The unbearable rightness of being a Democrat. By Hugo Gurdon.
Top Democrats keep emailing me to tell me how angry they are. They’re asking for money, and people apparently donate more if those seeking handouts are in a rage.
- I mentioned recently that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) asked me for support on the grounds that she was made “sick to [her] stomach” by originalist Supreme Court justices moving to overturn the “constitutional right to abortion.”
- Then, the “Ragin’ Cajun,” Democratic operative James Carville, emailed me saying he was “furious.” That was his one-word headline. “I’m so damn angry,” he went on, “I can hardly type this message to you.” …
This exactly fits Allan Bloom’s landmark 1987 analysis The Closing of the American Mind. He saw that university leftism was dragging America into a sort of anti-rational imbecility that displaced reason with emotion, and he noted that “civilization or, to say the same thing, education, is the taming of the soul’s raw passions.” He added, “Indignation or rage was the vivid passion characterizing those in the grip of a new moral experience.”
These passionate militants graduated to run the Democratic Party and send me fundraising emails. There is an adamantine chain of causation between their emotional preening and the urge to violence that recently produced the firebombing of a pro-life/anti-abortion organization’s headquarters in Wisconsin. If you’re a left-winger, you can lob Molotov cocktails at people whose opinions you dislike and feel self-righteous about it….
And why not? After all, rage supposedly justified a national orgy of destruction two years ago after the police murder of a black man, George Floyd. And, just this past week, President Joe Biden’s White House took days to stop making excuses for mobs attempting to intimidate conservative justices outside their homes. Initially, press secretary Jen Psaki refused repeatedly to condemn it, saying, “The president’s view is that there is a lot of passion, a lot of fear, a lot of sadness … about that leaked document.”
Passion, fear, sadness — emotions rather than reasons. With a veneer of excusable emotion, the Left uses violence again and again to get its way. This is right out of Saul Alinsky’s militant handbook Rules for Radicals, which inspired Hillary Clinton’s university thesis and has now been absorbed into the Democrats’ DNA.
The Madison, Wisconsin, police chief responded to the arson by intoning the piety, “There is no room for hate or violence in Madison.” But it’s not true. There is plenty of room. The Left has for generations opened a wide space in which its adherents may indulge their hate and inflict their violence. The wide-open space is all of America.
Violence gains power, but is a Pyrrhic victory because a sullen society is an unproductive and unhappy society.
