A Muscular Minority

     In any civilized society, those who are willing to use violence to gain what they seek will be a minority. Those who are eager to do so will be fewer still. But as I wrote a few days ago, when violence and intimidation fail to evoke an adequate – i.e., adequately violent and intimidating – response, we should expect the ranks of the willing to swell. However, the pressure on those who nominally have the job of responding will grow greater as well.

     It appears from recent events that that’s exactly what’s happening:

• MILO YIANNOPULOUS UC BERKELEY EVENT CANCELED; VIOLENT PROTESTS SHUT DOWN BREITBART EDITOR APPEARANCE
• After Berkeley: A Right Wing Call to Self-Defense
• Be Careful What You Ask For
• “Genocide, racial hate, America was never great”
• Protests and Attacks Cut Gavin McInnes’s Speech Short

     Those are only samples from the most recent events, of course. For some years now the trend among left-wing activists has been to disrupt – to render impossible, if they can – any gathering of persons they regard as enemies. They’re distressingly good at it, and successful more often than not.

     But the counterpressures are building. Conservatives expect the police to act: to suppress disturbances, maintain public peace, and protect the rights of the innocent. That hasn’t been the case in most of the recent leftist disruptions. If the police continue to hang back, there are three possible outcomes:

• The Left will succeed in its totalitarian-fascist drive to overturn our civil order;
• When the police finally respond, it will be indiscriminate and bloody;
• Badgeless citizens will take matters into their own hands.

     None of those developments would be welcomed by any man of good will. Yet there are no other possibilities.

     We speak of the police as the forces of order. Sometimes they’re not, particularly when they confer de facto protection on thugs for any reason. De facto protection is what the leftist rioters have been getting: the police have stood by – sometimes under orders from civilian authorities – and decent citizens have been inhibited from action. Consequently, the rioters have...run riot. Brutalizations and destruction of property have been widespread.

     Is it just too obvious to say that this will not end well?

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     Muscular minorities have taken power in other lands by the use of exactly the same tactics as the Left is using today. The best known case is, of course, the German Third Reich. The Nazis were never a majority; indeed, that was no part of their intentions. But they were classically “activist” in the streets of the Weimar Republic, and neither the police nor private Germans were willing to take up cudgels in defense of the civil order. The Brownshirts will triumph if the rest of society sits idle.

     The Left believes its field forces and popular support are sufficient to carry the day. They make no pretense about what they want: the nullification of the November election and the installation of their preference in the Oval Office. Present trends continuing, it’s difficult to be confident that they’ll fail.

     There must be a response, and the sooner the better.

     Americans have been led to believe that all the “important stuff” happens in Washington D.C. That’s not the case, especially today. A “demonstration” such as those that have disrupted cities and universities nationwide – riots, really – is a local affair, to which a local response is required. It’s time for riot-riven cities, communities, and universities to press local executives to do their jobs. It must be made clear to them that those jobs will be peremptorily taken from them should they elect to remain sitting with folded hands.

     Do you know your mayor’s, county executive’s, and governor’s email addresses, Gentle Reader? If not, why not?