Joy(less) to the World

The Left’s attempted Christmas carol cancellation reveals a comedic verdict but a tragic process. When it comes to the Left’s cancellation culture, it’s easy to focus on its results: the unfairness, the absurdity. However, by so doing, we overlook the more important… and the more sinister: The process that the Left wishes to impose throughout society.

By now, many of you are familiar with Joy Reid’s release of a clip that claims to cast Jingle Bells as racist. That’s right: the Christmas carol — the one you have sung innumerable times and whose catchy tune is probably running through your head right now. That Joy Reid would do this is not surprising: It is what she does to get attention. Reid is perpetually angry and forever sees racism everywhere. Now, she and the Left want to dictate what Christmas carols we shouldn’t sing. What she wants us to sing, she doesn’t say, though it’s pretty safe to assume it’s not Irving Berlin’s White Christmas. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 180: The Woke Claims Jingle Bells Is Racist)

If, as Samuel Johnson said, “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” racism is the first refuge of the Left. Now, the Left has sought it in Christmas carols via a one-horse open sleigh.

However, there is a seriousness in this foolishness. This latest exercise epitomizes what the Left sees as its purpose and what it aims for its role to be in society.

The Left seeks a pervasive and predominant influence in American society. There is nothing that the Left does not want to dictate to us. There are to be no limits to its reach.

That the Left is determined to insert itself everywhere and that it is continually looking for ways to do so can hardly be doubted. The economy, the historical focus and fulcrum of Marxism, is just the beginning for today’s Left. Culture, climate, race, and gender are all targets. Rest assured, more are on the way.

The Left will never be placated because its list of areas in which it wishes to meddle is ever-growing, and it is because, by expanding it, the Left gains the potential for increasing its power and influence.

All this is even more true for any state the Left achieves control of. It is tempting to say that the Left’s view of government — the government they would run if allowed to do so — is the opposite of the protections in the Constitution’s Ninth and 10th Amendments, which explicitly protect the rights of citizens and the states. Such a view would be wrong. It is because the Left would never be so careless as to delineate the powers it wants to expand, or wall off any that it will someday want to grasp. The idea of limited government — for any limits at all to their government — for its ideal state, is an oxymoron for the Left.

As shown by their attempt to put the scarlet “R” on Jingle Bells, nothing is off limits for the Left. Likewise, all means of extending current limits are permissible. Jingle Bells’ retro-reevaluation — passing the past through the prism of the present — is fair game for them. That there is nothing in this simple song which would give the modern ear pause does not matter in the slightest. The Left gets to assign values and motives at will, and stretching that ability back 170 years is as plausible to them as anything else.

Of course, no carols written by anyone are likely to pass the Woke test once it suits the Left to apply it. And that is the point. For the Left, there is no objective standard. Only its subjective one, with everything subject to it.

As the Left’s move against Jingle Bells shows, ex post facto actions are perfectly alright. In fact, they are a preferred go-to device. As abhorrent as this method of after-the-fact judgment seems to us, there is no aberration for the Left. Its “Cancel Culture” similarly shows what place due process would have under the Left’s state: None.

For too long, we have laughed off the Left’s inanities: rolled our eyes and walked away. Doing so, we leave them to regroup and then probe another area of our society. Only later do we realize that we are hemmed in on all sides, like Gulliver lying beneath the lines of the Lilliputians.

We would do well, therefore, not to focus as much on the absurdity of the Left’s charges, but instead on the horrors of the process by which they reach them. It is one tailormade for a limitless scope and power. And for awful consequences if we permit the Left to be successful and govern.

READ MORE from J.T. Young:

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The Price of Democrats’ Extremism

J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing. Follow him on Substack.