Is the Fall of Kabul the Fall of the Left?

 

Does the chaos in Kabul mark an inflection point?

It seems to me an inflection point is due, and overdue. And current events in Afghanistan are surely shocking enough to burn for some time in collective memory. Someone needs to be blamed for thiis, and someone needs to be punished. “Never again.”

It looked as though we were already hitting an inflection point in 2016; first we had Brexit, and then we had Trump elected. Both seemed miraculous, a turning of the tide. The cognoscenti, the clerisy, the managing elite, did not want either. Moreover, the elite predicted with confidence that neither would happen. It was as though the common man was rising up and refusing to do as he was told.

We should have expected a response, even a hysterical response, and for the past four years we have seen it. 

Realizing that a wave had swept over the gunwale, it was all hands on deck for the brass-polishers of the regular navy. So we got cancel culture, deplatforming, critical race theory, an openly partisan press, lots of fake news, multiple impeachment attempts, and branding at least half the country, or respective countries, racist and fascist. They didn’t manage to reverse Brexit; the voters remained adamant, dramatically endorsing Nigel Farage, and dramatically rejecting Jeremy Corbin. But they did manage in America, with or without the help of electoral tricks, to frighten enough ordinary folks back into their habitual cap-doffing to their betters. For the moment.

But now they have demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic terms. People are dying. Biden was their guy; now they own him. Covering his own away-from-the-mirror parts, Biden insists constantly he was following the advice of the experts. He ran promising to do so, and has claimed all along to be doing so. 

So it is natural and proper to hold the elites responsible for the unfolding Afghanistan disaster. They can’t tag it on Biden personally, because Kamala Harris is on record as saying she signed off on the decision. Nancy Pelosi insisted it was wise at the time. Blaming Biden and pressuring him to resign would only pass the presidency on to one of them.

it now looks possible, in the shadow of Kabul, that Gavin Newsome will be recalled, and replaced by Larry Elder—not just a Republican as governor of the ultimate “blue” state, but a libertarian Republican. If California falls to the “fascists,” who on the left is going to feel safe? Who on the right who has been cowed until now into silence won’t feel emboldened?

It now also looks possible that, in defiance of expectation, and also in the shadow of Kabul, the Liberals might fall to the Conservatives in Canada.

And this might look to all like a swelling wave, encouraging others to resist and to speak out. 

We seem already to be seeing it at school board meetings across the US.

In a few years, the fashionable leftist positions of today may look as bad as Joe McCarthy did by the 1960s, or Chamberlain and isolationism did by 1945.