THEIR OVER-REACH WILL BE THEIR UNDOING.

Mark Bauerlein, who might be Cold Spring Shops's favorite professor of English, lays out the evolution of vanguardism.

We begin with a longstanding norm, one embraced more or less by everyone. At some point, a vanguard of progressives comes along to challenge, decry, and subvert the norm. At first, the populace rejects the critics and the middle is secure (for instance, the way the Beat Generation was confined in the 1950s to small social enclaves).

But the critics don’t give up. They press the point in movies, the media, classrooms, and courtrooms, turning those spaces into forums of dissent.

They begin, too, with a benign premise: let’s not take our values for granted, let’s examine our assumptions, consider alternative viewpoints. We are a relatively open society, we have a natural American penchant for innovation, and so the consideration moves forward.

As the genuinely radical nature of progressive critics emerges, conservatives, traditionalists, and some moderate liberals step up and cry, “Whoa!” It’s not that they are trying to shut the other side up or end the debate. Instead, they have examined the progressive line of thinking and judged it wrong. The goal, then, is to oppose any action taken on the basis of the critique. Keep on talking, they say, but we don’t want to change our laws, our education, our norms, our country.

Sometimes, though, the transgressives might have a point: the Beats, for example, being able to point to racial segregation and rigid sex roles at the same time they were subverting the dominant paradigm.  Like anything else in human interaction, it's about striking a balance.

What is the proper balance between freedom for the avant-garde and continuity of the stable society that makes the avant-garde possible? And what happens when, as many German voters perceived during the Weimar era, and many U.S. voters currently perceive, the avant-garde is monopolizing the institutions of higher learning, of the performing arts, and of the entertainment in ways that are destabilizing the society?

Professor Bauerlein suggests social evolution works as if controlled by a ratchet: once the avant-garde deconstruct something, it stays deconstructed.

The old normal is now uptight, boring, oppressive; the formerly radical is now interesting, expressive, incisive.

It takes effect by pulling moderate liberals and conservatives to the left, little by little. The centrist who liked “family values” in 1992 now supports same-sex marriage. He used to regard integration as the antidote to racial tension; now he countenances separate dorms and graduations for students of color.

Some of those in the center shift because they accept the inevitability of the leftward trend. By going along with this or that revision, they think they can preserve this or that institution and policy. Others go with the flow because they fear the reaction of the Left should they not comply.

Progressives are inspired. They force people into either/or positions; they don’t do grey. And if they manage to control the gateways to success, as they do in academia, technology, entertainment, mainstream media, and, increasingly, the professions, individuals have to play ball.

That works, I submit, until it doesn't.

Reality, which is emergent, tends to be socially conservative,  And the snooty-ass gentry have, inter alia, erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance; declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatever; and excited domestic Insurrections among us.  And they fret about the Incomprehensible Others thinking of torches and pitchforks.  It is the Right of the People to Alter or Abolish.

Yes, that's a reference to electoral politics, but it's germane to the Kultursmog as well.

Yes, and to use the formulation popular on the trendy left when it comes to sexual practices or obnoxious music or any of the other manifestations of transgressiveness, that toothpaste is out of the tube.  Donald J. Trump may fail, for not doing the groundwork, to secure the Republican nomination, and yet the sentiments that he speaks to, that is the contempt of normal Americans for the metrofexual smug, will not so easily fade.

Professor Bauerlein proposes the first step in pushing back against the smug.

The moment a conservative hears talk of polarization, he should say, “And who caused it?” Remind these civic-minded moderates that conservatives don’t want polarization. They don’t like extremism. Progressives do. They know that a society with a large, generally contented middle doesn’t easily slip into social reform. Tell these neutral observers that polarization is not an unfortunate consequence of rising extremism or some other trans-ideological cause. It is exactly what the American Left has wanted all along.

It's not so much slipping into "social reform" as it is sliding into generalized incoherence that conservatives ought be pushing back against.  "The social destruction that erupted in the 1960s began with the premise that the machinery of prosperity would always be working, no matter how outrageous the mockery of the avant-garde or the hippies or the race hustlers was.  Woodstock could always coexist with moon shots." The institutions the avant-garde own? Not so much.  Reality will have the final say.