Three stories for the death-rattle-of-Western-civilization file

It's still a few minutes before 7 AM and I've just begun my perusal of news stories and analysis pieces. But in that short time I've already come across these stories:

• A lady - I guess she must be white, given the situation she's encountering - wrote a novel about a Mexican bookstore owner who comes north to the US after her family is killed by a drug cartel. The author's motives seem to lean more toward proselytizing than creating timeless art; according to her publisher, "the intent [was] to shine a spotlight on tragedies facing immigrants." Oprah made it this month's pick for her book club. Too late. The identity jackboots have already raised such a stink - saying it presents a "stereotypical and opportunistic narrative" -  that the author's promotional tour has been replace with "'townhall meetings' which will bring together Cummins [the book's author] and those who've raised objections to the book for discussion."
• Yale University is cancelling a longstanding and popular class entitled "Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present" because the artists and works it discusses are all white males. When students caught wind of this development, 400 signed up for the 300 seats available for the spring semester's final run of it. It's going to be replaced by several classes, including The Silk Road, Art & Politics, and Global Crafts.
• Cory Booker has introduced a bill in the Senate that would make it illegal for employers to take a pass on job applicants with corn rows, dreadlocks and Bantu knots. 

In a time when the nation's focus is on how the impeachment process is going to conclude, and what a good economy means for this year's political twists and turns, it's important to remember that identity-politics jackbootery has not gone away. Those who would passively-aggressively assume the victim pose are still ruining the rollout of works of fiction - and serving notice to Oprah that she better examine her wokeness level, and quick - as well as further destroying the university's role as the transmitter of the works and ideas that make Western civilization a unique blessing to humankind, and creating an environment in which federal legislators are seriously deliberating whether proprietors of privately owned organizations can set their own standards for appearance.

They're able to do this without really getting very physical about it. No roving gangs a la Mao's Cultural Revolution, no reeducation camps al a Pol Pot's Khner Rouge regime, no firing squads a la Che Guevara's way of handling "diversity" in the early days of Cuba's revolutionary regime.

No, the bedrock institutions of American life are now so peopled with cowards that a little diversity-and-inclusion-speak on social media, at board meetings and faculty meetings and on the Senate floor is sufficient to intimidate them into complete acquiescence. And contrition. "Thank you for pointing out our blindness. We'll now take time for some soul-searching."

I want to close on this note, though: Trumpism is inadequate to address this. Not because Trump or his slavish devotees are racist - they're not - but because they actually elevate ignorance of history and the West's defining ideas to a virtue. They lack the core set of principles that would make it possible to mount a real resistance. You can't "own the libs" on social media and make this go away. The Left has rotted our culture beyond recognition, and there doesn't seem to be a bridge back to terrain on which it would be recognizable.

It is so very late in the day.