The Liberal Culture of "Peaceful Protest" is a Lie

Because of President Obama we conservatives have learned a lot more about the left-wing culture of "protest" and "activism" than we wanted. We've had to become familiar with Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals; we've made a nodding acquaintance with the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School; we've wrinkled our noses about the wonder of community organizing, and now we are getting abused by the Black Autumn of Black Lives Matter and student protests at our most prestigious universities with the lists of "demands."

My own personal encounter with this left-wing culture was during classes at the University of Washington, where I repaired in recent years to take classes in Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hume. On two separate occasions some young woman spoke up about politics as peaceful protest. In the minds of these young women, politics consists of organizing a protest march to City Hall.

This is rubbish. It is illegitimate for the scions of the ruling class to use street violence, even under the euphemism of "peaceful protest," in the war of politics.

Back in the day, the bourgeoisie feared nothing more than the "mob." I assume they meant a spontaneous or planned explosion of the lower orders into the streets. You can read about it in histories of the American Revolution. Mobs would attack the house of a prominent Tory and sack and burn it. Alexander Hamilton, as a young student, stood at the front door of King's College (now Columbia University) to temporize with the mob that wanted to deal with the notorious Tory president of the college, Dr. Myles Cooper.

Today, the ruling-class youth think nothing is more noble than to lead a "peaceful protest" against some injustice and present its demands to a ruling class official at a college or a government office.

It all makes sense, given the over-under coalition between liberals and government-approved victim classes that coalesces in the Democratic Party. The normal way for the lower orders to express their rage is by the street riot. So the sensible thing to do is for the educated, evolved ruling-class community organizer to deflect their unfocussed rage into a "march" or a "peaceful protest."

But, of course, there is a problem. Our ruling-class activists do not just use this technique to give a voice to the voiceless. They use it to push their own ruling-class agenda. They protest about climate change: you'll have seen reference to "peaceful protests" in Paris at #COP21 recently. Given the way that left-wing media report these protests you would be forgiven for thinking that in the left-wing world, protest is a kind of sacrament. They protest about African American rights, although you might be forgiven for thinking that the need to protest against government injustice dissolved about half a century ago.

Thus with feminism and gay rights. These are not issues that animate the lower orders; they are the political agenda of elite ruling-class liberals. I argue that it is an illegitimate and unjust use of the ruling class's cultural and political power for ruling-class feminists and ruling-class gays to indulge themselves in street action.

Now one thing that the left has properly publicized is that, in the bad old days of fascism, the fascist demonstrators were tolerated by the justice system. Fascist demonstrators got light sentences for disturbing the peace. And this encouraged them in their street action and violence.

What our tender liberals of today don't grasp is that their "peaceful protests" get exactly the same treatment from the justice system as the fascists did nearly a century ago. James Hansen, government administrator and climate activist, gets himself arrested outside the White House. Does he get prosecuted to the full extent of the law, as conservative Dinesh D'Sousa did for a minor campaign violation? Goodness no! Because Hansen is doing the ruling class's work for it with his climate activism.

A telling marker is to note what happens when the other side does it. The Tea Party was a spontaneous eruption of middle-class rage in the wake of the bank bailouts and President Obama's election. (Yes, I think that there was some inchoate racism involved). As soon as the Tea Party got on the liberal radar liberals launched into a huge campaign to delegitimize it, and to paint it as a dangerous eruption of right-wing extremism. Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, talked about "Astroturf," meaning that the Tea Party was organized by conservative elitists. Others tagged the Tea Partiers as "tea-baggers," a reference to gay sexual practice. And of course, whenever there is a mass shooting, liberals shoulder each other aside in immediately blaming right-wing extremism, "eliminationist rhetoric" and racism and sexism for the outrage. In other words, liberals are scared stiff that conservatives might organize into a protest movement against them. That is why liberals are permanently in a panic about "right-wing militias."

In other words, protest is fine for liberals, but not for conservatives: protest for me, but not for thee.

So the whole culture of left-wing protest is a ruling-class conceit, a lie. It is used to advance liberal causes, and to demonize conservatives.

I like to say that after the election of Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan the liberal command bunker came to realize that it needed to push the protesters to the back of the line and teach the American people that liberals were just like them, only more compassionate. But now we have a new generation of liberals that have forgotten the hard-won wisdom of their fathers.

