Our Summer of Cultural Suicide

Townhall.com ^ | July 30, 2020 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Kaslin]

Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.

Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions, and cultures simply died off.

Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors' respect for moral and spiritual laws like thrift, moderation, and transcendence.

Take professional sports. Over the last century, professional football, basketball and baseball were racially integrated and adopted a uniform code of patriotic observance. The three leagues offered fans a pleasant respite from daily barroom politics. As a result, by the 21st century, the NFL, NBA and MLB had become global multibillion-dollar enterprises.

Then hubris ensued.

The owners, coaches and players weren't always racially diverse. But that inconvenient truth did not stop the leagues from hectoring their fans about social activism — even as they no longer honored common patriotic rituals.

All three leagues have suffered terribly during the viral lockdown, as American life mysteriously went on without them. And they have almost ensured that they won't fully recover when the quarantine ends. Many of their often-pampered multimillionaire players refuse to honor the national anthem. In the NFL they now will broadcast their politics on their helmets. They will virtue-signal their moral superiority to increasingly turned-off fans, as if to ensure that their sources of support flee.

[KC Burke]

I also want to comment on the thread. The article is wrong. Its not suicide, it is premeditated Murder.

The electronic, performing and print media finally reached a socialist super majority and decided to kill the United States of America. The academics, long committed, went delirious and support the media like the accomplices they are whole heartedly.

[GOPJ]

Great post. With someone like Victor Davis Hanson it’d be nice to see his name in the headline... then we’d be sure not to miss the post.