I fear that a theme on Ethics Alarms over the next few days is going to be the awful conduct and deteriorating ethical standards of the Trump-hating left. This situation is not really debatable, and flagging it from an ethical perspective should not be regarded as a partisan or an ideological act. It is, though: I have the emails, comments and Facebook insults to prove it. Why aren’t progressives and Democrats properly outraged? Why don’t they find this conduct by their apparently unhinged compatriots as repulsive as I find it—as repulsive as it is? I don’t understand it. When they are confronted, and I have confronted many, they have no answer, no reason. Just rationalizations, or more often, just emotional outbursts. Today a Facebook friend, and a real friend too, an actor and, I am pretty sure, a Communist, wrote in Facebook that he would rather have Harry and Megan running the country, because republican democracy wasn’t working out so well. He wasn’t kidding, either, and nobody in the progressive Facebook echo chamber challenged him. People are going insane, and they are rotting from the inside out.
Steve-O-wrote this in response to Item #1 in the 5/16 Warm-up. That section was about all the Democrats and pundits actively cheering for the North Korea talks to collapse, because they are so filled with hate that they want Trump to fail even when his successes would be good for the country and the world. That is, in a word, diseased. And that is what the “resistance” has devolved into in less than two years. I could not be more disappointed in my fellow citizens. I thought they were better–fairer, smarter, more patriotic, with a firmer hold on the values they claimed to possess—than this.
They’re not.
Here is Steve-O-in-NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post,Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/16/ 2018: The Fake Moussaka Edition:
David Gergen once said that those who dislike and criticize this nation, particularly blacks who don’t celebrate July 4 because they are still bitter about their history aren’t unpatriotic, they just practice “a different form of patriotism.” He also said that Jeremiah Wright might well love this country more than conventional patriots, but just believe we have fallen short of our ideals. The concept of “matriotism,” a sort of pacifistic yin to patriotism’s yang, was floated for a while, but never really caught on.
The fact of the matter is that a lot of us on the right loathed Obama and loathed his policies, but we never let that turn into us hating our own country, and we never stood against our own servicemen, even when Clinton wasted our efforts in the Balkans and Obama led from behind to topple Gadaffi…without a clue of what to do afterwards. We (except a few crackpots) also never talked of taking up arms against our own elected officials, nor rioting. Guess who put mobs in the street before the War on Terror and rioted the day Trump was sworn in, the duly elected president? Hint: it wasn’t the right.
The fact of the matter is that the left is a strange mix of the ultra-violent (the Black Panthers, antifa) and the ultra-disloyal (the National Lawyers’ Guild, the Peace and Freedom Party) held together by a few charismatic folks who want ultimate power and don’t give a damn how they get it. The only problem is that the right is in the way, and after Vietnam the right has pretty much a lock on the flag and conventional patriotism, which the average Joe still reveres. Like it or not, Donald Trump has become identified with the flag, strong law enforcement, a strong military, and other conventional symbols of pride in this nation. That’s still pretty powerful. Worse still, under Trump the economy is doing better, people have more money in their paychecks, and overall things seem to be looking back up after years of looking down.
This isn’t a recipe for the all-important Blue Wave the left is hoping for this fall so it can return to absolute power. So they attack the idea of patriotism as jingoistic and fit only for beer-drinking, camo-wearing, unsophisticates with bad teeth. They attack the idea of a strong military as the US bullying the rest of the world and taking out children with ugly weapons. They attack law enforcement as bullies with badges who hunt young black men for a hobby. They attack success itself as coming at the expense of the deserving. They play on guilt, they play on shame, they play on blame. Of course they aren’t patriots. Patriots believe in their country, no matter who’s in power, the left only believes in their country if they are in power. If someone else is, not so much.
Ethics Alarms 
The problems provided by the extreme left organisations are a problem of the rights making. We (moderates) were too busy to be concerned by the left dominating academia and other institutions and we were too apathetic about the way the law was being applied. Unless the law is applied without fear or favour it does not provide the protection it is supposed to.
stillthinking1 wrote, “The problems provided by the extreme left organizations are a problem of the rights making.”
