Posted: 21 Jun 2017 06:33 PM PDT
If you want to know
who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t, follow the anger.
There are
people in this country who can safely express their anger. And those who
can’t. If you’re
angry that Trump won, your anger is socially acceptable. If you were angry
that Obama won, it wasn’t
James Hodgkinson’s rage was socially acceptable. It continued to be socially
acceptable until he crossed the line into murder. And he’s not alone. There’s
Micah Xavier Johnson, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Dallas, and Gavin
Long, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Baton Rouge. If you’re black and
angry about the police, your anger is celebrated. If you’re white and angry
about the Terror travel ban, the Paris Climate treaty, ObamaCare repeal or
any leftist cause, you’re on the side of the angry angels.
But if you’re white and angry that your job is going to China or that you
just missed being killed in a Muslim suicide bombing, your anger is
unacceptable.
If you’re an angry leftist, your party leader, Tom Perez will scream and
curse into a microphone, and your aspiring presidential candidate, Kirsten
Gillibrand, will curse along, to channel the anger of the base. But if you’re
an angry conservative, then Trump channeling your anger is “dangerous”
because you aren’t allowed to be angry.
Not all anger is created equal. Some anger is privileged rage.
Good anger gets you a gig as a CNN commentator. Bad anger gets you hounded
out of your job. Good anger isn’t described as anger at all. Instead it’s
linguistically whitewashed as “passionate” or “courageous”. Bad anger however
is “worrying” or “dangerous”. Angry left-wing protesters “call out”, angry
right-wing protesters “threaten”. Good anger is left-wing. Bad anger is
right-wing.
Socially acceptable displays of anger, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives
Matter riots to the anti-Trump marches to the furious campus protests, are
invariably left-wing.
Left-wing anger over the elections of Bush and Trump was sanctified.
Right-wing outrage over Obama’s victory was demonized. Now that left-wing anger
led a Bernie Sanders volunteer to open fire at a Republican charity baseball
practice outing. And the media reluctantly concedes that maybe both sides
should moderate their rhetoric. Before listing examples that lean to the
right like “Lock her up”.
Why were chants of “Lock her up” immoderate, but not Bush era cries of “Jail
to the chief”? Why were Tea Party rallies “ominous” but the latest We Hate
Trump march is “courageous”? Why is killing Trump on stage the hottest thing
to hit Shakespeare while a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask was hounded by
everyone from the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri to the NAACP?
Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is ideologically
coded. Left-wing anger is good because its ideological foundations are good.
Right-wing anger is bad because its ideology is bad.
It’s not the level of anger, its intensity or its threatening nature that
makes it good or bad.
And that is why the left so easily slips into violence. All its ideological
ends are good. Therefore its means, from mass starvation to gulags to riots
and tyranny, must be good. If I slash your tires because of your Obama bumper
sticker”, I’m a monster. But if you key my car because of my Trump bumper
sticker, you’re fighting racism and fascism. Your tactics might be in error,
but your viewpoint isn’t.
There are no universal standards of behavior. Civility, like everything else,
is ideologically limited.
Intersectionality frowns on expecting civil behavior from “oppressed”
protesters. Asking that shrieking campus crybully not to scream threats in
your face is “tone policing”. An African-American millionaire’s child at Yale
is fighting for her “existence”, unlike the Pennsylvania coal miner, the
Baltimore police officer and the Christian florist whose existences really
are threatened.
Tone policing is how the anger of privileged leftists is protected while the
frustration of their victims is suppressed. The existence of tone policing as
a specific term to protect displays of left-wing anger shows the collapse of
civility into anger privilege. Civility has been replaced by a political
entitlement to anger.
The left prides itself on an unearned moral superiority (“When they go low,
we go high”) reinforced by its own echo chamber even as it has become
incapable of controlling its angry outbursts. The national tantrum after
Trump’s victory has all but shut down the government, turned every media
outlet into a non-stop feed of conspiracy theories and set off protests that
quickly escalated into street violence.
But Trump Derangement Syndrome is a symptom of a problem with
the left that existed before he was born. The left is an angry movement. It
is animated by an outraged self-righteousness whose moral superiority doubles
as dehumanization. And its machinery of culture glamorizes its anger. The
media dresses up the seething rage so that the left never has to look at its
inner Hodgkinson in the mirror.
The left is as angry as ever. Campus riots and assassinations of Republican
politicians are nothing new. What is changing is that its opponents are
beginning to match its anger. The left still clings to the same anger it had
when it was a theoretical movement with plans, but little impact on the
country. The outrage at the left is no longer ideological. There are millions
of people whose health care was destroyed by ObamaCare, whose First Amendment
rights were taken away, whose land was seized, whose children were turned
against them and whose livelihoods were destroyed.
The angry left has gained a great deal of power. It has used that power to
wreck lives. It is feverishly plotting to deprive nearly 63 million Americans
of their vote by using its entrenched power in the government, the media and
the non-profit sector. And it is too blinded by its own anger over the
results of the election to realize the anger over its wholesale abuses of
power and privileged tantrums.
But monopolies on anger only work in totalitarian states. In a free society,
both sides are expected to control their anger and find terms on which to
debate and settle issues. The left rejects civility and refuses to control
its anger. The only settlement it will accept is absolute power. If an
election doesn’t go its way, it will overturn the results. If someone offends
it, he must be punished. Or there will be anger.
The angry left demands that everyone recognize the absolute righteousness of
its anger as the basis for its power. This anger privilege, like tone
policing, is often cast in terms of oppressed groups. But its anger isn’t in
defiance of oppression, but in pursuit of oppression.
Anger privilege is used to silence opposition, to enforce illegal policies
and to seize power. But the left’s monopolies on anger are cultural, not
political. The entertainment industry and the media can enforce anger
privilege norms through public shaming, but their smears can’t stop the
consequences of the collapse of civility in public life. There are no
monopolies on emotion.
When anger becomes the basis for political power, then it won’t stop with
Howard Dean or Bernie Sanders. That’s what the left found out in the last
election Its phony pearl clutching was a reaction to the consequences of its
destruction of civility. Its reaction to that show of anger by conservatives
and independents was to escalate the conflict. Instead of being the
opposition, the left became the “resistance”. Trump was simultaneously Hitler
and a traitor. Republicans were evil beasts.
James Hodgkinson absorbed all this. The left fed his anger. And eventually he
snapped.
Anger has to go somewhere.
The left likes to think that its anger is good anger because it’s angry over
the plight of illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists, transgender bathrooms, the
lack of abortion in South Carolina, the minimum wage at Taco Bell, budget
cuts, tax cuts, police arrests, drone strikes and all the other ways in which
reality differs from its utopia. But all that anger isn’t the road to a
better world, but to hate and violence.
Millions of
leftists, just like Hodgkinson, are told every day that Republicans are
responsible for everything wrong with their lives, the country and the
planet. Despite everything they do, all the petitions they sign, the marches
they attend, the donations, the angry letters, the social media rants,
Republicans continue to exist and even be elected to public office. Where
does that anger go?
Either we have a political system based on existing laws and norms of
civility. Or we have one based on coups and populist leftist anger. And there
are already a whole bunch of those south of the border.
Leftist anger is a privileged bubble of entitlement that bursts every other
election. Its choice is to try to understand the rest of the country or to
intimidate, censor, oppress and eventually kill them.
James Hodgkinson took the latter course. His personal leftist revolution
ended, as all leftist revolutions do, in blood and violence. The left can
check its anger privilege and examine its entitlement.
Or his violence will be our future.
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