By John Daniel Davidson
Friday, May 12, 2017
Something is wrong with the American Left. The recent
spate of violent protests on college campuses has been well-documented, but the
violence and intolerance championed by left-wing student activists is beginning
to creep off campus and into mainstream public life.
The reason for this is straightforward enough: although
progressives pride themselves on their putative tolerance and diversity, the
imperatives of leftist politics are fundamentally illiberal. Justice imposed
through power is the philosophical foundation of the political left, and when
earnest progressives become convinced the only avenue to power is violence,
their tolerance quickly falls by the wayside. Consider a few recent events,
none of which involved college protesters but all of which were marked by
threats of violence.
Ahead of a town hall meeting this week in Virginia’s
fifth congressional district, Republican Rep. Tom Garrett received a series of
disturbing threats—not just against him but also his wife and family, even his
dog. One message said bluntly, “This is how we’re going to kill your wife.”
As a result, the town hall event was heavily guarded,
with uniformed and plain-clothes security lining the walls and scattered
throughout the 300-seat room.
Earlier this month, Jennifer Carnahan, the new chairwoman
of the Minnesota Republican Party, received a torrent of racist hate mail and
at least one threat of physical violence that forced her from her home for a
weekend. Carnahan, who is Korean-American, was targeted after publically
apologizing and calling for the resignation of those responsible for an
offensive image posted to the 7th Congressional District Republicans Facebook
page.
It didn’t matter that Carnahan didn’t post the image, or
that she did everything right. The folks sending the hate mail called her
racist, and threw a few racial epithets directly at her for good measure.
Last month, left-wing activists in Oregon caused the
cancellation of the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade by threatening to drag
“fascists” off the parade route—and by fascists, they meant the Republican
Party of Multanomah County. In an email, the activists warned, “we will have
two hundred or more people rush into the parade into the middle and drag and
push those people out as we will not give one inch to groups who espouse hatred
toward lgbt, immigrants, people of color or others.”
Leftist
Intolerance Invites A Breakdown Of Civility
For a long time, the mainstream media has treated
conservatives as intolerant, even bigoted, for their views on gay marriage,
abortion, and a host of other hot-button cultural issues. But now, faced with
the spectacle of rioting college leftists, even the mainstream media is coming
around to the realization that liberals are not as tolerant as they think. In
fact, recent psychological research suggests they
are not any more tolerant than conservatives.
Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University,
told Politico in a recent article
that, “Nowadays, as the right sees it, the left has won the culture war and
controls the media, the universities, Hollywood and the education of everyone’s
children. Many of them think that they are the victims, they are fighting back
against powerful and oppressive forces, and their animosities are related to
that worldview.”
Conservatives are also combatting a growing level of
hostility in public life. Since Trump’s election, much of it has come from the
Left. At another town hall this week, Rep. Tom MacArthur, a New Jersey
Republican, tried to explain his thinking on the GOP health care bill to angry
constituents. MacArthur, who authored the amendment allowing states to apply
for a waiver to opt out of some health insurance requirement, knows something
about preexisting conditions. His daughter died of health complications when
she was 11. The cost of her care was more than $1 million. MacArthur was in the
room when she was taken off life support.
When he tried to talk about this, the crowd shouted
“Shame!” When he said, “I put my head to my daughter’s chest and listened to
her die,” they erupted. One person yelled, “Other babies will die without care,
too!” Another jeered, “Did you have money for her care?” Someone suggested
MacArthur, “Write a book.”
It’s not just angry mobs at town halls. On Wednesday, an
editor at the Huffington Post called on his fellow leftists to stalk
Republicans: “They should be hounded by protesters everywhere, especially in
public—in restaurants, in shopping centers, in their districts and yes, on the
public property outside their homes and apartments, in Washington and back in
their homes states.”
Last week, senior Newsweek
writer Kurt Eichenwald—who, let’s be honest, seems
a little off—said he wants every Republican who voted for the American
Health Care Act to have a family member come down with a serious illness, lose
their insurance, and
die. For good measure, he added that he also wants them “to be tortured.”
The Way We Use
Social Media Is Exacerbating the Problem
How has it come to this? No doubt, leftist ideology
invites a kind of intolerance that leads to violence, as we’ve seen. But this
tendency is exacerbated by a breakdown of civility fueled by social media.
Would we see the kind of brutal, cutthroat behavior that’s marked the crowds at
these town halls if those people had not inured themselves somewhat to it?
And where might they have done that? Where would they
have practiced the kind of no-holds-barred political debate that impels them to
throw off the pretense of decorum and shout down their congressman? Or threaten
him?
They—and all of us, really—are learning to behave this
way on social media. Just as the violence on campus gradually seeps out into
the streets and town halls, so too does our violent and intolerant rhetoric
online eventually manifest in the real world. That so much of it is now coming
from the political left is not an accident.
With every Facebook post and Tweet, every demonstration
and boycott, they have talked themselves into it. It’s going to be difficult,
maybe even impossible, to talk them out of it.
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