
© Getty Images/Drew Angerer
Protesters attempt to pull down the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square near the White House on June 22, 2020.
Statues toppled, buildings renamed, curricula "decolonized," staff fired. The protests following George Floyd's killing have emboldened cultural revolutionaries in America and Europe. The iconoclasts are changing minds, and could be in a position to
enact a root-and-branch reconstruction of America into something completely unrecognizable to its present-day inhabitants. Imagine a country whose collective memory has been upended, with a new constitution, anthem, and flag, its name changed from the sinful "America" to something less tainted. Far-fetched? Not according to data I have collected on what liberal white Americans actually believe.
Only a renewed American cultural nationalism can resist it.
According to multiple surveys,
the effect of the riots which occurred at around the same time as the BLM protests
is quite different from what occurred with previous waves of rioting.
First, many of the participants in the major riots were white. Second, there has been no clear call for Nixonian law and order following the riots, but rather greater public acceptance of the BLM movement's
unsupported claims that contemporary structural racism explains why police shoot unarmed black men or violent crime plagues inner-city neighbourhoods. While 57 percent of Americans disagree with the protestors' radical slogan, "defund the police,"
an astounding 29 percent support it. This is so despite the deaths of a number of black people during the riots and the fact the riots have coincided with a steep
rise in the number of black homicide deaths in inner-city neighbourhoods due to
a "Ferguson Effect" of police reducing their presence in these areas.
Comment: At least Russia, China and North Korea find it reasonable to negotiate - unlike the hysterical Democrats: a locked cause producing little effect.