Lawlessness begets lawlessness

As someone who is on record condemning lawlessness and sedition, I am appalled and horrified by what happened today in Washington, D.C.  It is indefensible and inexcusable, and the rioters and vandals ought to be prosecuted.  But then, the rioting and vandalism that occurred in Washington last summer – and in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and other major cities – was also appalling, horrifying, indefensible, and inexcusable, and its instigators should have been prosecuted.  Yet some of the people who are now talking tough about law and order were then blathering on about “mostly peaceful protests,” “defunding the police,” and other such lunacy.  We are reaping what they sowed.  If you are going to tolerate and excuse left-wing political violence, you are opening the door to right-wing political violence.  But if you rightly condemn the latter, then to be consistent, you must condemn the former.  You must insist that all citizens respect law and order – your political allies no less than your political enemies.

Then there is the cause in the name of which the Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, viz. a refusal to accept the results of the election.  Here too the left-wing hypocrisy is breathtaking.  After the 2016 election, some on the Left attempted, through recounts and intimidation of members of the Electoral College, to reverse the outcome.  Many more left-wingers spent the next three years trying to delegitimize the outcome by pushing a groundless conspiracy theory according to which the Russians had helped steal the election for Trump.  Some plotted impeaching Trump before he was even sworn in, and spent his entire administration looking for pretexts for doing so.  Some warned darkly of the possibility of future election fraud through hacked voting machines, just as some left-wingers had insisted that George W. Bush had stolen the 2004 election by such means.  When raising doubts might benefit left-wing candidates, some characterized the flaws in the voting system as “staggering,” indeed a “crisis for American democracy,” and questioned the agendas of the companies that manufacture voting machines.  Some insisted that the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was “stolen” from Stacey Abrams.  Hillary Clinton said, before the recent presidential election, that Joe Biden “should not concede under any circumstances” if it is close.

And yet, in 2020, left-wingers nevertheless pushed through a mail-in voting system that was sure to increase the risk of fraud and open the door to endless litigation.  And they made arbitrary changes in the rules for accepting mail-in ballots in states like Pennsylvania.  Such moves guaranteed that the legitimacy of the outcome in any state where the vote was close would come to be widely doubted. 

In short, the Left spent four years making the questioning of an election’s legitimacy a routine political tactic, and then in 2020 produced conditions where such questioning would be a priori more plausible than usual.  Again, we are reaping what they sowed.

Not only has the Left itself inadvertently created this bear of a mob they now decry, they have insisted on poking it relentlessly.  They have imposed on the country open-ended lockdowns that have destroyed the livelihoods of working class people while enriching the Left’s corporate allies.  These same corporate allies have imposed, on the Left’s behalf, a regime of political censorship and information control.   Left-wingers shrilly and ceaselessly demonize their opponents as racists and bigots who cannot be compromised with but must be “cancelled” and driven into the cultural and political margins.  And they have talked of securing indefinite one-party rule by ending the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, and admitting into the Union new states whose voters could guarantee perpetual left-wing control of the Senate.

In these ways, left-wingers have worked to make their political enemies feel boxed in and desperate.  They can hardly be surprised when those enemies start acting in the ways that desperate people tend to act.  Trump’s rise was in the first place a reaction against left-wing excess.  Yet while he is now leaving the stage (albeit kicking and screaming), that excess has in four years massively increased.  While liberals piously pretend to fret about extremism, they have tolerated left-wing extremism and created the conditions for a backlash of right-wing extremism.

If Joe Biden is anything remotely close to a statesman, or even just politically savvy, he will do what is in his power to arrest this spiral of lawlessness and mutual hatred.  He will enforce the law against both right-wing and left-wing rioters, and insist that every governor and mayor do the same.  He will act to rein in the lunacy of the wokesters now cancelling and indoctrinating their way through every institution of American society.  He will urge the lifting of lockdowns that have no proven efficacy in controlling the virus, but have produced widespread economic devastation, psychological stress, and social unrest.  He will put an immediate end to Democratic talk of court-packing and other power grab schemes that will only pour gasoline on the fire.  And he will, as Jonathan Turley recommends, set up a commission to investigate the integrity of the election, and work to reverse the lax election rules that opened the door to doubt.