Do you wish your country would become normal again?

Geoff Russ I 23 April 2024 I The Spectator Australia

Would it be nice if universities suddenly became passively progressive again, instead of shamelessly revolutionary? Should national holidays return to unambiguous celebration and good-feeling, rather than self-flagellation?

If only we could wake up and have it all go away. The hard truth is that this will never happen without normal people taking back society, starting with the universities and other key institutions.

Whether it be Australia, Canada, or others in the Anglosphere, those carrying a sound mind and healthy values cannot retreat from the pillars of our countries. Like it or not, universities are an essential part of Western society, along with the family and a good measure of liberty.

The anonymous X user Edmund Smirk coined the term ‘Swiftian normality’ to denote traditional American cultural tastes like Taylor Swift’s pop music and the idealisation of college basketball star Caitlin Clark. Every country has an equivalent of ‘Swiftian normality’, or more simply put, ‘normality’.

Society will only become normal again when regular people displace the extremists currently dictating the national discourse. The extreme left is energetic and politically organised, and has forced mainstream progressives to appease them, lest they break off from the centre-left coalitions and split the vote.

Normal people are repulsed by these extremists, with their habit of ripping down statues, turning Australia Day into a day of penance, and mutating the Humanities classes into faux-revolutionary struggle sessions. Loon academics in the universities are the brain-trust of this movement, and the solution offered by many conservatives is to retreat from the academy and promote the trades and small business as an alternative.

Tradespersons and entrepreneurs are important and honourable parts of Western society. They also hold little institutional power.

Local chambers of commerce will never shift Australian culture back to the state of normality of recent decades, when even Melbourne was unashamed to fund an Australia Day parade. Conservatives, moderates, and even sane progressives cannot abandon institutions like higher education if they want a return to something resembling those halcyon days.

It is very easy to laugh and dismiss the blue-haired, hideously pierced individuals marching down the street demanding that Australia be ‘abolished’. What is no laughing matter is that those same buffoons will go to law school, and probably enter government as Green or Labor MPs.

Whatever they lack in brains is easily negated by their drive and determination to destroy the society they grew up in. In Canada, they have energetically seized control of the local school boards and rewired public education to encourage young children to despise the existing society.

In Canada’s largest province of Ontario, public school teachers recently took part in workshops that included a lesson on ‘Dismantling Whiteness’, which dictated that the word ‘family’ was harmful. There is no more obvious sign that an ideology is evil than when it attempts to break up the two-parent household.

For all the past furore over same-sex marriage and adoption, gay and lesbian couples only wanted to be part of the mainstream, not upend it. That is the difference between past and present leftist movements.

Speaking of anti-family sentiments, the public denigration of one’s own family ought to be a grievous taboo.

It is common and healthy to have differing political opinions with family members, close or distant. What is not normal is to air those grievances with the family in question and shame them in the public square.

Unfortunately, the taxpayer-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) had no qualms about publishing the grievances of the daughter of a Caribbean immigrant. In several hundred words, the author excoriated her own father for what amounted to little more than a political and cultural disagreement.

The sin of the father was retaining a sense of fealty for the British Crown and remaining an unrepentant Anglophile in modern Canada.

Although presented as a thoughtful piece titled, My dad denies what colonisation stole from us, it amounts to little more than amateur psychoanalysis. The op-ed ended with the following, ‘Even now in conversations with my father, there are insurmountable barriers to us understanding each other’s perspectives… I am left with the residual effects of the British monarchy’s legacy of unfettered imperialism.’

Being an Anglophile’s daughter does not make someone into Malcolm X. Nonetheless, it displayed that CBC management deems this kind of outburst to be an important acceptable part of Canadian cultural discourse.

In a similar spirit, Canada Day celebrations have been cancelled in recent years, with fireworks and celebrations giving way to an annual soulless day of penance in the name of ‘decolonisation’. Does that sound familiar to Australians?

The end of normalcy in Canada has also meant unfettered drug decriminalisation, letting retail theft go unpunished, and insulting women by referring to them as ‘menstruators’, all in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is now the policy standard for the Canadian left, and leaves little doubt as to why genuine blue-collar workers are flocking to the Conservative Party.

The situation in Australia is still not as dire as it is in Canada. There is no Canadian equivalent to the Robert Menzies Institute at the University of Melbourne, which is an island of good ideas inspired by Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister who embodied normal values.

However, the extremists making their way up the university bureaucracies on weekdays, and marching with ‘Abolish Australia’ signs on the weekends, will crush The Robert Menzies Institute if they get the opportunity. They will crush it simply because they are ultimately totalitarians who reject liberal democracy and pluralism.

The path to a better Australia can never be through denigrating its historical foundations, ripping down the statutes of its heroes, and decrying its very existence. Those that do not like what has happened to their country cannot shy away from becoming leaders in all parts of society.

If you believe that Australia is defined by liberal and traditional labor values that you do not want to disappear, then you have a duty to restore sanity. That means running for local government and school boards, not just winning federal or state elections.

10 years of Coalition government in Australia did nothing to snuff out the Woke wave. Even if the Conservative Party in Canada wins the next election, they alone cannot solve the problem.

The extremists have no shortage of energy in their quest to dominate every institution. Failing to match that energy will mean the end of Australia as you know it, which the far-left activist legions will enthusiastically proclaim to be their goal without hesitation.

Not every progressive is a lunatic, and there are good people among them who possess moderate values. They are just as marginalised as anyone else.

Returning to normalcy does not mean embracing right-wing extremism, it means making extremism unacceptable again. Making extremism unacceptable means displacing extremists from the institutions that shape national culture and re-instilling a culture of moderation.

That means that if you are a normal person who dislikes what is happening to academia, you must be the professor who offers a healthier curriculum to new generations of students. To enter other white-collar professions that affect national culture, university credentials are required.

Therefore, polish up your resume and hit the books. The Woke wave is a cultural virus that infects everything, and only the ordinary person can be the antibiotic.

Author: Geoff Russ