And so they will have to learn it the hard way, in landslide political defeat.

When you say that the street action of your supporters is nothing more than "peaceful protest" while the other guys are nothing more than "right-wing extremists" you are sending out a rather clear message.

Obama Behind the 8-Ball

The obvious explanation of President Obama's Sunday night Oval Office speech is that the president's men realize that they have a problem. Doing nothing about Islamic terrorism isn't going to cut it.

So the solution is for the president to do an Oval Office speech and seem to be "doing something."

But the problem is that liberal identity politics makes them want to analyze the radical Muslim threat as an protest against injustice. So liberals agree with the Iranian idea of the US as the Great Satan. Indeed any group that presents itself as victimized is catsmeat to the liberals. Because that's how they do politics.

That is the essence of left-wing politics: to represent and to lead the wretched of the earth and to fight for their rights.

But the problem is that left-wing politics divides the people of the nation state into tribal enclaves. And when your politics is based on dividing people into enclaves you find it hard to reunite the people out of their enclaves when it is time to fight for the nation.

And that is what Democrats are struggling with. They don't want to unite the nation to fight anything unless it's climate change. But climate change is a global challenge, not a national challenge.

That sort of thing gets them into an impossible situation.

The fact is that a government, any government, exists to protect its people from the rest of the world. It is there to unite the people to fight off the aggression of the rest of the world. In the nation state the government unites the nation against the world.

Because liberals have put the protection of their identity group clients over the protection of the nation, and confine their politics to the uniting of their identity groups. So when a issue arises that requires the uniting of the nation, liberals are nonplussed.

So that's why The New York Times responds to the San Bernardino terror attack by publishing a editorial pushing gun control. Because that's what they know.  They don't seem to think about the fact that gun control is an issue that divides America and is used by liberals to demonize conservatives and marginalize them. The idea of finding common ground with conservatives to unite the nation just doesn't occur to them.

So that's why President Obama does a Sunday night Oval Office speech with blather about "our values" and "giving in to fear." It doesn't occur to him that his job now requires him to formulate a strategy against radical Islam and unite the nation to fight it. Because the last thing the president wants to do is to rekindle the spirit of the American nation.

The last time the Democrats flunked the national test, and didn't unite the nation when it needed uniting, they got stuck with Ronald Reagan and he changed the world.

So there is no telling what will happen this time around. But the good thing is that the next president of the United States is going to have to unite the nation to fight against the latest outbreak of the Great Reaction against freedom and markets and individual responsibility. And the chances are that that president will be a Republican.

Could it be that Republicans will get the credit for winning the war against radical Islam? Dream on, pal.

Political Reaction: It's Not What You've Been Taught

Everybody knows that reactionaries are right-wing Throne and Altar types that want to keep... Er, yes, what exactly? Would it be the power of the monarch and the state church? Would it be the power of the bourgeoisie? Would it be traditional morality? Would it be white male European hegemony?

The answer is it depends. It depends on the two-minute hate that our progressive overlords are orchestrating this week.

But I want to suggest that it is the progressives who are the true reactionaries, in company with their identity group pals from feminists to Islamists.

What all these groups have in common is that they are reacting against the modern Age of Responsibility. In the modern Age of Responsibility each one of us, each individual, must accept the responsibility of making his or her own way in the world. Of course, in reality, we are not alone. The more we offer ourselves to the world, the more the world takes care of us. The situation of the modern individual was best described by Eric Hoffer who wrote that there are two options in the world of work. Either the boss tells you what to do, or you, the worker, takes that responsibility on yourself.

And this responsibility is terrifying. It just goes against every human social instinct to believe that you can wive and thrive in the world by surrendering yourself, naked, to the market and finding out by trial and error how to make your contribution to the world.

It makes sense that as soon as industrial capitalism started to turn the world upside down -- and increase per capita income by 30 times in 200 years -- that movements of rejection would rise up to stop it.

Because for anyone that hasn't tried it, the market economy of the invisible hand is obviously a complete delusion. It stands to reason that when the billionaire capitalist faces the semi-skilled worker that the worker goes to the wall, or at least to a state of starvation wages. So a big strong government is needed to stop that from happening.

The same applies to the other movements of rejection.

