Censure by the left didn't start with resistance to Trump
The mainstream media would have us believe that the ascendant left is a political version of Pavlov’s dog – salivating with righteous fury every time Trump rings out a controversial Tweet.
In their telling the most recent examples of dangerous anger – Rep. Maxine Waters' call for mob action against Trump Cabinet members and the decision of a Virginia restaurateur to refuse to serve Trump's press secretary, Sarah Sanders – are spontaneous responses to the president’s “zero tolerance” policy that included the separation of children from parents who crossed the border illegally.
A New York Times headline succinctly captured the effort to pretend this intolerance was new and Trump-inspired, “Liberals Clash Over Steering Off High Road.”
In fact, the left took that exit long ago. The recent intolerance is not new but part of a pattern that includes the violent protests against conservative speakers at Berkeley, Middlebury and other colleges as well as the numerous clashes between Antifa agitators and the police.
It is of a piece with Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of half of Trump voters as a “basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it.”
It is reflected in President Obama’s claim that there is a right side to history – embodied, naturally, by progressive policies. That idea, which helped give us both the Crusades and communism, is especially dangerous because it leaves no room for good faith disagreement. Those on the other side aren’t merely wrong or misguided, they are stupid and/or evil. Their views do not deserve to be heard.
The rise of the left and its intolerant politics aimed at silencing others can be traced back to 2010, when Republicans began routing Democrats in local, state and federal elections. In response, grassroots movements such as Moral Monday in North Carolina arose to challenge these electoral defeats.
Their fusion campaign joined left-wing ideas of class conflict and identity politics with a fire and brimstone version of the morality that fueled the civil rights movement. It was a protest movement aimed at demonizing and destroying others.
Forsaking truth for power, preachers and professors were eager to misuse history by claiming Republicans wanted to restore Jim Crow and the Old Confederacy – and, later, that Trump is a modern-day Hitler. That is not how you start a debate – it’s how you end one.
Even as civil liberties and the population of foreign-born residents expands, we’re told white supremacy is a grave threat. So too is white privilege, which is an especially pernicious idea because it is geared toward shutting down debate. Drawing on the ideas advanced by the Marxist scholar Herbert Marcuse, it asserts that privilege blinds most white people to oppression. The only proper response, then, is to shut up, listen and learn.
Having convinced themselves they are in a war with apostates, the left feels free to launch any attack. Just last week a writer on the popular African-American website The Root felt comfortable asserting “white people are evil”; New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, who has presumably heard of Stalin, Mao and Jeffery Dahmer, said the owner of the Red Hen restaurant was justified in refusing to serve Sanders because she works for a man who has demonstrated “unparalleled personal cruelty”; the editorial board of the Miami Herald recklessly suggested that the disturbed man who killed five people at the Capital Gazette newspaper was inspired by a right-wing provocateur; and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg blithely described Trump on Sunday as a “depraved” “authoritarian” leading a “kleptocratic” government.
Come on.
Trump isn’t Lincoln, but he’s a far stretch from Nero. Fair-minded people should recognize the danger of such objectively false claims, which discard reason for ugly emotion in the pursuit of power.
It is frightening because it is willful. It reflects a entrenched mindset embraced not by kooks on the margins but people with influence and prestige determined to silence their fellow Americans.
Contributing columnist J. Peder Zane can be reached at jpederzane@jpederzane.com.