Our lefty friends have just come off a
pretty a good century playing the blame game
on conservatives for "violence." Whether it
was corporate goons whacking union
organizers at the
Battle of the Overpass
or racist Southern cops turning the fire
hoses on civil-rights marchers or Chicago
cops attacking the "kids" in 1968, you knew
who the good guys were.
Somehow the story of union thugs attacking
Tea Party folks, or Reverend Al Sharpton
inciting anti-Korean riots, or anti-WTO
anarchists vandalizing downtown Seattle
didn't have quite the same resonance with
the American people. So our lefty friends
play the right-wing violence card every
chance they get.
In part, the reason for this is that black
civil rights really was a big deal -- the
issue of America's original sin. But a lot
of the difference comes down to whose story
gets told in the media. Back in the good
old days, "objective" journalists told the
story, and that meant the liberal line got
handed down to posterity. In consequence,
lefty bombers like Bill Ayers and Bernardine
Dohrn get to pal around with future
presidents; right-wing militia members and
their ilk don't.
Despite a century of good press, the veiled
or not-so-veiled threat of violence sits
right at the center of left-wing politics.
The very word "demonstration" is a euphemism
for "show of force." Labor unions have
always used the threat of violence.
"Community organizing" is what left-wing
activists do when they are trying to gin up
a rent-a-mob for the benefit of the TV news
cameras. Just to be helpful, the MSM used
to warn every year of "a long hot summer" if
summer jobs programs for urban youth weren't
passed.
Whenever there is actual violence by
lefties, as recently by "students" in
Britain or by government workers in Greece,
our lefty friends play both sides of the
street. If there is property damage, they
blame the police for not controlling the
crowd. If rioters get injured, they blame
the police for "overreacting." Did you
know that almost all MSM reporters are
labor-union members?
Richard Fernandez has an elegant description
of our lefty friends' strategy on violence.
He calls it "deniable
intimidation."
How right he is. If the
workers/victims/students/undocumented
workers get enraged by the injustice of the
system, how can we stop them? No justice,
no peace, as Reverend Sharpton insists.
There's nothing we can do, the lefty
talking-heads will say; poverty creates
violence.
Lefties are full of ideas for violence.
Frances Fox Piven in The Nation has proposed
to renew the
Cloward-Piven strategy
for the 2010s. This time, she wants to
mobilize the unemployed into mass protests.
Recovering lefty Ron Radosh reckons that the
revived Cloward-Piven is probably
history repeating itself as farce.
It just won't work -- not any more than it
worked in the 1960s.
The left got away with subtly encouraging
violence by its political clients in the
last century because the American people
could usually be persuaded to sympathize
with the workers or the Southern blacks or
the welfare recipients in question.
Left-wing rhetoric often aligned with
mainstream public opinion. But the Tea
Party experience tells us that mainstream
public opinion has changed. There's an even
chance that if the left takes to the streets
in the near future (and there already are
increasing
calls for violence
and revolution popping up lately), the
American people won't sympathize. That's
because the likely demonstrators will not be
the unemployed, but instead overpaid,
over-benefited, over-pensioned government
workers. Even The New York Times gets it: "Public
Workers Face Outrage as Budget Crises Grow."
Americans understand that taxes spent on
inflated government salaries and pensions
put their Social Security and Medicare
benefits at risk.
Also, conservatives are better-placed to
compete with the left at the level of
rhetoric. We all know why. The monopoly of
the mainstream media is broken -- by talk
radio, by Fox News, and by social
networking. Now it looks like we are
getting a generation of conservative
politicians who know how to play the blame
game. It was ninety years ago when
then-Governor Calvin Coolidge (R-MA) cooled
a
Boston police strike
with these words: "There is no right to
strike against the public safety, anywhere,
anytime." Now we have Sarah Palin and her
"death panels" and Governor Chris Christie
(R-NJ). He's become a YouTube sensation by
commenting on the teachers' union leader who
wished him dead.
This shouldn't be that hard. Conservatism
is all about limited government, peaceful
cooperation, and the American Dream.
Liberalism is a culture of compulsion, of
big government's bureaucratic experts
conducting double-blind tests of the law of
unintended consequences.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic. But I
believe we are entering an era in which
conservatives can play the violence card on
the left and win.