By Kelly Sloan | Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
The political diagnosticians poking around at the remains of the last election, on behalf of the Democratic Party, are compiling a gestating list of items seeking to explain why what happened on Nov. 7.
The lists get pretty long, but close to the top of nearly all of them is the general sense that the streets are manifestly less safe than were even four years ago; that the decay in respect for law and order has made our erstwhile civil society far less civil and far more dangerous.
This sort of post-mortem is a normal and healthy exercise in democratic hygiene, undertaken by both parties periodically, the point of which is to identify what motivates the voters and to adjust approaches to self-government accordingly. One would expect, then, that the Democrats, who just received a fairly thorough rebuke from the voters, would take pains to move in a direction that might assure the public that their commitment to the maintenance of civilized order is intact.
If they are, not all of them received the briefing packet.
Case in point: A couple weeks ago, we were greeted with the news, complete with video, of an assassin shooting the CEO of United Healthcare in the back, a scene that elicited universal revulsion at the evil act of cold murder.
Well, not quite universal — here was Elizabeth Warren, a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, quoted in HuffPost: “Violence is never the answer, but…” (note the use of the qualifier “but” following the introductory clause) “…people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they … start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.” Her colleague Bernie Sanders also took the opportunity, not to express sympathy for the victim’s young family, but to essentially justify the murder, saying “anger at the healthcare industry tells us is that … you cannot have people in the insurance industry rejecting needed healthcare for people while they make billions of dollars in profit.” Or, presumably, we will have them shot in the street.
Not to be outdone, the singularly ridiculous Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was quoted on the Capitol steps as saying, “This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but,” (there it is again) “I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.” Yes, she equated a business practice, however infuriating and seemingly capricious, with walking up to someone and putting three bullets in the back of their head.
Now, to be fair, not all Democrats share in those sorts of noxious equivocations. Take John Fetterman, for instance; whatever his other faults, he had this to say about the killer: “He’s the a**hole that’s going to die in prison.” And his analysis of the general situation was refreshingly spot-on: “Remember, he has two children that are going to grow up without their father. It’s vile. And if you’ve gunned someone down that you don’t happen to agree with their views or the business that they’re in, hey, you know, I’m next, they’re next, he’s next, she’s next.” Exactly.
Which viewpoint will win out on the left? Remember Daniel Penny? The young man, Marine veteran, who intervened to subdue a violent, and much larger, homeless man who was threatening Penny’s fellow citizens on a New York subway, and who was subsequently charged with murder for being a good citizen? He was acquitted earlier this month, and rightly so. For progressives such as AOC and the blessedly soon-to-be-former Rep. Jamaal Bowman, however, the real travesty of justice was not that Mr. Penny had been arrested and put on trial for doing the right thing, but that he intervened in the first place.
So, shooting someone in the back of the head because you disklike what he does for a living is at least presumptively justifiable, but if you take action to defend your weaker neighbours against a violent threat, and in the course of so doing accidentally kill the would-be assailant, the book should be thrown at you. So much for Burke’s apothegm that the prerequisite for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
The outgoing President is not doing his Party any rhetorical favors in this space by doing a 180 and pardoning his son — including preemptive pardons for anything he may have done that he hadn’t got caught doing yet — and then following it up with a spate of pardons and clemencies that stretch the rationality of the presidential pardon power; including one for a judge who was taking kickbacks in exchange for sentencing kids to prison.
The Democrats are going to have a much harder time convincing voters that they can be trusted with the maintenance of domestic tranquility while their erstwhile leader flouts the rule of law so arbitrarily, and their rouge elected officials skirt the line of countenancing class violence and celebrating disorder.
The brave new world being advocated by the far left is an invitation not to justice, but to its opposite, anarchy.