Victor Davis Hanson on how “the Left has so destroyed the old protocols of the opposition party that it will be hard to resurrect them when progressives return to power”

Victor Davis Hanson recently spoke at Cornell, but unfortunately I was out of town at the time. I would have loved to meet him, he’s one of the most insightful authors.

In my 9th Anniversary post on October 12, 2017, Legal Insurrection is 9 years old, and filled with dread, I wrote about the “rising tide of absolutism in ideas and enforcement of ideological uniformity that is palpable” on the left, and “what it will mean to live without institutions.”

In a column at National Review a week ago, Hanson elaborated his thoughts on a similar concern, in a way far more articulate than I did.

As always, read the whole thing, here’s an excerpt from Hanson’s Revolution and Worse to Come:

As the Resistance goes from one ploy to the next, it ignores its string of failed prior efforts, forgetting everything and learning nothing…. Anti- and Never-Trump op-ed writers have long ago run out of superlatives. Trump is the worst, most, biggest — fill in the blank — in the history of the presidency, in the history of the world, worse even than Mao, Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler…. Everything from the NFL to late-night comedy shows have become Trump-hating venues…. Each cycle of hysteria demands another, as the race to the bottom has descended into which celebrity or politician can discover the most provocative — or crude — Trump expletive. “S***” and “f***” are now the ordinary vocabulary of angry Democratic politicos and officeholders. Are we reaching a point in the so-far-failed Resistance where little is left except abject violence in the manner of the Roman or French Revolution? The problem for Trump’s pop-culture foes is not whether to imagine or advocate killing the president. That’s a given. They just need to agree on the means of doing so: decapitation (Kathy Griffin), incineration (David Crosby), stabbing (the Shakespeare in the Park troupe), shooting (Snoop Dogg), explosives (Madonna), old-fashioned, Lincoln-style assassination (Johnny Depp), death by elevator (Kamala Harris), hanging (a CSU professor), or simple generic assassination (a Missouri state legislator)…. Insidiously and incrementally, we are in the process of normalizing violence against the elected president of the United States. If all this fails to delegitimize Trump, fails to destroy his health, or fails to lead to a 2018 midterm Democratic sweep and subsequent impeachment, expect even greater threats of violence. The Resistance and rabid anti-Trumpers have lost confidence in the constitutional framework of elections, and they’ve flouted the tradition by which the opposition allows the in-power party to present its case to the court of public opinion….. The danger to the country this time around is that the Left has so destroyed the old protocols of the opposition party that it will be hard to resurrect them when progressives return to power. We are entering revolutionary times. The law is no longer equally applied. The media are the ministry of truth. The Democratic party is a revolutionary force. And it is all getting scary.

Hanson apparently shares my dread.

We’ve lost the ability to reason with these people because they are so far gone. I wish it weren’t so, but we need to face reality.

[Featured Image: Inauguration Day Protests]



