White Supremacists Under The Bed

“That’s so bourg,” said one of the Saul Alinsky community organizers I was working with forty-five years ago in Massachusetts. Though I didn’t know what "bourg" meant, I got that it was a pejorative. “Bourg” meant “bad.” Only later did I ask the full meaning. It was short for “bourgeois,” she said, as if that explained everything. I still didn’t understand but the word sounded familiar and I knew its spelling so I looked it up. Bourgeois meant “middle class,” but I was still perplexed. I saw myself as middle class and still do. What was so bad about middle class? 

Amy Wax University of Pennsylvania Law School

Well, just about everything, I guess. At the ultra-progressive, ivy-league University of Pennsylvania, a law professor named Amy Wax is being vilified as “racist” and “bigoted” by students, faculty, and alumni for daring to write that bourgeois values exemplified in 1950s America are superior to those prized in today’s progressive America. She asserted in a Philadelphia Inquirer  op-ed that in the 1950s people believed you should:

“Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

The last straw came when Wax dared criticize mores in sacrosanct sub-cultures:

“the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; [and] the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.” Wax asserted those were, “destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans.”

UPenn took all that as a declaration of war and several scorching columns appeared in UPenn’s daily newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. One, signed by fifty-four faculty and doctoral students declared that Wax’s bourgeois culture:

“stem[s] from the very same malignant logic of hetero-patriarchal, class-based, white supremacy that plagues our country today,” and “These cultural values and logics are steeped in anti-blackness and white hetero-patriarchal respectability, i.e. two-hetero-parent homes, divorce is a vice, and the denouncement of all groups perceived as not acting white enough i.e. black Americans, Latino communities, and immigrants in particular.”

Forty-five years ago bourgeois culture was still acceptable but today it’s anathema to the progressive left which rules media and academia. Above her original op-ed, Wax included a picture of actor John Wayne from Director John Ford’s 1956 film: The Searchers, the film was depicted as reinforcing bourgeois culture and further enflaming the UPenn establishment.

Other symbols of the bourgeois 1950s like “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It To Beaver” are often derided by progressives. Must we now regard Jim Anderson and Ward Cleaver as hetero-patriarchal white-supremacists? Were baby boomer minds corrupted by their propaganda? Do we need reeducation and sensitivity training? To remedy this, perhaps there could be another remake of “Leave It To Beaver” in which Lumpy Rutherford marries Eddie Haskell. Maybe Whitey Whitney can renounce his white male privilege and transition into a woman. Maybe June Cleaver can organize a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood.

NBC’s Chuck Todd invited Dartmouth’s Chris Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook onto the August 20th “Meet The Press.” Bray argued for Antifa's use of violence in opposition to fascist white-supremacists. Arguing against was Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Then Dartmouth President Phil Scanlon denounced Bray’s remarks, only to be himself condemned by 100 active Dartmouth faculty. Sounds a lot like UPenn's antics.

Thus is political polarization exacerbated. Antifa uses violence not only against real white supremacists, but imagined ones as well. The Marxist left, which seems now to control of the Democrat Party, sees anyone who opposes it as white supremacist. So when Antifa beats up Trump supporters, capitalists, readers of Ann Coulter’s columns, and anyone it considers conservative, leftist Democrats either cheer them or keep silent, recent remarks by Nancy Pelosi notwithstanding.

Perhaps observing how Maine’s rural 2nd District where I live went for Trump in 2016, former Trump campaigner staffer Mark Braynard is bringing his “Look Ahead America” organization to New Hampshire. Interviewed on WMUR-TV, Braynard said he identified 15,000 to 100,000 disaffected rural voters he’ll try to register. In response, NH Democrat Party Chairman Ray Buckley called these disaffected citizens “white supremacists.”

Who knew there were so many white supremacists in NH? Might these disaffected citizens also consider themselves middle class? Bourgeois? Whereas the late Senator Joseph McCarthy saw communists under his bed and everywhere else in the 1950s, it appears today’s Democrats are seeing white supremacists everywhere now.