Feminists can't believe that women can thrive in the working world without lots of special legislation to protect them from the patriarchy.

Race identity groups can't believe that the unhampered market will give them an equal chance at prosperity; they insist on government enforcing diversity and equality.

Gays can't believe that the world will let them alone; they insist on using government to bully Christians.

And, of course, the probleme du jour, Islam. Of course the Muslims are reacting against the global attack on their tribal, paternalist society. It cannot be true that the world can work without the faithful imposing their will on the rest of the world.

But resistance is futile. We have already seen this with the most extreme reactionary movements like communism. Communism wrecked the economy and the society of Russia and of China. So in the end the Commies had to give up communism. We are seeing it in the slow-motion failure of the neo-feudal welfare state. It just doesn't work in the Age of Responsibility to recreate the feudal top-down hierarchy, where people nestle in the government's social-welfare programs for protection from the market.

In due course, the Muslims will discover that Islamism doesn't work either. But rivers of blood will have to flow before that happens. Just like with communism.

Oh What a Relief It Is

The San Bernadino Islamist terrorist killings are not a joke. But what conservative can help feeling a sense of relief that the killings were not, as Hillary Clinton tweeted, "gun violence" but a simple terror attack by Muslim terrorists infected with the jihad bug.

It's telling, isn't it, that liberals go into full right-wing extremism, Christian terrorism mode when some mentally-ill loner shoots up a crowd, but go into full non-judgmental mode when Muslims are involved. Like President Obama this morning.

"At this stage, we do not yet know why this terrible event occurred,” Obama said during remarks at the White House. He added: “It is possible this was terrorist-related, but we don’t know. It is also possible this was workplace related.”

Oh yeah.

Conservatives have known for ages what is going on here. If you are President Obama or any community-organizer liberal your existential fight is with conservatives, Christians, racist white males and evil Koch Brothers. Radical Muslims, jihad, Israel, Christians in the Middle East are really not that important. And anyway, with all foreign policy questions and non-white groups, there is the question of racism and colonialism. And we wouldn't want to risk even the teeniest taint of racism and colonialism.

When some white guy lets loose with a gun, on the other hand, liberals are thinking: It begins; the white racist sexist insurgency against our rule. So of course it is important to stamp it out right now before the spark develops into a fire. And the first thing to do is to disarm the white racist homophobes before they develop into a militia.

If you think this analysis of liberal motivations suggest a liberal paranoia, know that rulers are always interested in disarming the opposition. It's not really paranoia, it's just taking care of business. You never know when a head of rebellion might develop, but it certainly doesn't hurt to make it really difficult for the would-be rebels to get weapons.

In Anglo-Saxon history the disarming of the populace all started with the Tudors. From p.47 in Kevin D. Williamson's The End is Near:

They began by depriving the barons and other regional powers of their private military forces... They then set about tearing down the castles and fortresses of the individual lords.

The French did the same thing in the 17th century. That made it easier for the French Revolution to succeed because the nobility had all been concentrated in the capital, and couldn't appeal to their vassals and peasants for support when the Enlightenment came knocking on the doors of kingly power.

But notice what our liberal rulers do permit and condone. They condone their educated youth and its "peaceful protests" at its universities. They have nothing to say about criminal gangs of blacks and Hispanics operating in our big cities. They apologize for "workplace violence" when committed by Muslims.  In other words they condone shows of force when the demonstrations are made by people that they judge to be their regime supporters.

Here is something to think about. The San Bernadino killings were done at a local government office facility. The front page of the New York Post on Friday December 3, 2015 shows an African American woman wounded on the ground and an East Asian woman kneeling by her side. The killers are killing regime supporters.

I'd say that when Muslim killers are killing Democratic-voting minorities then it's time for the liberal astronauts to radio "Houston we have a problem" back to Debbie Wasserman Schultz at Democratic Party HQ. Because if you can't protect your own government employee supporters when they plead "is it safe", what's the point of your patron/client politics? The whole point of clientism is for the clients to find a safe space within the power perimeter of the patron.

As the Marxists would say: Eventually capitalism liberalism will collapse from its own internal contradictions.

Murdoch and Koch Heart America

In these days when our young 'uns, or at least the most privileged ones at the most prestigious universities, are determined to echo the insular views of their jobs-for-life professors, here comes the ogre behind Fox News, the amiable Rupert Murdoch in his own newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. 

