By John Daniel Davidson
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
In a recent column for The Guardian, former Democratic senator for Wisconsin Russ Feingold
clarified what all this controversy about white supremacists and Confederate
statues is really all about: Republicans are Nazis.
“The lesson from Charlottesville is not how dangerous the
neo-Nazis are,” he writes. “It is the unmasking of the Republican party
leadership. In the wake of last weekend’s horror and tragedy, let us finally, finally rip off the veneer that Trump’s
affinity for white supremacy is distinct from the Republican agenda of voter
suppression, renewed mass incarceration and the expulsion of immigrants.”
Finally, finally,
someone on the Left just came out and said it. Being a Republican is apparently
no different than being a white supremacist. Supporting a lower marginal tax
rate puts you in the same company as the Ku Klux Klan. Therefore, punching a
Nazi is the same as punching someone wearing a MAGA hat.
This is the logical endpoint of what social justice
warriors have been arguing since before Charlottesville. Everyone who opposes
their political agenda does so out of hatred and bigotry, and there’s little
difference between the GOP establishment and fringe neo-Nazi groups.
Feingold’s column, along with countless tweets and news
commentary from left-wing pundits, underscores what some of us have been saying
all along about Charlottesville and the Confederate statue controversy: this is
not about neo-Nazis, or the Civil War, or the rise of white nationalism in American
politics.
This is about progressives demonizing their political
opponents. Having failed to persuade American voters to support their policies
and elect their candidates, Democrats are now resorting to ad hominem attacks.
Don’t agree with Feingold and other Democrats about immigration reform or voter
ID laws? Well, that’s because you’re racist. “The white supremacist chant of,
‘you will not replace us,’ could easily and accurately be the slogan for these
Republican politicians,” Feingold writes. “Their policies will achieve the same
racial outcome as Jim Crow – the disenfranchisement and marginalization of
people of color.”
If Your Enemies
Are Nazis, Anything Goes
For the Left, one of the advantages of this zero-sum
approach to politics is that it frees you to do whatever you like to your
opponents. If Trump supporters are all racists, then it’s okay to confront them
in the streets, shout them down, and physically attack them. That’s precisely
what happened at a rally in Boston over the weekend, where left-wing “Antifa”
activists attacked Trump supporters and others who had come out to rally in
support of free speech.
As my colleague Rob Tracinski noted yesterday, “They need
everyone who is not a card-carrying supporter of their political movement to be
a total evil that justifies unlimited reprisal: from getting people fired from
their jobs to beating them with sticks in the streets.”
And if everyone who opposes their agenda really is evil,
well, then it also must be okay to take a sledgehammer to a 225-year-old
monument to Christopher Columbus, as someone did in Baltimore on Sunday night.
Heck, maybe it’s even okay to try to blow up Confederate statues with homemade
explosives, as a man tried to do in Houston on Saturday night. Certainly, it’s
okay to remove statues in secret in the dead of night, as the University of
Texas at Austin did over the weekend.
If you’re a Democrat on the U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights, it’s okay to issue a statement on Charlottesville, Virginia, that
denounces Nazis, Klansmen, and white supremacists, but to veto an amendment
that also would have condemned violent Antifa counter-protesters.
For progressive Democrats like Sen. Corey Booker and
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, it’s okay now suddenly to have a problem with
the Confederate statues in Congress and imply that if Republicans don’t get rid
of them immediately then they’re not “serious about rejecting white supremacy.”
The Point Is to
Silence Dissent
This impulse on the Left to demonize everyone who
disagrees with them and draw false moral equivalencies between Republicans and
Nazis has made many Americans afraid to admit what they really think about a
whole host of mundane issues. If simply wearing a MAGA hat in Boston is enough
to get you surrounded by an angry mob, then most people aren’t going to do it.
Likewise, if voting Republican is enough to lump you in
with Nazis and the KKK, you might just keep your party affiliation to yourself.
If going to hear a conservative speaker on a college campus gets you caught up
in a melee, maybe you just won’t go. If speaking out about bias at Google will
get you fired, maybe you just stay silent.
And that’s the point. The larger goal of the
social-justice Left is to silence the opposition, whether through violence or
social stigma or real economic punishment, like losing one’s job. The problem
is, a lot of people will go on quietly disagreeing with progressive dogma. They
will persist in supporting such evils as low taxes and secure borders. They
will be silenced, for a while, but not persuaded.
Maybe that’s why the polls got it so wrong last year.
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