A Subtly Optimistic Fable: George Leef’s The Awakening of Jennifer…

“Jen realized she had by no means skilled this earlier than — profound cognitive dissonance.”

A second of disaster strikes the title character of George Leef’s new novel, The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale (Bombardier Books, 2022). How will Jen deal with it? Does she suppress the sensation and apply what George Orwell referred to as Doublethink: “The ability of holding two contradictory beliefs in a single’s thoughts concurrently, and accepting each of them?” 

Or does her thoughts reject the contradiction and actively search out the reality? 

In his story, Leef affords what his subtitle calls “A Political Fable For Our Time.” Jen is a progressive political journalist for the Washington Publish, extremely expert at crafting what real-life practitioners name “the narrative.”

It’s a telling time period of in the present day’s journalism, “narrative.” It implies storytelling, which isn’t a recounting of information however extra the type of “storytelling” that Southern mothers discuss once they warn their little ones about mendacity. Not way back, as I can personally attest, the craft of journalism nonetheless aimed to provide readers the who, what, when, the place, why, and how in as expeditious and compelling a trend as doable, this to maintain readers’ consideration lengthy sufficient to be absolutely knowledgeable. Now it’s to withhold from readers as a lot of the who, what, when, the place, why, and how as doable to slop out a graspable “narrative,” signaling what they’re supposed to consider one thing and nothing extra. An editorializing “information” headline now normally suffices.

Leef’s protagonist, we study, is a information storyteller par excellence. 

It’s this reward of hers that results in Jen getting the provide of a lifetime. Her idol, the nation’s first feminine president, Patricia Farnsworth, has requested her to write down her official biography, and she or he’s agreed. Farnsworth remembered how one in every of Jen’s deftly delivered fictions helped torpedo her first opponent’s marketing campaign. Jen referred to as it “my very own ‘October Shock,’” and she or he did it unflinchingly out of a then-unquestioned dedication to her thought of the better good. As president, “Pat” radically remade America, working exterior and round constitutional obstacles.

Earlier than her awakening, Jen’s view of the previous president was heroic:

Pat Farnsworth had united the nation, just about eradicated unemployment, ensured medical look after all, and ended America’s dependancy to fossil fuels, amongst many different nice accomplishments. For any president to have so reworked the nation, placing equality, security, and social justice forward of the nation’s outdated obsessions with cash and revenue and founding rules was superb. And that it was a lady who had performed it was really one thing to savor.

Her interviews with Farnsworth happen at Pat’s luxurious California mansion nestled amid the stunning, crime-ridden squalor of Laguna Seaside. Jen registers however dismisses the contradiction. In these interviews, readers decide up how Farnsworth consolidated energy. It included finagling a Senate majority, eliminating the filibuster, packing (“revitalizing”) the Supreme Court docket, after which, removed from reaping the standard political rewards of such an imbalance of energy, she tore on. Her unchallengeable Court docket started issuing preemptive “advisory opinions” on issues not even earlier than the Court docket or worse, on older issues beforehand determined (chosen for such evaluation on the arbitrary query of “Did the outdated case impede the flexibility of the federal government to result in wanted reforms?”). Naturally, speech and gun rights have been among the many earliest casualties, however extra importantly, freedom-minded organizations that normally problem such intolerant grabs determined to not combat a misplaced trigger. 

Subsequent, she federalized elections and “received” a second time period strolling away. To do away with “dissidents,” she weaponized federal companies towards them, threatened and incentivized Massive Tech to close them out, and relied on runaway courts to punish them. Her mantra was a chilling ode to autocracy: “The worst abuse of energy is to not use it to perform one thing good.”

A reader might be forgiven for failing to recollect Leef’s guide is fable, not prophecy. 

From this attitude, Farnsworth is a tyrant as vicious and unfeeling as any granite-brained Communist premier. Nevertheless it wasn’t a perspective Jen may share. That began to vary, nevertheless, when she was attacked within the police-deserted streets of Laguna Seaside and saved by a person her preloaded ideology couldn’t have imagined.

The person is a retired electrician, a Navy veteran, who out of concern for his crumbling neighborhood has been patrolling the streets with a number of like-minded others. He’s black. And he has an unlawful gun. For which Jen was very grateful.

Will was there when she wanted a hero, and Jen wished to know extra about him. And what she discovered introduced her to her second of profound cognitive dissonance. Will lamented the devastation wrought to his state by “power-hungry politicians,” together with the previous Gov. Farnsworth. He talked concerning the piles of legal guidelines and rules that made it “tougher and tougher to run a enterprise, to search out good staff, to afford a house.” Schooling didn’t put together children for all times and work. Electrical energy has develop into a luxurious when it was an afterthought, and so has water. Misuse of eminent area has led to tent cities for the homeless. Systemic election fraud ensured voters have been caught with the leaders chargeable for all of it. As Will talks and Jen probes, she will get stunning solutions about many issues, together with transportation, gun insurance policies, crime, racial reparations, variety insurance policies, and what Will referred to as “group equality rhetoric.” 