BALDERDASH!
I’ve been in the middle since I was a young man watching both ends of the political spectrum and since the protests of the 1960’s. I’ve watched the left move farther and farther left (Progressives) so far in fact that they have blinded themselves with their Socialistic and/or Communists ideological tendencies and they now paint a true Liberals and moderates as Conservative or extremist Conservatives. The intolerance of the Progressive wing of the political left is now dominating the left absolutely, the more moderate Liberal voices are actively being shunned. The Progressives, anything to their right is wrong and demonized as such.
The root problem in the political scene of the United States is Progressives trying to dominate absolutely and, in my opinion, they no longer care how they achieve that absolute domination. The lefts growing moral bankruptcy since the 1960’s has driven them to the ends justifies the means.
This won’t end peacefully.
My reaction is more a “huh?” I don’t understand how the extreme left is a creation of the right. This needs to be explained better. That said, I also agree with Z. The left has been extreme since the days of Alinsky, and if they keep moving far left, they’ll fall into the Pacific.
Yeah, I read this and thought, “Wut?”
stillthinking has a point, though: is analysis of the moderates.
“We (moderates) were too busy to be concerned by the left dominating academia and other institutions and we were too apathetic about the way the law was being applied. ”
This is true of most of common Americans. We have had it so good the past 100 years that we are self involved, and thus apathetic as a people. Our elected servants have become our civil masters, and are at the point of being above the law as a matter of course.
There are points in history that focus American attention: 9/11, Pearl Harbor. However, the general theme is for everyone to live their lives without regard for politics, and civics suffers as a result. How is jury duty viewed by most of your friends? How was the turnout at the polls for the recent primary elections? We have allowed the business of the people to be taken from the people, and allowed the people to be dumbed, numbed and excluded. Bread and Circuses have become cheap food (or free food, from welfare) and the entertainment media, right down to the games on our phones.
“Unless the law is applied without fear or favour it does not provide the protection it is supposed to.”
This is an eternal truth, and one America has lost sight of.
Z says, “This won’t end peacefully.”
I think the only way this end peacefully is if common Americans wake up and take back their country from the zealots on either end of the spectrum. If Civic Duty is again made to be an honor and not a chore, if we return to a state where the public pays attention to what their elected servants are doing ‘in their name.’
I don’t understand the chain of thinking…. You were too distracted by academia to worry about the way that laws were being applied?
I don’t accept that the problems in academia are a distraction, they’re the environment the next generation of movers and shakers are coming up in, and winning culturally on campus is important generationally… But even if you disregard that, which laws do you feel were inappropriately applied by the right that led to the extreme bad behaviour of the left?
stillthinking1,
Are you new to Ethics Alarms? If so, welcome.
You sure you aren’t seeing ghosts?
Michael West wrote, “You sure you aren’t seeing ghosts?”
Nope.
Reincarnation maybe?
Style is different and typing-quirks don’t match. Same for the last 1 or 2 New guys you welcomed since Monday.
Our personal compositional styles are like fingerprints…really, really hard to arbitrarily change.
Michael West wrote, “Style is different and typing-quirks don’t match. Same for the last 1 or 2 New guys you welcomed since Monday.”
Agreed.
Michael West wrote, “Our personal compositional styles are like fingerprints…really, really hard to arbitrarily change.”
I have an old buddy that writes similarly to how I write. We have “similar” backgrounds and our opinions are relatively close on a lot of things plus we have conversed via writing a lot so it’s really not too surprising that our styles have blended. I think the most noticeable difference between us is the adjectives we use.
All of our writing styles and even our personalities have a tendency to morph based on the things we regularly read, kind of like creating new norms for self based on what they perceived as a norm in what they read, you can actually see that happen right here in these threads. I’ve seen this up close and personal with a couple of people that have gone over the edge of reasonably accepted reality with some things and it’s changed nearly everything about them; it’s all been because of their immersion, to the point of obsession, into things they’ve read online that they’ve allowed it to pollute their minds.
