In the midst of a brutal civil conflict seeking control of the Chinese mainland, the rival Kuomintang Party of Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communist Party of Mao Zedong agreed to a temporary cessation of violence beginning in 1937. In what became known as the Second United Front, the two bitter enemies formed an unlikely alliance in order to ward off a more pressing and imminent threat than they found in each other: Imperial Japan.
For four years, the Chinese Civil War was suspended as the KMT-CCP alliance pressed hard against the invading Japanese forces with their technologically and strategically advanced military.
Perhaps it's a strained and even alarming metaphor to draw given the fact that credible scholarship now suggests the Chinese communists used the four-year interlude to do far less fighting against the Japanese and far more replenishing and retooling for the civil war that they were, at that time, on the verge of losing.
Still, recent statements from some of America's most recognizable liberal voices make me wonder if the time is not quickly approaching when conservatives would be wise to form a temporary cultural alliance with traditional liberals, agreeing to set aside our vastly different views of the proper scope of American government, in order to ward off the more pressing and imminent threat of a woke strand of progressivism that embraces more than a few strands of fascism.
First, liberal stalwart Bill Maher, whose resumé includes a persistent denunciation of organized religion, withering criticism of "MAGA truthers with meth teeth," and a pounding indictment of right-wing hypocrisy that claims to despise socialism while doing "nothing but take money from the government," has served as America's most unlikely voice of reason in recent days.
And just weeks before, it was Maher who properly exposed the COVID-hysterical left that had used the seriousness of a pandemic to ignore science simply to advocate a government power grab that curbed personal liberty.
But Maher isn't alone. Former Daily Show host, Jon Stewart, recently came out of the shadows to articulate the obvious regarding the origins of the pandemic.
Keep in mind that until just a few weeks ago, saying what Stewart (a bona fide leftist) just said would have been banned by Big Tech's social media speech stranglehold. It also was the very common sense that got Republican Senator Tom Cotton branded a conspiracy theorist by mainstream media outlets from Amazon's Washington Post, The New York Times, MSNBC, The Daily Beast, and CBS, just to name a few.
Do I think that Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, along with other left-leaning voices like former NBA superstar Charles Barkley are seeing the light? Do I think they are on the verge of embracing conservative ideology? Not a chance.
No, I fully expect that when this moment is over, the societal civil war between traditional liberals and traditional conservatives will rage on. But perhaps it would be in the best interest of both sides to acknowledge the existence of, and join forces to defeat, a more pressing and imminent threat in the neo-fascist, science-denying, progressive woke warriors currently waging a cultural invasion.
