It now seems little more than a gauzy memory, but we can all recall the days - in fact, most of the modern era - when actual political debate took place in this country on the great issues of the day. The right and left would pronounce, argue, and defend their positions passionately, and by doing so, educate and challenge the American people on matters of critical importance. Both sides would confidently defend the wisdom they thought inherent in their respective beliefs.
But that is no more. By both their words and actions, leftists have clearly concluded they can no longer win debates on policy. So, they have stopped trying, and replaced reason with rage. Targeted tantrums of the sort we witnessed over these last days in the wake of the leak of a seminal (draft) Supreme Court decision, have become so familiar among craven progressives that the entire standard of political conduct in this nation now amounts to little more than tribal warfare - no rules, no respect, just slurs and naked intimidation. And in such an environment, right and wrong, the need to convince voters of the morality of their cause ceases to matter. The only thing that matters is the power to enforce one’s enraged will on the public writ large. Leftists are, as constitutional attorney Jonathan Turley opined recently, addicted to rage.
In their view, the Supreme Court is there to rule the way progressives desire, democracy and separation of powers be damned. And if the court fails to comply, they will figuratively if not literally burn it to the ground, unleashing flash mobs, doxing, and fomenting ugly protests at the homes of conservative justices. And they do so not only without shame, but with pride.
Permanent State of Rage
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
The insidious influence of AOC-style progressives on the Democratic Party is inherently authoritarian - a charge they ironically hurl liberally at Trump and his followers in a breathtaking act of projection, i.e., projecting their own shortcomings onto their enemies. Such socialists do not value, recognize, or seek consensus. If they did, would they have pushed for a radical remaking of the Republic with the thinnest of majorities in both branches of Congress, after losing ground in the last election? Of course not. But all that mattered was whether they could find expression for their permanent state of rage by cajoling the one or two remaining Democratic senators who have not sold their soul to the progressive movement to join them in ramming through fundamental teardowns of our political system - packing the court, abolishing the filibuster, wild socialist spending sprees - before they are inevitably and rudely kicked to the curb in November.
Outrage has become the sole currency of the left. It may have been particularly pronounced in the era of Donald Trump, a man whose mere existence incited countless mental breakdowns among the faithful. But what happened long before, and since, Trump was president should be more than enough to convince any thinking person of the left’s ultimate answer to everything: outrage and violence. Does it not thus make perverse sense that they would react violently to the curtailing of the very act of violence on the defenseless unborn which they declare to be a sacred right?
While the left-wing riots of the 1960’s, and more recently, the barbaric tactics of Antifa and its sociopathic ilk, have been on display for all to see, it was the summer of 2020 which forever unmasked the deepest, truest intentions of those in the progressive movement, and the Democratic Party which has surrendered to it. Faced with an almost binary choice of leading a productive discussion on police reform and racial justice with a nation ready to engage in it after the George Floyd affair, or unleash mobs to burn down urban America, they chose the latter.
Similarly, instead of pressing the virtue of their pro-abortion position and arguing about the morality of it all, they re-initiate demands for a typically left-wing one-step solution to a conservative-dominated court, packing the institution with progressives, and promote protests which have, for one, driven the man who penned the draft decision, Justice Samuel Alito, to move himself and his family to an undisclosed location. This 46th president, wedded to no ideology other than his own power, has unsurprisingly turned his back on a career of skepticism toward abortion to go all in on the progressive outrage, even warning of other rights being usurped by the highest court in the land - as if there was any actual threat of their absurd accusation – for one, that the court might ban interracial marriage. No one believes that, but then, self-awareness is a commodity in short supply - or absent - on the left.
Leftists are angry about everything all the time, and never satisfied. Rage is a way of life for those twisted souls who see nothing but shortcomings in a culture and system of governance that has built the freest, most powerful nation in the world. At this point it would be appropriate for them to bring back that oldie but goodie from their radical days of a half century ago, a slogan famously shouted during the riots of Watts in 1965, for it would certainly be applicable to the left and the Democratic Party circa 2022.
Burn baby burn.
