By Robert Tracinski
Monday, August 21, 2017
I’m worried that the Charlottesville riots are making the
Left psychologically unhinged in the same way that they have been unhinged by
the election of Donald Trump, only more so.
The problem with their reaction to Donald Trump is that
he seems to so totally vindicate all of their political prejudices that he
justifies an even more vicious vilification of anyone who opposes their agenda.
Everyone who supports free market capitalism is a rich jerk who looks down on
poor people? Check. Anyone who complains about political correctness just wants
to be a sexist boor? Check. Anyone who talks hawkishly about Islamic terrorism
must be driven by a neurotic need to prove his masculinity? Check. Anyone who
doesn’t sign up for the latest iteration of the “diversity” agenda must harbor
some kind of implicit sympathy for white nationalists? Yeah, well, check.
These things are not
true of the overwhelming majority of people who hold those views. As applied to
Trump, they are a bit exaggerated, but close enough to be plausible. So the
Left is seduced by the temptation to take this as final proof that everyone who
opposes them is just as irredeemably awful as they always suspected. And if
that’s true, then there’s no point in making any effort to reach out to the
rest of the country, to find out what people really think, to attempt to
persuade them, or, God forbid, to learn anything from what they have to say.
The events in Charlottesville have accomplished the same
thing, with less justification and 100 times the intensity. One of the Left’s
greatest weaknesses has always been their tendency to brand anyone who
disagrees with them on public policy as a secret racist and possibly a Nazi. To
anyone on the Left who scoffs at this, I’ll furnish a few examples in a moment.
I promise you that no one on the Right is scoffing at it. This kind of ignorant
vilification has been a daily reality for our entire adult lives.
We Knew You All
Were Nazis
Now actual, real-life Nazis have materialized on the
scene, and while the Ku Klux Klan was getting too geriatric to look all that
scary, these guys are young and have a stronger sense of the theatrical, what
with the matching outfits and chants and torches and all. So the Left can now
claim among its enemies real, live, literally murderous Nazis, an enemy that is
profoundly and indisputably evil.
This is a sobering new development that ought to put
ordinary politics into perspective. Instead, many have been tempted to make it
into another tool of ordinary politics—the ultimate tool. Charlottesville has
made them feel even more emboldened in smearing everyone who disagrees with
them as a Nazi or a white nationalist.
I’ve been watching this unfold over the last week on
Twitter. To be sure, Twitter is not necessarily representative of the real
world, but it definitely serves as incubator for angry mobs and has an outsized
influence on the national political media, through whom these trends filter
down to the rank and file of the Left.
I’ve learned from Twitter in the last week that not only
is the Trump White House chock full of white nationalists, but that also
extends to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, along with the entire Republican
Party. When Republicans like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio denounce Nazis, that
doesn’t mean they’re not Nazis, it just means they’re posturing. Paul Ryan
“owns” Nazism just by being a Republican, I guess. Oh, and unless he’s actually
impeaching Trump, he’s a brownshirt.
People who complain about calling everybody Nazis are
Nazis. Anyone who points out that there were also violent, anti-democracy
anarcho-Communist “Antifa” demonstrators in Charlottesville is simply making
excuses for Nazis—even if they work for the New
York Times.
This isn’t even guilt by association. It’s guilt by free
association, and it seems almost calculated to prevent the overwhelming number
of people who oppose fascism and white nationalism from making common cause
with one another. There are a lot of people who are taking an issue that
somewhere around 99 percent of Americans ought to be able to agree on—”Nazis
are bad”—and trying to make it into a repellently partisan issue. It is as if
they need us to be Nazis. If every
one of them is Simon Wiesenthal, they’d better find an awful lot of Eichmanns.
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 Nazis Have No
Rights
What is most ominous is that the Left is using
Charlottesville to talk themselves into the notion that Nazis and white
nationalists have no free speech rights and are fair game for violence. They
talk about “punching Nazis,” but that’s just a mild-sounding euphemism as they
work their way toward justifying political murder. Don’t believe me? Look at this video, and ask
yourself where this is heading.
