By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, December 20, 2015
At the beginning of December, Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell asked Secretary of State John
Kerry whether Charles and David Koch, two libertarian political activists,
should be considered — his remarkable words — “an enemy of the state.” He posed
the same question about Exxon, and John Kerry, who could have been president of
these United States, said that he looked forward to the seizure of Exxon’s
assets for the crime of “proselytizing” impermissibly about the question of
global warming.
An enemy of the state? That’s the Democrats’ theme for
the New Year: totalitarianism.
Donald Trump may talk like a brownshirt, but the
Democrats mean business. For those of you keeping track, the Democrats and
their allies on the left have now: voted in the Senate to repeal the First
Amendment, proposed imprisoning people for holding the wrong views on global
warming, sought to prohibit the showing of a film critical of Hillary Rodham
Clinton, proposed banning politically unpopular academic research, demanded
that funding politically unpopular organizations and causes be made a crime and
that the RICO organized-crime statute be used as a weapon against targeted
political groups. They have filed felony charges against a Republican governor
for vetoing a piece of legislation, engaged in naked political persecutions of
members of Congress, and used the IRS and the ATF as weapons against political
critics.
On the college campuses, they shout down unpopular ideas
or simply forbid nonconforming views from being heard there in the first place.
They have declared academic freedom an “outdated concept” and have gone the
full Orwell, declaring that freedom is oppressive and that they should not be
expected to tolerate ideas that they do not share. They are demanding mandatory
ideological indoctrination sessions for nonconforming students. They have
violently assaulted students studying in libraries and assaulted student
journalists documenting their activities. They have staged dozens of phony hate
crimes and sexual assaults as a pretext for persecuting unpopular organizations
and people.
What they cannot achieve by legislation or litigation,
they seek to achieve by simple violence, left-wing activists having smashed,
looted, and burned portions of Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, where Koreans and
other Asian minorities were specifically targeted. As on college campuses, they
have made a point of assaulting journalists documenting their violence. They
have rioted in Philadelphia and in other cities.
They are not backing away from that. Hillary Rodham
Clinton may do her vice-principal shtick, but Bernie Sanders is calling for
“revolution,” and by “revolution” he means crushing the economic and political
rights of opponents in order to prevent them from having a say in political
debate. Sounding oddly like Henry Ford, he seethes as he talks about scheming
foreigners and international bankers working nefariously behind the scenes to
undermine American interests, while his admirers brandish such traditional
symbols of totalitarianism as the hammer-and-sickle flag.
They have sought to use the FCC to revoke the broadcast
licenses of Rupert Murdoch and other political hate totems, and have long dreamt
of using federal regulation to shut down conservative talk radio. They have
gone to the Supreme Court to argue that they should be empowered to ban books,
films, magazines, and newspapers when they desire to do so for political
reasons. They are energetic suppressors of free speech.
It is possible to have a robust, energetic political
discourse within the parameters of American liberalism, which cherishes freedom
of speech and of inquiry, which distinguishes between public and private
spheres, which relies upon the rule of law and the Bill of Rights while placing
limits on the reach of the state. But if you reject that, as our so-called
liberals have, then you cannot have genuine political discourse, or genuine
democracy. When he was asked about having fabricated a story about Mitt
Romney’s not paying taxes, Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid made a
straight-up might-makes-right argument: “Romney didn’t win, did he?” You cannot
have much of an argument without some level of honesty, which is a problem for
a country that probably is going to be subjected to yet another Clinton
campaign. You cannot have much of an argument without freedom of speech, and
you cannot have democracy if political activism is criminalized. The Democrats
are seeking to restrict speech, and they already have criminalized politics:
Ask Rick Perry about that, or Tom Delay.
The Right cannot be indifferent to this, because we
simply do not have that option: It is our speech that they intend to prohibit
first, and it is us that they are attempting to imprison for our political
views. But the Left should not be indifferent to this, either. There are at
least a few (and, one suspects, more than that) liberals of the old-fashioned
variety in the Democratic party, and it is not at all clear that they are going
to wish to remain part of a political organization that is seriously attempting
to create a class of political prisoners, to ban books, and to drive people
from their jobs and communities for their political beliefs.
John Kerry cannot quite answer the question of whether
one of his political rivals should be declared “an enemy of the state.” Between
now and November 2016, Americans might want to think a bit about whether they
wish to invest an openly totalitarian political party with the power of the
presidency.
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