It Takes an Intellectual...

Just in time, you might say, John Podhoretz (via Maggie's Farm) reminds us of what he calls George Orwell’s “timeless admonition:"

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

Indeed, it is impossible to follow intellectual debates in this country without thinking that something is seriously wrong with the American mind. Not in the sense that it is warped or even ill, but that it is infested with terminal stupidity. And especially with the mind of America’s elite intellectuals. It did not begin yesterday. It has been around forever:

The glorification of mob violence and petty criminality that was one of the disgraceful hallmarks of bien-pensant thinking throughout the 20th century resonates through every tweet, ­every deep TV observation and every piece of writing that casts the coast-to-coast destruction and anarchy in a positive light.

Rationalize and justify, find a deeper meaning to the mindless violence. That is the media agenda. It was borne out of cowardice, I would maintain. After all, people who are terrified of mob violence are the first to insist that they are on the rioters side. So, intellectuals, lacking in moral character, are falling over themselves to excuse the moral depravity of the rioters. As noted yesterday, Atlanta Mayor Bottoms struck the correct counter-note, when she said: “We are better than this.”

Our elite intellectuals do not think so. Isn't that telling?Beginning with a Northwestern University professor named Steven Thrasher, they are providing air cover for the rioters. In their eyes we live in a police state. Thus, it is right and honorable and just to burn down police precincts.

How much do you wager that Thrasher will keep his job. After all, fomenting violence against the police or against the state makes you something of a hero.

Podhoretz writes:

A Northwestern University journalism professor named Steven Thrasher took to Slate to offer this analysis: “The destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable ­response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response, and a predictable one. The uprising we’ve seen this week is speaking to the American police state in its own language, up to and including the use of fireworks to mark a battle victory. Property destruction for social change is as American as the Boston Tea Party. . . .”

There is nothing new about this, Podhoretz reminds us. After all, Norman Mailer was defending criminal acts of violence committed by minority group members decades ago:

The difference between the hoodlums of Mailer’s day and the antifa “insurgents” of Thrasher’s and our time is that our insurgents are fully aware there is a phalanx of media and academic apologists at the ready, who will not only excuse their behavior but laud it. This both provides them internal psychological cover for the unleashing of the evils inside them and a vocabulary to explain away the evils they release.

An important point, worthy or emphasis. Today’s rioters know that they have the media on their side. They know that they will not be portrayed as idiot thugs or even as violent insurrectionists. They will be portrayed as heroes, as a vanguard of the revolution. It's not just about being permitted to riot; it's about being rewarded for rioting.

After all, they are doing what leftist intellectuals have been encouraging for yo these many years. If they add a little violence to the formula, that just means, Podhoretz suggests, that they have an excess of righteous zeal:

Ideological partisans of all stripes face this temptation every day — the temptation to believe that those who seem to be making the same argument you make but then add violence to the mix only do so out of an excess of zeal. In other words, the violent people may be wrong in their tactics, but their passionate loathing of injustice simply got the best of their good intentions.

Perhaps they feel it necessary to do so because they don’t want the bad behavior to discredit their beliefs, or because they can’t bear to examine their ­beliefs in light of the violence and wonder if they are a part of what made the violence happen.

Can you, by the amoral calculus of the American left, ever be too strongly opposed to injustice?

Besides, to keep with a theme of this blog, the rioters are doing little more than expressing their emotions, openly, honestly and shamelessly. Isn't that what therapists have been telling them to do? Isn’t that the height of mental health and emotional well being? Do we want them to bottle up their feelings and get cancer?