Murdoch is getting an award from the Hudson Institute so he has to give a speech. And since he is being introduced by Henry Kissinger, he has a few words for him too. His speech is title "America the Indispensable." As in:

1. America saved Australia in WWII. "There is no way that Australia alone could have defended itself during the Second World War, heroic as Australian troops were."
2. "America saved the now prospering South Korea from the barbarity of Kim Il Sung. And that sacrifice and intervention provided the buffer that Japan needed to rise from the postwar ashes to be a great economy and a reliable ally."
3. America intervened in Vietnam.
4. "And in the 1980s, thanks to Ronald Reagan, America stood firm against the Soviet Union." That meant one Germany instead of two. "It recast Europe and emancipated millions."
5. The US facilitated the rise of China. "That emancipation of the most populous nation on earth is a modern miracle", raising the Chinese people from poverty through the action of the market.
6. Fracking. "Not hundreds of millions, but billions of people will benefit from fracking and the cheaper energy it provides."

It's interesting to read such a simple and straightforward recitation of America's positive role in the world. Because we haven't heard a peep about it in the last Seven Lean Years of Obamadom.

It all comes down to this, as Murdoch says:

Around our country, there is a restless desire for revival. We see it in the primary process, which, apart from an interesting cast of characters, has articulated a deep distaste for the slow descent of our country.

And not just within America, but outside, as the world yearns for American leadership, for

without this country’s self-confident championing of that “human quest for freedom and humane values,” global affairs collapse into nightmare—the policy wasteland becomes fertile territory for terror. 

Good old Rupert Murdoch. Why, he's almost as good an American as Charles Koch, of Koch Brothers fame. Koch has just published a book of his business philosophy, Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies. You'll be amazed to learn that the supposed slash-and-burn monster built Koch Industries from a $10 million business to a $100 billion business on the idea that business is about long-term relationships, and a business should treat customers and suppliers as their friends. I know: nothing new here. "Creating value for others" is the basic proposition of market capitalism. You find out what people want, or might want. You make it and sell it at the price they are willing to pay. Then you make a profit. Here's the interview with Hugh Hewitt.

Like I said. I voted for Obama in 2008 because I felt that America had to give Democrats the reins of power so we could get beyond the "Oh the Horror" culture of the Bush era. I little knew that Obama would teach Americans to elect the most Republican Congress in 85 years.

And now American voters are getting the see the "kids" protestin' again on campus, after a 50 year hiatus. Oh, and everywhere you look is evidence of Democrat corruption on the hoof, from New York's Sheldon Silver to Chicago's Rahm Emanuel.

It really is time for a president that loves America.

Pretending to Care about Aboriginals

When Europeans came to North America they just rolled over the native American tribes that they found there and obliterated their culture. When Europeans went to India they played divide-and-conquer with the rajahs and the nizams and succeeded for a couple of hundred years in ruling over the Indians. When Europeans went to China they succeeded in forcing the Chinese to lease them treaty ports for a while.

And of course when Europeans went to Australia they rolled over the aboriginal tribes and obliterated their culture.

Now, of course, our liberal elites are horrified by the colonial adventures in India and China and show their compassion by keeping the native Americans in North America and the aboriginals in Australia on life support with welfare and free education. In Australia they also give aboriginals jobs in national parks and at monuments to aboriginal culture.

What should we do about the remnant of the pre-modern cultures that the European explosion obliterated in the last five hundred years? To the ruling class the honoring of aboriginal culture with cultural products that preserve the memory of the aboriginal past and that preserve the living with welfare and education is a great ethical improvement over the old way, which involved taking native American and aboriginal children from their families and stashing them in boarding schools and Christian missions. But really, what is the difference? It is still the ruling class imposing its will on the people its regime conquered a century or two ago.

The truth is that we should do nothing. The rule of the world is that to survive and thrive you must get with the program, whatever it is. The world is full of the ghosts of extinct families, tribes, cultures, nations, empires. Each of them were born, thrived for a while, then declined and disappeared. Our own western culture that was born a while back and is flourishing today will in its time decline and fall. And those of us that mean to survive in the world that is to come will follow the new thing or face obliteration.

