over the last few days on cable shows discussing women
in combat.
The left considers itself the great defender of science, even as
it denies the most fundamental biological realities. Liberals can
stare at an ultrasound image and see no human life. Such is the
left’s grasp of scientific evidence. It is a movement not of
science but of fantasy. For the sake of its egalitarian dreams, it
routinely denies elemental facts of life and thinks itself capable
of extinguishing them through technology or humans simply choosing
to ignore them.
Placing women in direct ground combat infantry units poses no
problems, it blithely says under that mindset, pooh-poohing
concerns about differences between men and women in upper-body
strength or the obvious conflicts that would result from men and
women living in close quarters on battlefields. The left doesn’t
even feel the need to argue these points. It simply declares such
objections retrograde and asserts that humans can be hammered into
an amorphous sameness.
Obama, who said in 2008 that he didn’t “necessarily” want women
drafted into combat roles, assembled a “Military Leadership
Diversity Commission” to provide all the requisite Orwellian
denials of reality. But human nature is impervious to such
propaganda and will take its revenge in due course.
Given the choice between “equality” and military effectiveness,
the left chooses the former while pretending that society can have
both. Standards will remain as high as ever, they claimed. Right.
A few defenders of the traditional policy have wondered why
professional sports remains segregated if what the left says about
the sexes is true. Shouldn’t we have a co-ed NFL? The answer to why
America doesn’t have co-ed professional sports is that sports fans
would never permit it. Sports is far too sacred for such
ideological tinkering. “Everyone is conservative about what he
knows best,” as the historian Robert Conquest has said. Sports fans
know perfectly well that “equality” would destroy their favorite
sports.
The military is more essential to a country than professional
sports, and yet in the grip of the left’s Year One ideology it is
willing to perform casual experiments against human nature. The
success of that ideology can be measured in the relatively mute
response from Republicans to this change. GOP leaders have either
been silent or supportive of it, which makes sense since they began
the process of feminizing the military under Bush. The success of
that ideology can also be seen in the complete disappearance of the
argument against women in combat on familial and cultural grounds.
Sending recently pregnant female soldiers to the battlefield is now
a largely uncontested idea.
What begins as “equal opportunity” will end as equal obligation,
as women find themselves on battlefields whether they like it or
not. The equal obligation to die in battle is a great advance for
mankind, according to the New York Times, which quoted
approvingly a general who said, “I think people have come to the
sensible conclusion that you can’t say a woman’s life is more
valuable than a man’s life.”
Edmund Burke saw in the ideology of the French Revolution the
end of all noble human relations. But even the French
Revolutionaries might have blanched at Obama’s Year One, as it
hurtles towards an agender world that makes the radicalism of the
past look quaint.
Photo: UPI