To be sure, the fellow at the center of this video is
contemptible—though I’m of the old-fashioned school that holds civil liberties
exist precisely to protect those whose views are repugnant to the majority. But
what struck me is the way the people around him have formed into a howling mob,
closed to reason, principles, or restraint.
Also notice that the people attacking him are not just
young people caught up in the frenzy of the moment. They’re distinctly
middle-aged—notice the man with the grey goatee—and given that this is a
university town, they’re probably well-educated. They look like the kind of
people I might rub shoulders with in the aisles of the local Whole Foods. In
other words, they are old enough to exercise some self-restraint—but they’re
not interested in doing so. They have taken the evil of their enemies as a
license to forego all the rules of civilized society.
Like I said, the victim here is hardly sympathetic. He is
not only a white nationalist but was the organizer of the so-called Unite the
Right rally on Saturday, so I suppose you could excuse the angry response by
holding him indirectly responsible for Heather Heyer’s death. But what I wonder
is: was the howling mob even thinking any of that through?
Combine this with the Left’s glee at calling anyone a Nazi, at the slightest
provocation. If you stood accused of that and were confronted with a mob like
this, do you think they would listen as you patiently explain that you only
oppose removing Confederate monuments out of a desire to preserve history? And
if free speech rights don’t apply to “fascists”—or to those branded as
such—would you even be allowed to make the case that you aren’t one? When the
online mobs have set out to get people fired for attending the white
nationalist rally in Charlottesville, they certainly didn’t wait to find out if
they might be targeting
the wrong people.
Believe me, the arguments about how Nazis don’t have free
speech rights and how it’s okay to punch them sound much more ominous if anyone
has ever called you a Nazi just because he doesn’t like your stand on
single-payer health care.
This Is Why Mob
Rule Is Terrifying And Evil
The point is that no argument should be settled by a
howling mob or by punching people. We should maintain a deep suspicion of mobs
as such, not matter what their cause.
All of this is feeling like a live-action, digitalized
version of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Rod Serling’s “Twilight
Zone” parable in which even the whispered prospect of an alien invasion causes
the neighbors on a suburban street to turn against one another, forming
frenzied mobs based on the slightest rumor. You should watch it.
At the time, this was supposed to be a warning against
Cold War paranoia, but the message is universal and can be applied to other
instances of moral panic. Notice one thing about this episode. (Spoiler alert.)
The point is not that the monsters aren’t real. The aliens really are planning
their invasion, just as there really were Communists, and yes, today, there
really are Nazis and they really did come, not to Maple Street, but to Charlottesville’s
Main Street. But the point of the episode is that they didn’t even have to
attack because they could manipulate us into attacking each other. The monsters
didn’t have to come because, in our crazed fear of them, we became the monsters.
We should ask ourselves if we are becoming the monsters
today. Those on the Left should pause to ask whether they are whipping
themselves up into a frenzy against imagined enemies and losing sight of the
real ones.
The white nationalists who marched on Charlottesville
last weekend are an ominous development, but at least I know that they are a
small and widely despised minority. What I find somewhat more ominous is the
way the media is embracing violent “anti-fascist” demonstrators, lionizing them
as heroes and whitewashing their deeply illiberal ideology. Yet this illiberal
ideology is getting sympathy and support from the very heights of the culture,
who have declared it impermissible even to acknowledge the existence of a
violent, illiberal left. Doing so makes you—you guessed it—a Nazi.
No, our president isn’t helping any, and that is a
massive, disqualifying failure on his part. But Americans shouldn’t wait for
some political authority in Washington DC, to set a proper example—particularly
not a politician from whom we had no reason to expect any better. If he is
inadequate to this moment, that just means the rest of us have to make sure we
are.
The monsters are due, again, on Main Street. Please try
to make sure you’re not one of them.
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