1. Political Violence

Have you ever noticed that many pieces of helpful wisdom contradict other pieces of helpful wisdom?

For instance: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

But also: Never throw good money after bad.

You see what I’m getting at, right? Both of these maxims are correct. And wise. And yet they are in tension with one another because they’re not universally applicable.

We have a tendency to do that these days. We look at an idea or an argument and extrapolate it past the horizon and then, when it bumps up against some limits say, “See? It’s a slippery slope. You can’t have X.”

I would argue that there are actually very few ideas or arguments that can be extrapolated past the horizon. And those ideas or arguments—you call them “first things”—are the exception to the rule.

Because the rule is: Even with the most sensible ideas, you cannot escape the duty to apply judgment and make distinctions. Because most norms are not universal. They are prudential.

Which brings us to two scenes from the political left over the weekend.

In the first scene, some of the fun-loving boys from Antifa went wilding and caused a great deal of mayhem and assaulted a journalist.

Their logic, such as these things have a logic, is that the journalist was right-wing apologist who got what he had coming.

The other scene was a piece in the Washington Post by by Stephanie Wilkinson, whom you may remember at the owner of the Red Hen—the restaurant from which Sarah Sanders was politely asked to leave a few months ago.

Wilkinson was attempting to reconcile two recent restaurant incidents—one in which a waitress spit on Eric Trump and another in which Cracker Barrel told a Baptist preacher who wants gays arrested that he couldn’t hold an event in their space.

Wilkinson’s view is that one of these protests was acceptable and the other was not. Here she is wrestling—very ably—with the duality:

The comments tend to fall into one of two camps: either that it’s illegal to discriminate against a person for his or her political stance or that it violates some imaginary unwritten universal service-for-all hospitality industry code. Neither is quite right. Eateries have always reserved the right to refuse service. But in the main, the real hospitality code comes down to a simple if paradoxical statement: All are welcome. Terms and conditions apply. Thankfully, as a culture and by law, the United States continues to move toward increasing inclusivity in communal spaces. No one can deny you service because of your race, religion or national origin. (And in some places, sexual orientation, physical ability and age are also protected classes, while in the District, Seattle and a few other locales, it is illegal to refuse service based on a guest’s political affiliation or views.) At the same time, if you’re an unsavory individual — of whatever persuasion or affiliation — we have no legal or moral obligation to do business with you. And that, too, is right. Because — and this is important and easily overlooked — at bottom this isn’t about politics. It’s about values, and accountability to values, in business. . . .

But the most important part of Wilkinson’s essay is this:

The high-profile clashes rarely involve one citizen fussing at another over the entrees. It’s more often a frustrated person (some of whom are restaurant employees) lashing out at the representatives of an administration that has made its name trashing norms and breaking backs. Not surprising, if you think about it: You can’t call people your enemies by day and expect hospitality from them in the evening.

I’m not sure whether or not that’s true.

Or more to the point: I’m not sure whether or not it should be true.

But I do know that the current round of “enemy” talk didn’t start with Trump. It has its roots in the New Left of the 1960s, back when radicals on the left actually set off bombs and took over campus building with guns.

Or maybe it started with Bull Connor and Jim Crow.

But the point is, it doesn’t matter who started it. This is where we are now.

And it would be nice if we could simply grant everyone amnesty and try walking this back.

Political violence is like a disease. It strikes when society’s immune system is weak. When the body politic has become fat and sclerotic. When it lacks the resources to defend itself.

And once the virus takes hold, it spreads. Stamping it out is an all-hands effort.

It will take both sides.

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2. Laura

Jim Swift caught this. It is . . . amazing.

How can you walk around with this level of cognitive dissonance and still pretend to care about anything other than Team Red vs. Team Blue?