THE FORMULA FOR USURPATION OF POWER IN MODERN AMERICA
The new left has sued guilting within the Democratic party to bring moderates to heel with alarming effectiveness. How do they do it?
Social Synchdoche
Perhaps the root of their power is the oft used nostrum “if one is oppressed we’re all oppressed”. Of course it’s ridiculous, but combined with ugly shaming on social media and forums it ensures that dissenting (adult) opinions are quickly drowned out. That dissatisfaction of very very few, mixed with a lot of shouting, and covered by a compliant media creates a new narrative.
A shooting by a cop wherein the cop is White and the suspect is Black is used to create a narrative of widespread police bias against Black men. While Mike ‘Ivy League’ Brown was killed in the process of trying to murder a cop after committing a strong - armed robbery, he nonetheless was elevated to martyr status by the left. Like so many of the left’s dead heroes – useless in life, but so very useful in death. Obama immediately sent his race card carrying* DOJ chief Eric Holder to both comfort the mother of Brown, and try to railroad the officer. The CBC embarrassed itself with ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ and soon Back Lives Matter was created to channel blind hatred of police, because this was easier than confronting the criminality so prevalent in SOME Black communities.
Vilification
When Barack Obama was President, there were many who despised him, yet you never saw massive demonstrations against him. You also didn’t see people singled out for personal and/or professional ruin for supporting him. The media loved Obama, yet even Fox News didn’t vilify everyone on his cabinet – it would not be decent.
Today, the left vilifies and tries to destroy anyone who openly disagrees with any of their policies. Additionally, entire demographics are painted with open hatred – actively encouraged. Trump’s supporters are routinely cast as villains, ignoramuses and worse. Any authority figure or department is vilified – Police, ICE, DHS, the SCOTUS etc. In seeking to tear down authority, they believe, naively, that society will heal itself and become better. Everywhere such anarchy has been tried, the results have been disastrous.
To vilify one must have villains; the Left makes wild accusations – typically racism – to gin up hate. The rich are a distant, small, and easy target; they are also someone to blame for your failure at life.
Indoctrination
I used to teach Brave New World and 1984. The left advocates for the former, and shrills that any notion of public order and laws is proof that we’re entering the latter.
In my own experience, male teachers are mostly conservative, female teachers are almost exclusively liberal. When I retired in 2015, there was still an unwritten rule that you avoided politics in the classroom. Those who violated that were known to the rest of us, and were always hard left. Incidentally, the kids didn’t like them, in part because like most on the left – they were humorless, shrill, and nursed hatred toward any dissenting views – and their owners.
It appears from news reports that such unseemly semi-pro teachers are becoming more rather than less common, though I have no real proof of that. On a macro level however, California instituting mandatory Ethnic Studies (read ‘hate Whitey’) curriculum is deeply disturbing.
Guilting
This goes back to Synechdoche, but it is more about methods used to silence dissent. No one person I know wishes anyone have greater rights than another, or that any American be relegated to second class citizen status, yet the left conflates any dissent as evidence of racism, sexism- some ism or another. Then the attacks begin, and with sufficient invective, with enough examples of people’s lives and careers being ruined, dissent appears to stop. The left, at one time, believed that their ‘better’ ideas would win out, but now seeks only control.
Guilting is working a bit less of late, as people have come through abuse exhaustion and are fighting back.
The 2020 election will tell whether the above strategies work, or whether, America still has another generation before it loses the will to be great.
*In a 1990’s interview with Terry Grosse on NPR’s “Fresh Air” he described the card he carries that intones that in all matters, race comes first.