May even tells her of the group shaped by his late spouse, Veronica, “the Free Individuals of Laguna Seaside,” who assist one another with varied providers and in addition provide the lacking sense of neighborhood that years of misrule has robbed them of. His spouse, we study, had died of an undiagnosed mind tumor as a result of COVID-19 restrictions forbid her from looking for remedy of her complications. The identical heartlessness wouldn’t permit her a correct funeral.

To Jen’s credit score, she desires to satisfy the Free Individuals, and when she does, she continues to appreciate issues aren’t in any respect what she has been informed to assume contained in the Beltway. Now a significant downside looms: What’s Jen going to write down in her guide?

One of many strengths of Leef’s guide is knowing what motivates Jen. Like us, she navigates a pressured binary world of viewing all political decisions in Marvel comics phrases. Each coverage query about which individuals could moderately differ, which contain trade-offs, is as an alternative seen by way of an apocalyptic lens of Good vs. Evil, and the destiny of the whole world hinges on the selection. With a lot at stake, persuasion is deserted, and victory “by any means needed” turns into all that issues.

At its core, although, Jen’s concern is to do good, serving the better good as she sees it. As Leef explains, “Her political philosophy was premised on the necessity for presidency to guard strange folks towards the grasping designs of enterprise.” Sincerity of her want for the safety of strange folks units her other than the tyrant Farnsworth.

In her pre-awakened naivete, Jen lacked three vital insights: one, that different folks, a minimum of equally well-intentioned, wanting to supply the better good for society, can differ from her with out evil intent; two, their concepts and decisions may even be higher, so having authorities preclude them may truly serve a better unhealthy; and three, grasping, power-hungry politicians like Farnsworth can make the most of (and even inculcate) this notion of disagreement being rooted in evil as a way to destroy their political foes, be they citizen, custom, or structure.

Jen’s expertise and discussions with Will and the Free Individuals — which type the guts of The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale — assist her acquire the primary two insights. Her conservations with others from Farnsworth’s previous drive house the third. 

One thing else helps Jen alongside the best way: her love for classical music, a fact of artwork that transcends the progressive reflex to tear greatness down and assume it may merely get replaced. From the very starting, she is aware of the “narrative” amongst her fellow progressives is that classical music is “‘problematic’ as a result of its ‘white male dominance,’” however she additionally is aware of that’s bunk. Even so, when she attends a live performance she takes an absurd quantity of precautions to keep away from being acknowledged.

Regardless of her skilled devotion to political expediency over goal fact, when it got here to music, Jen noticed clearly: 

Why did they should let ideology get in the best way of objectivity and equity? Sure, the world of classical music was largely white, however all that folks actually cared about was the music. For those who may play nicely sufficient, no one cared about anything about you. You shut your eyes and hear. As for composers, those who have been hottest had achieved their rank as a result of they related listeners most deeply with the music, not due to their race or sexual id. 

In America, it was doable to pretend many issues. You would faux to be an artist by splashing paint on a canvas. You would faux to be a author by producing phrase salads. However to compose nice music took actual expertise. Nobody had come together with sufficient of that to shoulder apart Bach, Beethoven, and Liszt. 

If [progressive critics] bought their means and compelled classical music to be “equitable,” music lovers would undergo. And America wouldn’t be the slightest bit higher, both.

Jen was to find a mutual enjoyment of classical music together with her pals among the many Free. They shared this common language even earlier than they shared different concepts in frequent.

With this notion, Leef’s fable evinces a delicate optimism. The lesson for these of us who hew to the thought of goal fact and are perplexed by the Jens round us is that there are areas the place they reject relativism. These areas will probably be private and studied and can present inroads to opening their eyes to the everlasting values of freedom for people reasonably than collectivism enforced by grasping, egocentric politicians (who will not be gods or superheroes, however folks with flaws). 

For some it will likely be the impropriety of inculcating the youngest amongst us with extremely controversial, very grownup points reasonably than educating them phonics and math. For others it will likely be overrunning sports activities with political posturing. For some, artwork; for some, structure; and for some, delicacies. I do know a fellow lover of Shakespeare who’s a progressive however who deserted longstanding monetary help of a regional Shakespeare theater when it instantly introduced alignment with the calls for of one thing referred to as the “We See You White American Theater” manifesto.

With The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale, Leef reveals that somebody who really desires the very best for his or her neighbors and fellow residents can not eternally ignore the compounding contradictions of rote progressivism. The seeds of recognition are there, and with them, the hope of a flowering appreciation for fact and particular person liberty. 

Some could even discover this awakening by way of Leef’s fable itself.