Where does this end?
The progressives’ rejection of the presidential election, the obstruction and social disruption – what is its purpose?
Is this the Democrats in 1861, or the Bolsheviks in 1917?
Four months after the Democrats warned that refusing to accept the outcome of the presidential election would tear the country apart, they are refusing to accept the outcome of the presidential election.
In coordinated nationwide demonstrations, in random outbreaks of campus violence, in shrill denunciations and boycotts, a secession has taken place. A non-geographic civil war has seemingly been declared.
A man looks at graffiti during a protest in Berkeley, California on February 1, 2017. Violent protests erupted on February 1 at the University of California at Berkeley over the scheduled appearance of a controversial editor of the conservative news website Breitbart. / AFP / Josh Edelson (Photo credit should read JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images)
In rejecting the outcome of an election in a republic, one rejects the premise of that republic, and the compact of citizenship. It is a nullification of the social contract. If, in fact, the president selected by a constitutional process is not your president, then it is not your Constitution. You have rejected it. You have stepped outside the group which declared itself with the words, “We the People.”
Certainly, a person or a party can dislike the outcome of an election – ask any conservative about the last eight years. But to reject the outcome of an election is to come out in open hostility toward the structure which defines a nation.
It is an act of rebellion and revolution.
And to throw fuel on that fire, to ratchet up the spending and the rhetoric, to pump the marketplace of ideas with ever more invective and anger, is to mash down on the accelerator of a car headed toward a brick wall. Enraging people, abandoning civility and comity, is how you build barricades, not bridges. This is not the spirit of the American Revolution, it is the spirit of the French Revolution.
And the master funders of the progressive movement are plowing millions into it. The leaders of the Democratic Party, in government and out, are claiming and shouting outrageous and incendiary things. The shrill zealots of progressive society are shaming and blacklisting and whipping the timid into conformity.
And you wonder where it goes.
What is the end?
Where do they want this to take this country?
What is the finish line these people seek to cross?
Is all of this to whip up passion for a congressional election that is still two years away, or a presidential election two years beyond that? Is it to paralyze and derail the function of the American government, to destabilize our nation, until the candidate of the mobs can be installed?
Do they want commissars to be appointed? Do they want an overturn of the presidency? Is it a coup they seek? Do they want to foment a social disorder that crumbles the organizational infrastructure of the American nation and people?
Or is there some form of release and relief in shouting their hatred for a president and his supporters? Is there an orgasmic thrill to be had in declaring half of your fellow citizens your moral and intellectual inferiors?
Or is it extortion? Are they hoping to buy something with their unrest, to squeeze from the government some concessions and autonomies?
Will there be a new flag, and a new capital – a new currency, and who will be on it?
The Democratic Party has established itself as a coalition of the disaffected. Is it now seeking to disaffect the entire nation, to turn it against its structures and institutions -- even its electoral voice? Americans have always been taught to support the constitutional government that protects their liberties, now they are being taught to actively hate it.
Mayors have used taxpayer resources to organize political protests. Weekly demonstrations have been decreed by sitting municipal officials. The fuehrers of the arts community have declared they are undertaking a war against fascism, and performers and business leaders are threatened with blackballing if they acknowledge a new president.
In 1950 you were blacklisted if you were a communist; in 2017 you are blacklisted if you are a Republican.
The loudest voices in our society are profanely denouncing what two hundred years of American experience have defined as the basic obligation of the citizenry – to live by the Constitution. If social disruption is to occur in the wake of a presidential election, then it was not a peaceful transfer of power. If one half of the electorate is to take its toys and go home, to throw a rage of destruction over its electoral failure, then their relationship with their fellow citizens is fundamentally abusive and hostile. If the progressives can’t have control of the levers of power, then no one can.
That is bullying, at best. And civil war, at worst.
And they keep pushing down on the accelerator.
So perhaps they should be honest enough to state their objective.
What is the end game?
What are they trying to achieve?
Is this secession? Is it revolution?
Or is it just a tantrum?