Too Hard

Some regular readers of this blog have suggested that I'm being too hard on the Left, that although there are extremist elements among them, the average progressive or Democrat is NOT a creature of the Left, and it's unfair to lump them all together. There's some truth to that.

For example, there are many (well, maybe at least a significant minority of) Democrats who think that it was a bad idea for Nike to pull their "Betsy Ross" shoe after historically illiterate complaints by left-wing activist Colin Kaepernick. And sure, there are some progressives who might question the Charlottesville, VA city council's decision to remove Thomas Jefferson's birthday from the city calendar (after all, 250 years ago, he was a slave owner) or the San Francisco's city council's decision to paint over a mural of George Washington because it made a small number of leftists feel "unsafe." And yes, at least a few old-school liberals are troubled by the hundreds of cases at American Universities in which conservative speakers were either disinvited or shouted down when they were asked to speak. Undoubtedly, at least a few Democrats are troubled by the obvious attempt by social media giants to shadow ban conservative voices, or Hollywood's concerted effort to avoid any story that might present a balanced political viewpoint. And quietly, more than a few Democrats express concern over the borderline crazy comments that often emanate from the cadre of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders. Yeah ... I get all that.

But something is going on here, and I think Rod Dreher might have identified what it is:

I can hear the squawking from liberals now: How can you blame the entire Left for this? How can you actually believe that a corporation’s decision about a shoe, and a city council’s decision about a local holiday, matters? Nike has a right to do what it did, and so does the Charlottesville city council! Anyway, what about this terrible thing Trump did, and this one, and the other one? Et cetera.

I have to chuckle. This is profoundly ignorant of how ordinary people think. Don’t you people get it? Little things like this are part of a developing narrative, one that emerges from the actions of people like campus activists, media and academic figures, city councils, and Woke Capitalists in corporate boardrooms. The narrative is this: the American nation is illegitimate, the American nation is wicked at its roots, America is loathsome. If we are going to dissolve this old, bad America, and replace it with something better, then we are going to need to start by teaching her people to hate her through and through. Meanwhile, let’s open the borders to let in a better class of future American.

Attacking figures like Jefferson, and symbols like the Colonial-era flag — again, not the Confederate flag, but a Colonial-era flag — make it clear that what’s under assault now by the Social Justice Warriors — not fringe campus hotheads, but institutionalists like senior corporate executives and city council members — is the symbolic core of America herself.

Maybe that's why socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets so much positive media coverage when they claim that the United States of America is running "concentration camps" on our southern border. What an odious and dishonest assertion, yet it's celebrated by far too many Democrats and progressives who might otherwise suggest they aren't left-wing. Or maybe that's why elected leftists like Ilhan Omar or Keith Ellison get away with blatantly anti-Semitic tropes, or why they and others are never called to task for suggesting that Nicholas Maduro is a victim of American oppression in Venezuela, a nation leftists virtually destroyed.

Maybe that's why I'm hard on the left. They romanticize "revolution" (you know, Che tee shirts and Bernie Sanders' speeches) but what they really want is power and control. They had it just beyond their grasp when Barack Obama was elected president and then lost it completely when Hillary was defeated. They've become vicious—no lie too extreme, no action too offensive. They need to be called out. If that's being too hard on them, so be it.