Meanwhile, in bizarroworld
by digby
Courtesy Josh Marshall on twitter, I was led to this bizarroworld essay about violent liberal intimidation:
If you want to know why the culture has become so “divisive,” this is why. Liberal elites are so threatened by the collapse of their narrative on every level, that they cannot help lashing out in a primitive manner.
Thus William Kristol writes of “the Agenda Project,” a major progressive group which “has launched the ‘Fuck Tea’ project,” the purpose of which is to “to dismiss the Tea Party and promote the progressive cause.”
“The ‘Fuck Tea’ movement — that’s what the left has come to. They can’t defend the results of Obama’s policies or the validity of Krugman’s arguments. They know it’s hard to sustain an anti-democratic ethos in a democracy. They realize they’ve degenerated into pro-am levels of whining and squabbling. So they curse their opponents.”
That’s about as primitive as one can get and still remain in the realm of language. The only thing left after “fuck you” is violent action. But it is critical to bear in mind that state violence is different from personal violence. The state is a giant bully that has a kind of infinite reservoir of violence behind it, so it needn’t necessarily behave with overt violence, since merely the threat is usually sufficient.
Change can be progressive, or it can be violent. Organic growth is a kind of change, but so too is a bullet to the head. Our Constitution is supposed to protect us from the violent predation of government, which is why it is Job One for the left to transform it from a document that protects us from the state to one which defines what the state can do to you.
Thus, “If a judge (or ultimately the Supreme Court) says the Constitution allows the government to force you to buy health insurance, then it’s a done deal, regardless of whether the Constitution says so or not. Under such a scenario, the Constitution thus becomes a tool for social engineering rather than a protection against government excess, as it was originally intended.”
And “as the ruling class has more and more isolated to themselves the power to dictate what is and is not an appropriate use of the blessings of liberty, we have seen a corresponding decrease in the actual liberty we enjoy.”
So in Arizona, a judge says that the people have no right to protect themselves from illegal aliens, while in California another judge decides that henceforth marriage will means something it has never meant and cannot mean. It is not so much that marriage between two men is “illegal.” Rather, it is impossible, like being the father of your mother. But what is the left but violent insistence on the possibility of the impossible?
Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. Whatever happens in November, it certainly won’t be a cause for joy. Transient relief, maybe, but not joy, because when narratives break down, people are truly capable of anything.
It’s always bracing to catch up with the right’s inverse view of the state of the world. It’s a reminder that we can all construct narratives to fit our worldview. This one is fairly elegant in its way although I’d love to know how they expect “the Constitution” to be upheld if judges and the Supreme Court are not allowed to adjudicate it. Priests? Psychics?
*Oh, and if you think this is just the mental meanderings of some blogger, take a gander at the triumphal 2010 William Kristol piece this fellow linked. In his mind liberals were on the verge of going extinct at that point:
The left has collapsed.
Its political support has collapsed. Public opinion polls point to a historic repudiation of the president and the Democratic party this fall, something on the order of a 60-seat Republican gain in the House. The GOP has an outside shot at taking the Senate as well.
Its claim to intellectual integrity has collapsed. Paul Krugman, Ivy League professor, New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate (the holy trinity of the liberal establishment), has humiliated himself with a startlingly dishonest attack on Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. Krugman, called out by Ryan, rebuked by honest analysts and unwilling to concede his errors, has retreated into uncharacteristic abashed silence.
Its Leninist discipline has collapsed. Last week, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs complained about the craziness of the professional left in the punditocracy. “Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs explained. “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality. … They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”
Members of the professional left hit back at Gibbs, dubbing the Obama White House the “amateur left.”
Its democratic credibility has collapsed. In recent weeks, the left has the arbitrary rulings and sophistic arguments of federal judges who have overturned an immigration statute that mirrors federal law passed by the state legislature in Arizona, and a constitutional amendment defining marriage as it has been defined for all of American history, enacted by the citizens of California.
Good times.