The Lafayette Square Crimes Highlight a Big Problem for the Democrats

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Sunday, June 09, 2024

 

As Thomas notes:

 

Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters surrounded the White House on Saturday afternoon, calling for President Joe Biden to end U.S. military aid to Israel.

 

And, per NBC, some of those protestors committed crimes:

 

Multiple statues in Lafayette Square across from the White House were vandalized during the protest with spray paint, graffiti and painted red handprints. Protesters attached signs reading slogans such as “Hands off Rafah! Stop the genocide!” to statues. Some graffitied slogans such as “free Gaza,” “kill pigs” and “f— pigs” on the statues.

 

And yet:

 

Police said they attempted to arrest one person who climbed a statue, but members of the crowd intervened. The police deployed pepper spray and the person got away.

 

I don’t think that the Democratic Party has even started to grapple with how badly this stuff hurts them. If the summer of 2020 is any indication, “the person got away” will be the final word on this matter. There’ll be no investigation; nobody who “intervened” — read: interfered — will be punished for it; the sum total of attempted arrests will stay at one; and the number of actual arrests will be zero.

 

Polling routinely shows that the Democratic Party enjoys no reputational advantage on “the rule of law,” on “defending democracy,” or in any other of the categories in which one would expect to see it thriving were one to take its rhetoric at face value. Given Donald Trump’s appalling behavior in 2021 — behavior for which he should have been impeached — as well as his ongoing promises to violate the law, this shocks and infuriates the party and its advocates. But it shouldn’t. Voters are quite capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, and they are aware that the existence of the sins of Donald Trump does not negate the existence of the sins of the Democratic Party. Online, “but Trump!” is a killer rejoinder. Offline, it just sounds stupid.

 

There are many, many reasons why the public does not trust the Democrats with America’s constitutional order. In part, that mistrust is the product of the party’s unreconstructed Wilsonianism — Democrats continue to flirt with abolishing the Senate filibuster if not the Senate per se, nixing the Electoral College, and packing the Supreme Court, and they remain openly hostile to many parts of the Constitution; in part, that mistrust is the product of the party’s absurd and visible hypocrisy — Democrats tried to have Trump removed from the ballot via a preposterous legal theory, they have convicted him of a felony in New York in a Kafkaesque trial that should never have seen the light of day, and they continue to relitigate the 2016 election; and, in part, that mistrust is the product of an imbalance in elite opinion that leads every Trump outrage to be met (appropriately) with loud howls and every Democratic outrage to be met with silence, acquiescence, or even rank encouragement. But, more than anything else, it is the product of the party’s disgraceful double-standard on basic questions of law and order.

 

Here, again, is NBC’s description of what happened in D.C. yesterday:

 

Multiple statues in Lafayette Square across from the White House were vandalized during the protest with spray paint, graffiti and painted red handprints. Protesters attached signs reading slogans such as “Hands off Rafah! Stop the genocide!” to statues. Some graffitied slogans such as “free Gaza,” “kill pigs” and “f— pigs” on the statues.

 

It gets boring to play these “what if?” games, but that they are boring does not mean that they aren’t necessary or true. What if the people who did this had been right-wingers? What if they’d been wearing MAGA hats? What if, instead of describing leftists, this paragraph described figures who could be ideologically associated with the other team?

 

Hundreds of signs dotted the crowds, many with messages like “lift the siege on Gaza now” and “genocide is our red line,” but a few had controversial messages including a sign that said “f— Israel, stand with Hamas.” Another sign displayed a Star of David with red handprints around it.

 

A handful of protesters wore green headbands that appeared to be similar to those worn by members of Hamas.

 

One protester wearing the headband said that it was “Hamas’ one,” though the protester said he does not speak Arabic and was not sure what it said. When asked if he supported Hamas, the protester, who would not give his name, said that he “wouldn’t say supporter, I would say maybe sympathizer.”

 

We all know the answers to these questions. There would have been mass arrests — and mass hysteria to go along with it. We’d have had wall-to-wall coverage in the press, an endless supply of furrowed opinion pieces in the newspapers, and the delivery of hundreds of new “expert” theories confirming the intrinsic link between right-of-center views and murderous hyperbole. As it is, I’ve had to search quite hard to find out what happened yesterday, and most of the photographs and videos I’ve seen were taken not by TV stations or newspapers but by amateurs on Twitter. There is a reason that I’ve used NBC’s report twice in this post: I couldn’t find an equivalent on the homepages of CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, or the supposedly D.C.-oriented Washington Post.

 

We all know why this is. And, until it changes, the Democrats’ rhetoric will continue to fall flat — even in such cases as it’s demonstrably correct.