Bats And Balls

     Humorist P. J. O’Rourke has called liberalism “the philosophy of sniveling brats.” No doubt he had in mind the gimme mentality that’s prevalent among them, married to their tendency to whine, stamp their feet, and shout “It’s not fair!” when they don’t get whatever they’re currently demanding: “If you don’t give me what I want, I’m going to take my bat and ball and go home.” And indeed, that was an adequate characterization for the Eighties and Nineties: arguably as accurate as any precis of a “philosophy of governance” that has no intellectual underpinnings could be.

     Today, the “sniveling brats” have graduated to a new stance: “If you don’t give me what I want, I’m going to take your bat and ball and go home:”

     This is a phenomenon we have seen repeatedly over the last year and a half. Liberals try to rule any support for President Trump out of bounds. Anyone who expresses even the mildest support for Trump is read out of polite society. He is shunned; he should be fired from his job; if he writes anything, it shouldn’t be printed; he is publicly denounced and inundated with hate; his home, in some instances, is besieged and his children terrorized. If he ventures out into public, he is harassed by bullies. This is the essence of 21st century liberalism.

     And it is evil. It is incompatible with democracy or any kind of civil society. And, above all, it is completely crazy. After all, Donald Trump won the election. Donald Trump is the President of the United States. Liberals are trying to dictate, through mob rule and control over the press, that any support for the President of the United States is unacceptable and, if at all possible, career ending.

     John Hinderaker calls this “crazy and evil.” I concur on the “evil” portion, but I can’t see the Left’s behavior as “crazy.” It’s steadily getting them at least some of the things they want: concurrence from a good part of their “base,” obeisance from the major media, and a scattering of conciliatory gestures from the GOP, especially the “NeverTrump” portion thereof. As the old Army saying goes, “If it’s crazy and it works, it ain’t crazy.”

     Note how solidly the Left-inclined have cheered for Red Hen’s expulsion of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family. Note how broadly they’ve approved of the ongoing harassment of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Note how unabashed TIME has been about its fraudulent magazine cover. There was one miscreant on Twitter who opined that “fascists” – and you know who he had in mind, don’t you, Gentle Reader? – should be afraid to step outdoors:

     A few folks with significant influence are finally catching up with me:

     “I think we’re at the beginning of a soft civil war,” political scientist Thomas Schaller told Bloomberg’s Francis Wilkinson. “I don’t know if the country gets out of it whole.”

     I wonder what it took to get his attention? Some of us in the Right have been on this story for quite a while:

     It’s becoming a nation where an elite that is certain of its power and its moral rightness is waging a cultural war on a despised minority. Except it’s not actually a minority – it only seems that way because it is marginalized by the coastal elitist liberals who run the mainstream media.

     Today in America, we have a liberal president refuses to recognize the majority sent to Congress as a reaction to his progressive failures, and who uses extra-Constitutional means like executive orders to stifle the voice of his opponents. We have a liberal establishment on a secular jihad against people who dare place their conscience ahead of progressive dogma. And we have two different sets of laws, one for the little people and one for liberals like Lois Lerner, Al Sharpton and Hillary Clinton, who can blatantly commit federal crimes and walk away scot free and smirking.

     Today in America, a despised minority that is really no minority is the target of an establishment that considers this minority unworthy of respect, unworthy of rights, and unworthy of having a say in the direction of this country. It’s an establishment that has one law for itself, and another for its enemies. It’s an establishment that inflicts an ever-increasing series of petty humiliations on its opponents and considers this all hilarious.

     That’s a recipe for disaster. You cannot expect to change the status quo for yourself and then expect those you victimize not to play by the new rules you have created. You cannot expect to be able to discard the rule of law in favor of the rule of force and have those you target not respond in kind.

     Kurt Schlichter wrote the above in April of 2015. He foresaw a swifter and more dramatic response from the Right than has emerged to this point. I don’t think we’ll have to wait much longer.

     Leftists believe that they can get away with these “one rule for me, another for you” tactics indefinitely. They believe it because up to now they’ve garnered the results they’ve sought, at least in part, with a perceptible shortage of consequences unfavorable to them. That’s about to change. Gatherings of conservatives, free-speech rallies, and talks by Rightist and nationalist luminaries are being equipped with security -- armed security. Police forces in left-wing-governed cities are being put on notice that if they don’t maintain public order under those circumstances, it will be done for them, and be damned to the consequences.

     I didn’t want to live long enough to see the blood of Americans running in the gutters. It appears I’ll have no choice.