Of course, the new masters of the universe may be kind to us, and allow us to molder away in little enclaves so long as we don't interfere with their grand plan. Or they may not.

But for individuals the imperative is obvious. When the world changes you find a way to get with the program, somehow. Because otherwise you and yours will molder away and die.

Jonathan Haidt on Hate

For conservatives the liberal psychology professor Jonathan Haidt is an impossibility. A liberal and a psychologist who wrote a book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion in which he found, to his surprise, that conservatives are not just racists, sexists, and homophobes, but people.

Deciding that humans have a "righteous mind" that is set up to make moral distinctions and judgements Haidt constructed a matrix of moral axes: care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation. Then he applied the matrix to the belief system of American liberals, libertarians, and conservatives. He found that liberals defined themselves mainly on the care/harm axis, moderately on the liberty/oppression axis and somewhat on the fairness/cheating axis. Libertarians were really big on liberty/oppression, so-so on fairness/cheating. Conservatives, on the other hand, were pretty well balanced on all six axes.

Wow. Like wow. Since then, Jonathan Haidt has developed a strange new respect for conservatives. For if conservative moral minds were balanced across the six axes, that kinda tells you something about the balanced nature of conservatism.

Recently he went to give a speech at a prestigious private school (probably Lakeside School in Seattle) and ran slam-bang into the modern snowflake fascist culture during the Q&A after his speech. The little snowflake teenage girls at that august institution had fully ingested the present culture that we have been seeing all across America's elite universities this fall.

But then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?”

 But it was just the girls asking questions and snapping their fingers. The boys said nothing at all, except at the end when they gave him a standing ovation. What was going on? Haidt found out in a smaller breakout session.

[Haidt:] When there is a class discussion about gender issues, do you feel free to speak up and say what you are thinking? Or do you feel that you are walking on eggshells and you must heavily censor yourself? Just the girls in the class, raise your hand if you feel you can speak up? [about 70% said they feel free, vs about 10% who said eggshells ]. Now just the boys? [about 80% said eggshells, nobody said they feel free].

And so on, with race and politics. Same thing. There was only one boy who was Republican and also dared to speak out on political issues. At the end of the discussion, Haidt told them it was high time for the school to make "viewpoint diversity a priority." (Hey Jonathan, why do you think that Bill Gates turned out a conventional liberal?)

Golly. Who would have thunk it in America?

It shows, I think, the fundamental error at the heart of liberalism. When you bring moral issues into politics, it means that all moral issues become grist for the political mill. Moral issues become political issues. And politics always comes down to a fight: my way or the highway.

This is why in America the Founders proposed a separation between Church and State. In America you can -- or you could -- choose your own moral community, and if you don't like one you can choose another. But we are all more or less stuck with the state we have, so when we bring moral issues into politics then we inevitably find that we must fight to the death over it.

You can tell from the outbreak of snowflake fascists at the nation's universities (and apparently at its prestigious private high schools) this fall that liberals really don't understand this. They don't understand that when they go on a PC rampage that they are telling us all "my way or the highway." They don't understand that they are creating enemies all across America because most people don't want to be made to care about racism, sexism, and climate change, and not allowed to have a dissenting position. You see everyone, especially including liberals, hates it when somebody is playing the morality card on them.

It all takes me back to the last Great Awakening of liberal hysteria in the 1960s. Average Americans started to hate it almost immediately, and so elected Richard Nixon twice over. But it really wasn't until the B-movie actor won the presidency by two landslides that liberals got the message and pretended, for a couple of elections, that they were "New Democrats."

Now, egged on by George Soros' money and Barack Obama's crazed faith in community organizing, they are back in full liberal Puritanical fever, complete with witch-hunts for the fabled right-wing extremist unicorn, and the rest of America hates it.

I think that liberals are going to get a terrible shock in November 2016. Just like those boys at that private high schools, about half of America is forced to button its lip at work, at school, and elsewhere wherever ruling-class liberals make the rules. And that half of America hates it.

But here's the good news. Just like back in the 1970s it will take a few election cycles before liberals realize what has happened. After all, nobody they know voted for Trump/Cruz/Rubio, whoever.  Maybe, in the interregnum, before liberals come to their senses, we can fix the economy, and roll back a bit of the liberal bossy-boots state.