“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is in the news again, offering resonant metaphors that some find applicable to today’s sociopolitical culture.
Gerard Baker, a Wall Street Journal columnist, found intriguing parallels between the themes of Hans Christian Andersen’s Prometheus-winning fable and the surprising results of the recent 2024 U.S. presidential election.
“It’s an “Emperor’s New Clothes” event for America and perhaps for the rest of the West too, an overdue recognition and repudiation of the regime of oppressive insanities we have been subjected to for a decade or more,” Baker wrote in his Wall Street Journal column.
“We’re all familiar with the details of Hans Christian Andersen’s moral parable: the unscrupulous tailors who trick a vain monarch into believing their empty work is a fashion innovation, the ambitious courtiers who go along with the fiction and vie with each other for the king’s favor, the crowds who silence their shock at the emperor’s nudity for fear of standing out from the rest, and the small boy who alone calls out the truth in the charade,” Baker wrote.
While making clear many ways in which he disagrees with the president-elect and his policies, Baker documents the thesis of column and use of his felicitous literary metaphor by enumerating “the fancy new items of invisible attire that our nation’s rulers have made us wear for too long.”
Among the examples Baker describes:
“The idea that democracy and freedom are best protected by denying people the right to express certain views that the authorities deem “misinformation” and by weaponizing the law against political opponents lest they weaponize the law for political purposes.
“The idea that a nation that sits atop one of the greatest reservoirs of natural energy resources on Earth should forcibly restrain itself from exploiting them to “save the planet” on the basis of politicized science, while other countries are free to do much more damage to the global environment.
“The idea that after a century and a half of progress in expiating America’s original sin of racism and making the country more equal, we are suddenly obliged to believe that America is as oppressive as it was in 1619, and that the best way to right the past wrong of treating people based on the color of their skin is to treat people based on the color of their skin.
“The idea that children should, without parental consultation or consent, be free to choose their “gender,” be assisted by the state in committing acts of self-mutilation to do so, and all on the understanding that we have repealed millennia of science and just discovered that there is no such thing as biological sex.”
Baker goes on to observe that ambitious elites in business and civil society went along with the fictions.
“Politicians on all sides, including Republicans, declined to dissent for fear of being called out. It took a man with some of the instincts of a child, a political ingénue lacking the sophistication to participate in the sham, to call the whole thing out for what it was,” he said.
Whether or not one agrees with all of Baker’s examples or his overall commentary, it’s refreshing to see anew the vitality of one of the classic fantasy works that have been inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
It’s also dismaying, of course, to be reminded that human nature tends to remain the same over the centuries, no matter how much progress we’ve made (or believe we’ve made), and that currying favor with the State while denying various realities continues to be a common political ploy even in these allegedly enlightened times.
Yet, Baker’s column ends with several welcome notes of hope.
“But here’s what I am optimistic about: Four years from now, there’s a good chance that the nonsense we have had to endure will be buried, that important things will have become normal again.
“It will have become normal for the nation to exploit its enormous energy advantages for its own economic benefit and know that the planet won’t explode as a result.
“It will have become normal again for children to be helped to respond to the inevitable strains and traumas of growing up not by having their genitals cut out, but by receiving loving guidance and care from family and society; that people will be judged on the basis of their talents and ability, not on their claims of oppression by ancestors six generations in the past, and it will not be automatically assumed that because you are white you should be punished for your supposed persecution of others.
“It will have become normal to be able to say what you think—on university campuses, in the media, on technology platforms—however unpalatable some people may find it.”
Those who care about individual liberty and respect for the rights of others, as well as the importance of upholding objective reality and genuine science, can’t help but share such hope.
For a deeper understanding of the anti-authoritarian and libertarian lessons in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the 2000 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner for Best Classic Fiction, check out the Prometheus Blog’s review-essay Appreciation.
Here’s a relevant – and prescient – excerpt:
“Interestingly, according to his biographies, Andersen’s inspiration for his fable may have stemmed partly from his own childhood, as he once recalled standing in a crowd with his mother, waiting to see King Frederick VI.
When the king appeared, Andersen said: “Oh, he’s nothing more than a human being!” Yet, his mother tried to silence him, asking him if he’d gone mad.
Because political discourse routinely resorts to deception, euphemism, exaggeration and denial of reality, Andersen’s fable sadly is destined to remain relevant for generations to come.”
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