Making Misogyny Respectable Again

They went fishing in the dustbin of history, and guess what they found? That’s right, you guessed it: they discovered the discredited strategy of shaming public officials, holding them up to opprobrium, dispensing with the niceties of debate and even trial… punishing them mercilessly for crimes real and imagined.

It sure beats due process. It also beats democratic elections and deliberative debate. It's called mob rule.

#GetTrump Resistance fighters have reached peak insanity and peak stupidity by publicly humiliating women and children. They banded together to force Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson from a restaurant. They showed up outside her door to violate her personal time. They expelled Sarah Huckabee Sanders from a restaurant, and then, when members of her party went to another restaurant, they ganged up on them too. They even launched attacks on the president’s son and granddaughter. And they assaulted Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi at a movie theatre.

They wanted to show how strong and empowered they were. Because attacking women is always a good way to show off your toughness. Violating a woman's personal space shows how tough you are. Did anyone consider the implications of violating a woman's privacy? Of course, not. 

If you didn’t notice, they are attacking women and children… and thus are making misogyny respectable again. Once you find reason to attack women, other people will feel that they have been given a green light to assault women. Good job, folks.

Anyway, we are back in the days of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, when cadres of Red Guards ravaged the bureaucracy by humiliating everyone who held power in the government or the party. Anyone who knows history can tell you how it turned out. A million and a half people murdered by the Red Guards. The situation got so completely out of hand that Mao had to mobilize the army to put down the teenage demonstrators. As for the nation, it was completely destroyed—the extreme poverty rate after Mao’s death was north of 80%.

Once upon a time in America the nation rose up in outrage over the fact that certain people were not allowed to use public accommodations. In certain parts of the South African-Americans were banned from eating at lunch counters. We went to considerable lengths to rectify this egregious wrong. Now the armies of the progressive left see no problem in throwing people out of restaurants because they work for the American government. If not throwing them out, assaulting them with taunts and jeers, ruining the restaurant atmosphere for everyone else.

Evidently, the government will need to lean in against the protesters, in order to restore a semblance of public civility. Because otherwise, we are in far more trouble than you can imagine.

Petula Dvorak gets it mostly right in the Washington Post. She doesn’t really get it right when she says that it’s fine to hate Donald Trump. She is wrong because hate is not a constructive passion. Saying that hate is good for me but not for thee tosses the national conversation into a very dark place. Hate is something best kept dormant.

But she is right about this:

When American businesses stop serving people they don’t like — whether it’s because of their politics, their jobs, the color of their skin, whom they love or whom they worship — we’re breaking the social compact of a civilized society.

It’s not just about Trump administration officials. Dvorak continues, showing the consequences that descend on us when we rip up the social compact:

●A transgender woman was asked to leave a lively Cuban restaurant in downtown Washington for trying to use the women’s bathroom.

●A pharmacist in Arizona cited moral objections and refused a woman’s prescription for miscarriage medication.

●A black man was banned from shopping at his neighborhood grocery store in Maine after asking the clerk why both he and his wife were asked to show their IDs to buy a bottle of sake.

Dvorak notes that some of these people were members of a legally protected class. And that Sarah Sanders was not. Thus, the government cannot prosecute the perpetrators.

And yet, prosecution is not the issue. The issue is violating the norms of civil society. Once you do it, what’s good for thee also becomes good for me.

If you were asking yourselves how it got to this point, I cite Victor Davis Hanson’s sage analysis:

Had the defeated Hillary Clinton only accepted the results of the Electoral College, like all other defeated candidates, there would have been no post-election collusion hysteria. Had Clinton acted magnanimously like other sorely disappointed losers—Jimmy Carter in 1980, Walter Mondale in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988, George H.W. Bush in 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012—there would have been no accusations of scandal.

It’s not just that there would have been no post-election collusion hysteria. There would have been no feeling that the election was illegitimate and that the Trump presidency defied democratic and civil social norms.

Consider the old adage: the fish rots from the head down. Our leaders send us signals. They send us signals by their behavior and their actions. If they fail to show proper respect for the winner of an election, their supporters, those who love them beyond reason, will conclude that they had been robbed. They will then conclude that they can go to any lengths to right the wrong inflicted on Hillary.

Hillary Clinton: the presiding genie for the return of American misogyny. Consider the irony in that….