A Violent Exercise in Futility

It seems like yesterday that we were agonizing about how we were going to compete against China in the newest chapter in the clash of civilizations. We were up in arms about the way China treats its people, about their appalling work conditions and about how they have cracked down on protest in Hong Kong.

It seems like yesterday, but alas, it has become a bunch of dead letters. The United States of America is descending into something akin to anarchy. True enough, mainstream news outlets are reporting on what they are calling peaceful protests, though no one with an ounce of intelligence believes their propaganda.

Politicians and leftist intellectuals are blaming it on President Trump. They have, for more than three years blamed everything on President Trump. Why stop now? As for the rioters, the Antifa fascists and the Black Lives Matter antisemites, the least we can say is that they are not Trump voters. 

They are the ultimate in #NeverTrumpers. They are the left’s extremist rhetoric put into action. The Congresspeople and the media intellectuals who have been indulging in extreme forms of rhetorical violence against the president, who have refused to see him as a legitimate president and who have systematically defamed him, who have disparaged everything he has done from the onset of his presidency wrote the script that the demonstrators are following, to the letter.

Of course, the more the riots continue the more they blame Trump. As for local authorities, those responsible for law and order in their cities, they have nothing to say. New York City is burning. Shops are being looted. People are being attacked on the streets by so-called peaceful protesters, and the media still loves Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio. President Trump declares that if the local authorities cannot do the job, he will send in the troops. New York’s Attorney General, Letitia James, is outraged by the president, far more outraged than she ever was about marauding rioters destroying the state’s greatest city. And she threatens to take Trump to court, to prevent him from trying to tamp down the violence.

Of course, riots tend in the long run to work to the political advantage of Republicans. Peaceful demonstrations tend to work to the political advantage of Democrats. Insurrection, we would suspect, will work to the advantage of Republicans.

And yet, these rioters are not just being led by blacks. They have been joined by the radical left, often white college students, recent grads who despair of ever finding meaningful employment. These latter sopped up the radical rhetoric of their college teachers, the notion that America was a vast criminal enterprise, built on racist genocide, needing nothing more than a violent overthrow. They are effectively doing what they were taught. Those who wrote that script are safely ensconced in their ivory towers, ready to defend any and all of the violent actions.

If you ask yourself whether these college grads, the cream of America’s youth, will ever be able to compete against China’s best and brightest, you will not be able to suppress  a laugh. These young people are doing what they are doing because they do not know how to do anything else. Since they were not taught the skills required to hold down a job, beginning with proper decorum, good manners and a sense of common purpose, they can do nothing else but break, tear down, deconstruct what others have built.

Leaders around the world are watching. And in many capitals they are laughing at America. The notion that other countries would want to emulate our sterling example of democracy rings more than a little hollow these days. If democracy is designed to tamp down social unrest and insurrection because it allows everyone’s voice to be heard, then we are not making a good case for it.

As I have noted, the first rule of democratic decorum is to respect the results of a fair election. About that, today’s Democratic Party has failed miserably. From the pathetic Hillary Clinton’s saying that President Trump is illegitimate to Stacy Abrams’ refusal to concede her loss in the Georgia governor’s race, to Nancy Pelosi’s contemptuous on-camera tearing up of her copy of the president’s State of the Union address… today’s Democratic party has been all contempt and no respect. The message has been heard, especially by those who were taught in school that deconstructing Western Civilization was a noble action.

I have noted it often, and it needs be noted again, the practice of deconstruction was concocted by a man who joined the German Nazi Party in 1933. By deconstruction he meant pogrom, a systematic effort to cleanse Germany of Jewish owned businesses of community centers. The Black Lives Matter protesters who have been desecrating synagogues while declaring themselves at war with Israel certainly belong to these cults. 

The Antifa radicals, now labelled a domestic terrorist organization, has always followed the Nazi Storm Trooper playbook: harass, disparage and destroy those who are associated with the Jewish president.

As learned from past riots, the ones who suffer the most are the rioters and those who are associated with them. Mayor Bottoms of Atlanta said it well when she said: “We are better than this.” And yet, the impression that black rioters are giving the nation is not one that is likely to make you want to hire someone who is black. The reputational cost of these riots is likely to be very high. And it will not just be the reputation of blacks. It will be the reputation of America itself. It’s one thing to be a beacon of freedom in the world. It’s quite another to show the world that freedom is a euphemism for anarchy.

Sadly, the businesses that are being burned, as well as the businesses that were more likely shut down during the pandemic lockdown, are owned by minorities. Burning down your neighborhood is not a smart thing to do. Moving on to other people’s neighborhoods, as some demonstrators have suggested, is even worse.

And then there is the demoralization effect. When leftist leaders blame all of the nation’s ills on white racism, when they declare that American racism is so deeply engrained that blacks can not succeed, they are offering a counsel of despair. A loudmouthed blowhard like Cornell West can declare that we really need a radical revolution, but to what end. 

This will make it less likely that blacks or members of any other minority group will want to do the hard work that will bring success. It will make them into chronic malcontents, unable to build, but only able to destroy. And it will make them feel entirely dependent on others, on white people. Where have we heard that before?

If you want any group to succeed, you should not be telling them that the odds are so completely stacked against them that they can only destroy what others have built. Of course, the radicals on the left still believe-- history be damned-- that the proletarian should rise up to overthrow the capitalist order. One Jeremiah Wright bought into the modernized version, called Black Liberation Theology, whereby black people would become the vanguard of the revolution against their white oppressors.

You might think correctly that it’s been tried before. And that it has failed in all forms. The reason is simple: the people who are out destroying shops and restaurants and the livelihood of their neighbors would never, never know how to rebuild these places, no less how to manage them. It’s the flaw in Hegel. It’s the flaw in Marx. It consigns the gauzy dreams of radicals to the ash heap. If they are waiting for the phoenix to arise from the ashes, they are going to have a long wait. 

Today’s nationwide rioting will set the cause of civil rights back. It will not move it forward. The victims will invariably be black. The Antifa radicals and the young zealots will simply get a haircut and a shave-- to fit right back in.