Ever since the election of 2016 our liberal friends have been patting themselves on the back for their #Resistance to President Trump and his hateful cabal of white supremacists.
But today there are a whole bunch of pieces telling us that there are two resistances. There is the public liberal one that gets to pat itself on the back for its diversity and its inclusiveness. Then there is the underground conservative one that dare not speak its name in public. Because there is a cost to public conservatism in the land of the free and the brave.
Victor Davis Hanson writes about it. Dennis Prager writes about the conservative professional musicians that emailed him after he was attacked as a conservative that dared to conduct a community orchestra. Then there are the lonely lives of tech industry conservatives.
And obviously this will not end well.
I return to this theme time and again.
The fact is, of course, that left and right in America view politics in two completely different ways. The left experiences politics as a way of saving society from exploitation and oppression. The right experiences politics as a mechanics of channeling people's rage into non-violent streams.
For the left, the "activism" of politics is about advocating for wretched of the earth. I've been reading over the past week a book by ageing lefty Bernard-Henri Lévy which is all about which group lefties should be advocating for: the Palestinians, the folks in Darfur, or elsewhere in Africa. Or should they be fighting against the new anti-semitism or "fascislamism." But always it is fascist this or fascist that. Do these lefties not see how their obsession with fascism and stamping it out is so very fascistic?
On the right we believe that the point of political institutions is to channel the passions and the rage of enthusiasts into political organizing within the law: backing candidates for office; proposing changes in the law; accepting the verdict of the voters. That was how the American founders thought. They argued about how much power was necessary for a government to do its necessary tasks, and how much was too much.
Personally, I think it is a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for the left to give itself permission to send violent Antifa mobs into the streets to beat up anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. Personally, I think it was a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for the Democrats to ram through Obamacare on procedural shenanigans. Personally, I think it was a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for Obama to govern with "phone and pen." Personally, I think it is a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for tech company diversity administrators to name and shame employees with the wrong opinions and to censor conservative groups as "hate" groups and take away their domain names.
Maybe the way to understand what is going on is to compare leftist politics to a big stock market bubble, or a tulip mania.
On that view the left began with a real issue, advocating for the workers in the 19th century. That's when workers didn't have the vote and couldn't get the attention of the political system without street action. This was pretty novel because previously everybody worried about the poor, mainly of course the rural poor starving and dying on the land, but nobody did anything about it. Then we had the civil-rights revolution, that included women and racial minorities in the political community.
Thus does a great stock bull market get started, on real improvements in earnings and company formations. But eventually a great bull market ends in hysteria as people scramble to get aboard "before it's too late," and there is a period of upside panic just before the whole thing collapses in a crash.
Are we experiencing late-stage leftism right now as lefties scramble for something, anything, to be outraged about and to make non-negotiable demands?
I do hope so.
But I am deeply conscious that, crazy as every bubble may be, the downside is usually worse -- after the bubble bursts -- as good decent people get ruined.
The reason to have free speech is not to allow fools and knaves their chance to strut and fret their hour upon the stage; it is because it is better to have such people identify themselves and not be forced to develop their conspiracies out of sight. The reason not to name and shame people for wrongthink is that if you fire them from their jobs and cancel their email accounts you create really angry people that have experienced real injustice and are eager to combine with other sufferers in a head of rebellion.
But in the current resistance mania, liberals seem to think that it is the end of the world unless they #Resist!
They are probably right. It probably it is the end of the world -- for their foolish brand of politics that has forgotten all the practical knowledge about politics and government that the Montesquieux and the Tocquevilles wrote about and our Founders seemed to pick up in their mothers' milk.
But the trouble with folly is that there is always a price to pay, and it is not just the foolish that get to pay to clean up the mess.
But today there are a whole bunch of pieces telling us that there are two resistances. There is the public liberal one that gets to pat itself on the back for its diversity and its inclusiveness. Then there is the underground conservative one that dare not speak its name in public. Because there is a cost to public conservatism in the land of the free and the brave.
Victor Davis Hanson writes about it. Dennis Prager writes about the conservative professional musicians that emailed him after he was attacked as a conservative that dared to conduct a community orchestra. Then there are the lonely lives of tech industry conservatives.
And obviously this will not end well.
I return to this theme time and again.
The fact is, of course, that left and right in America view politics in two completely different ways. The left experiences politics as a way of saving society from exploitation and oppression. The right experiences politics as a mechanics of channeling people's rage into non-violent streams.
For the left, the "activism" of politics is about advocating for wretched of the earth. I've been reading over the past week a book by ageing lefty Bernard-Henri Lévy which is all about which group lefties should be advocating for: the Palestinians, the folks in Darfur, or elsewhere in Africa. Or should they be fighting against the new anti-semitism or "fascislamism." But always it is fascist this or fascist that. Do these lefties not see how their obsession with fascism and stamping it out is so very fascistic?
On the right we believe that the point of political institutions is to channel the passions and the rage of enthusiasts into political organizing within the law: backing candidates for office; proposing changes in the law; accepting the verdict of the voters. That was how the American founders thought. They argued about how much power was necessary for a government to do its necessary tasks, and how much was too much.
Personally, I think it is a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for the left to give itself permission to send violent Antifa mobs into the streets to beat up anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. Personally, I think it was a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for the Democrats to ram through Obamacare on procedural shenanigans. Personally, I think it was a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for Obama to govern with "phone and pen." Personally, I think it is a strategic mistake of cosmic proportions for tech company diversity administrators to name and shame employees with the wrong opinions and to censor conservative groups as "hate" groups and take away their domain names.
Maybe the way to understand what is going on is to compare leftist politics to a big stock market bubble, or a tulip mania.
On that view the left began with a real issue, advocating for the workers in the 19th century. That's when workers didn't have the vote and couldn't get the attention of the political system without street action. This was pretty novel because previously everybody worried about the poor, mainly of course the rural poor starving and dying on the land, but nobody did anything about it. Then we had the civil-rights revolution, that included women and racial minorities in the political community.
Thus does a great stock bull market get started, on real improvements in earnings and company formations. But eventually a great bull market ends in hysteria as people scramble to get aboard "before it's too late," and there is a period of upside panic just before the whole thing collapses in a crash.
Are we experiencing late-stage leftism right now as lefties scramble for something, anything, to be outraged about and to make non-negotiable demands?
I do hope so.
But I am deeply conscious that, crazy as every bubble may be, the downside is usually worse -- after the bubble bursts -- as good decent people get ruined.
The reason to have free speech is not to allow fools and knaves their chance to strut and fret their hour upon the stage; it is because it is better to have such people identify themselves and not be forced to develop their conspiracies out of sight. The reason not to name and shame people for wrongthink is that if you fire them from their jobs and cancel their email accounts you create really angry people that have experienced real injustice and are eager to combine with other sufferers in a head of rebellion.
But in the current resistance mania, liberals seem to think that it is the end of the world unless they #Resist!
They are probably right. It probably it is the end of the world -- for their foolish brand of politics that has forgotten all the practical knowledge about politics and government that the Montesquieux and the Tocquevilles wrote about and our Founders seemed to pick up in their mothers' milk.
But the trouble with folly is that there is always a price to pay, and it is not just the foolish that get to pay to clean up the mess.
No comments:
Post a Comment