Still:
Do yourself a favor and watch the inaugural episode of Saturday Night Live and the Leftist agenda is on display from minute one:
• Religion stupid and bad
• Gun rights ridiculous
• Traditional marriage a joke
Then do yourself another favor and read Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, a plan to destroy the American Constitution, a la Noam Chomsky et.al.. and see the genesis of what we call today’s Left.
Lastly, revisit your first sentence and see if you still believe it to be true.
Claiming the Left’s behavior is simply a reaction to the Right is not true.
Is this the same faction of the Left that said that “[l]ocal law enforcement must be able to use their discretion to determine who can carry a concealed weapon”?
Maybe, maybe not. The black radicals, the cop-haters and the anti-gunners are not necessarily the same people. Some of the anti-gunners dislike and fear the police, but just as many if not more of them are ok with the police being the only ones with guns, including most of the elected officials who have armed protectors.
The same that says federal law enforcement is above reproach and should not be questioned about what they do in secret (at least when it comes to the President).
Not to mention that Federal law enforcement is above reproach when it does not recommend charges against one candidate after a non-interview, but spies on the other.
Congrats on the COTD Steve, well done.
Thank you.
P.S. Trump just pulled the plug on talks, citing the recent hostility by Kim. In the same letter he warned him not to push his luck and that our arsenal is a lot more powerful. Is the left happy at this collapse of talks? If so, why is this good, and Reagan’s walking away from the table in Rekyavik not so good?
It’s sad that the talks aren’t going to happen as planned. We’ll see how. or if. canceling the talks changes Kim’s attitude.
I think Kim Jong Un is an absolute coward not to face Trump in talks.
I also think Kim Jong Un is no Gorbachev, who wanted reform and was back at the table the next year to sign the INF treaty once both sides knew the extent of concessions available. Whether Trump is a Reagan, I dunno, but, let me remind everyone that a lot of folks laughed at former actor Reagan as a lightweight in his time.
The problem with Un’s current saber rattling, is he tried a new tactic, a faux-conciliatory attitude, he even took it pretty far. But once he showed his hand was just more bluster, he’s ruined that for the future.
You can’t pretend to be a friend to get in good with others.
You either ARE a friend and work towards better friendship OR you have severely set back your efforts for a good long while.
Well done, Steve-O
Thanks.
People will cite an equivalency between Rush’s comments a decade ago, when he was wishing for Obama to fail, and the current crop of the “resistance.”
But that’s not even a fair comparison. Rush was wanting Obama to fail because Rush was opposed to Obama’s goal of “fundamentally reforming America.” When Obama was actually doing something that both sides should support, there wasn’t a hope for Obama to fail so that it would be another failure to tout. Rush was never rooting for the failure of America.
As you point out regarding Trump and N. Korea, that’s exactly what the “resistance” is doing: rooting for America to fail. Trump should be easy to defeat, but I forsee the Democrats losing to him AGAIN, because they can’t resist from doing crazy things like rooting for N. Korea, defending MS13 and Hamas. The public isn’t going to go for people who are rooting for the failure of America.
Michael Moore’s crazy comments on Osama bin Laden’s video in 2004 (which seemed to echo Fahrenheit 9/11 to the point where he said OBL must have had a bootleg copy) are sometimes cited as contributing to George Bush the Younger prevailing in that year’s elections. The thought was that the folks in the center and maybe even some edging toward the left might have read them and said “wait a minute, just whose side are this guy and his followers on?” and “do I really want to vote for an ideology that has a major advocate who sounds not too unlike the sworn worst enemy of my nation?”
In the end most Americans are still Americans first, and it’s hard for anyone who thinks of himself as an American to side with totalitarians, Muslim fundamentalists, and those who are here illegally over his own nation and his own people. Interestingly, the same people who will defend these enemies of this nation are probably the same who would tell a Christian opposed to gay marriage to go live in Saudi Arabia or someone opposed to illegal immigration to GTFO MY country. The hypocrisy is staggering.