Playing The Violence Card - Road to the Middle Class

OUR LEFTY friends have just come off a pretty a good century playing the blame game on “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 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 the revived Cloward-Piven is probably history repeating itself as farce. It just won’t work this time, 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 the American people won’t sympathize. That’s because the likely demonstrators will not be the unemployed, but overpaid, over benefited, over pensioned government workers. Even The New York Times get 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 that know how to play the blame game. It was 90 years ago when then-Governor Calvin Coolidge (R-MA) cooled a Boston police strike with the 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 that 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, 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.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close