In July when Donald Trump proposed to send federal agents into Chicago to deal with the violence in that city, Mayor Lori Lightfoot characterized it as the reaction of a tyrant. It was not the protesters’ brazen disrespect for the Rule of Law as well as other people’s property and well-being that was tyrannical, but rather the effort of an elected official to restore civil order.
[On Aug. 21 The Blaze reported that Lightfoot had stationed approximately 100 cops around her home while banning all protests on her block, protests she had characterized as “peaceful.” Two sets of rules, one for the rest of Chicago, one for her, such hypocrisy, sadly, epidemic on the Left.]
In Feb. 2020, when environmental protesters blocked a main rail line near Edmonton, Alberta, a few young White males showed up in a pickup truck and quietly, peaceably cleared the track. The ever sanctimonious CBC immediately denounced them as vigilantes, suggesting that had violence ensued it would have been their fault; not the fault of those who initiated the dangerous situation in defiance of the Law but rather of those who sought to rectify it.
In the weeks following the Brexit referendum of 2016, dozens of articles by Leftists declared the vote to be the product of an ugly, “authoritarian” strain of populism, “populism” meaning “of the people.” Whereas Democracy used to mean Majority Rule, “progressives” now dismiss any electoral outcome not in keeping with the sacred value of “inclusiveness” as inherently undemocratic. Their values clearly take precedence over the Will of the People. It is a ludicrous violation of the very meaning of Democracy. It is itself a recipe for the tyranny they see only in others!
The residents of Great Britain apparently had no right to want to recover control of their borders from a collection of bureaucrats in Brussels who, inasmuch as they were in no way obligated to consult with them on such issues, were themselves actually tyrants of a sort. And of course those Brits who saw their vote as an attempt to preserve a culture they deemed to be eminently in peril from a massive influx of those holding radically different values, were really just racists unwilling to tolerate “the other.” Were there some among them who were so? Of course! But this in no way gives the “progressive” media the right to simply dismiss the wide-spread concern throughout Europe for the preservation of its Culture as little more than a latter day form of Nazism.
But how else could the Left react, given its postmodern disdain for “cultural values” as mere vehicles of oppression? Engaging in an honest discussion of the relative merits of the Democracies of the West and any number of other nations born of different cultural traditions, must inevitably reveal the superiority of the former, must inevitably impugn the inane egalitarian conviction that all people are morally equal, all principles equally valid, all cultures equally conducive to human welfare. The Left responds to any proposed discussion of such issues with a barrage of insulting epithets because it has no other option, because it is intellectually bankrupt.
Hence the tendency of the CBC and indeed most of Canada’s media outlets to glorify those radicals given to disrupting the projects of our energy sector, thereby compromising our economy and forcing us to import oil from countries that don’t give a damn about the environment, while demonizing those opposed to this eminently questionable policy as “deniers” or, in the case alluded to above, “vigilantes.” No room for rational debate. No room for the complexities of the issues at hand. Environmental Radicals Good, Canada’s Energy Sector Evil! End of discussion. Bravo CBC! Bravo, you “woke” Fanatics of the Religious Left!
Endless editorials and indeed a host of recently published books support the narrative that the political Right poses a dire threat to Democracy. Jane Mayer’s 2016 “Dark Money” comes to mind. Her hypothesis is that the behind-the-scenes machinations of various billionaires who support “conservative” candidates and political initiatives are the very definition of tyranny in action. That George Soros, the Tides Foundation, The Southern Poverty Law Center and various other well-funded, radical Leftist groups operate in the very same covert fashion does not seem to concern her. In essence her sophisticated thesis would seem to be: You’re wrong and we’re right; end of story.
Such narrow-mindedness pervades the Left. Many of that orientation have admitted as much [Paul Berman, Nicholas Kristof, etc.] while others have actually defected to “conservatism.” The notion that any White Westerner who votes for a candidate given to the defense of traditional, Liberal Western values is somehow a threat to Democracy, is a product of the Left’s implicit disdain for Democracy, a disdain born of that disrespect for the Rights of the Individual that is an essential element of its Neo-Marxist creed.
Those of that persuasion have been subtly undermining the public’s faith in our fundamental values for decades now, that process no more apparent than in our institutions of “higher learning.” Whereas most of the professors of my 70s university education saw the Western Tradition in its manifold facets as integral to Man’s quest for a more civilized future, that sentiment is now dismissed as an expression of White Supremacism. It is a judgment passed down from the lofty perches of our “intellectual elites.” It is a judgment which the silent majority has every right to reject. While Trump is clearly a highly flawed individual, the notion that a vote for him amounts to a vote for Tyranny is absurd. Rational “conservatism” [what used to be called “liberalism”] by definition supports Reason, the Rule of Law and the Checks and Balances essential to a Democracy. I am fully confident that should Trump violate any of the above, he will be duly chastised. I am equally confidant that continued support throughout the West for the values and tactics of B.L.M., ANTIFA and that host of “social justice” fanatics who clearly have no respect for any of the above, will inevitably result in the very sort of tyrannical regimes which the simpletons of the Left purport to so despise.