Victor Davis Hanson:"How Animal Farm Is Playing Out in the Democratic Party"

VDH's essay, a must-read, is here. Some excerpts:

Tennis great Martina Navratilova until recently had long been coronated as a social justice trailblazer. She was one of the first marquee celebrity athletes to come out as gay, and then to advocate lesbian issues in and out of sports. But suddenly the icon seems out of step with her progressive legend status.

Navratilova had the temerity to suggest that one’s sex is biologically determined. In other words, transgenderism, even with the imprimatur of the social and biological sciences, cannot trump our innate genetic codes.

A frustrated Navratilova was editorializing mostly in the context of men “transitioning” to women, while in many cases still enjoying innate muscular and size advantages over females in same-sex sporting events. As a result, she is being demonized unfairly as an intersectional traitor (“transphobic”) and thus increasingly disinvited from a number of events by what is known as the LGBTQ community.

In other words, her intersectional femaleness and gayness are revoked by improper ideology.

Barack Obama, once the progressive “god” who was acclaimed to have the power to cool the planet and halt the rising of the seas, had the recent audacity to suggest, quite understandably, that young black teens need not ostentatiously show their wealth with gaudy chains, or highlight their sexuality with a cadre of “twerking” girls. Worse, the now multi-million-dollar-mansion-residing Obama sort of suggested that young inner-city African-Americans who do such gauche things might be insecure about either their income or their sexuality.

Now even the divine Obama is having his ankles bitten on social media as a counterrevolutionary, despite his prior denunciations of white bitter clingers, “the 1 percent,” and greedy capitalists who delusionally believed they had built their own businesses.

[...]

Liberals at warp speed became progressives who have now become radicals who are becoming before our eyes socialists—as ending capitalism, the internal combustion engine, and so-called white privilege become, for now, the new revolutionary agendas. The old party elite might be able to pay lip service to the first two tenets, in talking loudly of more redistribution and passing cap-and-trade, but the third canon of race unfortunately is not apparently, like gender, a social construct, but innate, unchanging and genetic—and historically an igniter of tribal strife every time it is elevated to being essential rather than incidental to identity.

I'm reminded of the joke about the liberal who shouts that gender and biological sex are both social constructs, then bemoans the fact that she feels like a man trapped in a woman's body.

Read the rest.