In the Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Wyman writes,
there’s one complicated Media vs. Trump story playing out that’s been overlooked. I speak of the media coverage of the Trump protests that have disrupted many of his appearances and, somewhat regrettably, they leave me having to stand up for Donald Trump. Why? Because the First Amendment does not take sides, not even against pumpkin-haired, nonsense-spewing, bloviating demagogues.
I got into a rare heated discussion with a lefty friend about this a couple of weeks ago. He was reciting the then-current left-wing talking points that the Republican Party was reaping what it has sowed with Trump and Trump was interfering with the right of people to protest. I said that the role of protest varies by context and by type of protest.
The context concerns what alternatives you have. In the case of Trump, you have many alternatives to getting to the face of his supporters and yelling at them. You can vote for someone else, you can contribute to someone else’s campaign, you can express your views about Trump in various media. In a context where you have no right to engage in other forms of political expression, I can be much more sympathetic to staging protests.
If you still choose to exercise voice at a Trump rally rather than rely on the other available alternatives, then I think that the less polite you are the less legitimate your “protest.” You can politely and quietly hold up signs. But it is wrong to scream at his supporters or try to keep Trump from being heard. We do not need to instill a culture of political violence in this country.
I do not think that my friend was persuaded to be less than completely sympathetic with the so-called protesters. So I am glad to see that someone who is disturbed by the Trump phenomenon (as am I) is still willing to criticize the anti-Trump protest phenomenon.
Undoubtedly manipulated by publican bias, etc., but regardless of whether it should, this dynamic pushes people towards Trump.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8Hxn2CoMl4
The protests they are pursuing are actually a bullying attempt to intimidate and suppress speech and political assembly on the part of the right. To suppose the protests are protected by a “right to protest” is to claim that those who disagree with the Left have no right to speak or peaceably assemble. It is noteworthy that there is no “right to protest” named in the Constitution, but freedom of speech and the right to peaceably assemble are named. The Left is trying to replace our heritage of liberty with totalitarianism, and render written law nugatory, replacing it by their own will.
The genius of the marketing seems to be the implicit assertion “see, Trump is so bad and racist that he leaves defenseless oppressed protesters no choice but to violently defend themselves.”
Only people who see themselves as part of the same in-group can disagree civilly. People who don’t have strong bonds don’t debate, they try to dominate.
What the Trump protestors are doing is just the prole version of what high brow progressives are planning:
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2016/05/abandoning-defensive-crouch-liberal.html
Several generations of law students and their teachers grew up with federal courts dominated by conservatives. Not surprisingly, they found themselves wandering in the wilderness, looking for any sign of hope. The result: Defensive-crouch constitutionalism, with every liberal position asserted nervously, its proponents looking over their shoulders for retaliation by conservatives (in its elevated forms, fear of a backlash against aggressively liberal positions).
It’s time to stop. Right now more than half of the judges sitting on the courts of appeals were appointed by Democratic presidents, and – though I wasn’t able to locate up-to-date numbers – the same appears to be true of the district courts. And, those judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions. (They might be reversed, but now there’s no guarantee.) …
…
1. A jurisprudence of “wrong the day it was decided.” Liberals should be compiling lists of cases to be overruled at the first opportunity on the ground that they were wrong the day they were decided. My own list is Bakke (for rejecting all the rationales for affirmative action that really matter), Buckley v. Valeo (for ruling out the possibility that legislatures could develop reasonable campaign finance rules promoting small-r republicanism), Casey (for the “undue burden” test), and Shelby County. (I thought about including Washington v. Davis, but my third agenda item should be enough to deal with it.)…
2. The culture wars are over; they lost, we won…My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown…..
3. Aggressively exploit the ambiguities and loopholes in unfavorable precedents that aren’t worth overruling. Take Wal-Mart: Confine it to its unusual facts (a huge nation-wide class, a questionable theory of liability), and don’t treat it as having any generative power in other cases. …
4. Related: Remember that doctrine is a way to empower our allies and weaken theirs. Conservative decisions on class-action arbitration should be understood as part of a long-term project of defunding the left. Much of the current Court’s voting rights jurisprudence strengthens Republican efforts selectively to shrink the electorate. Similarly with campaign finance jurisprudence. I don’t mean that these doctrines are consciously designed by the justices to have those effects, but outsiders – academics and activists – should understand that that’s what they do. (Nor do I mean that the efforts always succeed – see Evenwel for a failure.)
5. Our models are Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, not David Souter or John Marshall Harlan….With some ambivalence I’d add Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the list, the reluctance arising from the fact that her work as a judge has been shaped more than it should be by defensive crouch constitutionalism, particular in her sensitivity to the possibility of backlash. Still, when the votes are there, she’s been much like Brennan and Marshall (personality aside). Famously, Brennan said that he’d been around long enough to know what it was like to win, and what it was like to lose, implying that “this too shall pass,” though it’s taken a long time. (Or, channeling Sophie Tucker [or Mae West, or Beatrice Kaufman], he ‘d been a winner and a loser, and winning is better.)
6. Finally (trigger/crudeness alert), fuck Anthony Kennedy. I don’t mean that liberals should treat him with disrespect. But defensive-crouch liberalism meant not only trying to figure out arguments that would get Kennedy’s apparently crucial vote (not so crucial any more), but also trying to milk his opinions – and more generally, obviously conservative opinions – for doctrines that might be awkwardly pressed into the service of liberal goals. …
Nonsense. Progressives have been trying to undermine the foundations of the American republic for a hundred years. They have used the courts to further this agenda for at least 50 years. The nondiscrimination laws, which wiped out the idea of free association, were passed in the 1950s and the baleful effects are being felt strongly today, where the left is attempting to enforce its view of what is acceptable (or else).
And just nevermind that law should come from the lawmaking branch? Or not even nevermind it because everything should always be exploited as one way valve to totalitarianism and if conservatives believe in checks that is their problem?
SJWs are wasting their time here. Trump does represent 30 – 40% but their protests are not effective.
Simply reminding people young and Latino voters to vote in November is more effective.
The protesters are being foolishly counterproductive. It is precisely a tremendous amount of frustration and fatigue with these sorts of things which drives people into Trump’s corner.
What makes you think the protesters want to be productive?
The protests probably do help Trump. But isn’t Trump a dream-come-true opponent for the Left: someone they can plausibly vilify as a racist, sexist, etc., but does not seriously challenge any of the Left’s core positions? And affirmatively accepts most of them? A Trumpian Republican Party would provide the American Left with the equivalent of a Soviet satellite-style token opposition party. I mean, even more than the GOP has been up till now.
Another way that Trump’s rise serves the Left is that, when he does occasionally take a position in opposition to the Left, he advocates for such an outlandish version of the position, and with such buffoonish, ignorant, incoherent verbiage, that all versions of the position tend to be discredited with the general public beyond the Trump cult. For example, Trump’s exploitation of the immigration issue has caused support for building a border wall to decline.
Trump is the opposite of a dream come true opponent for Clinton. Whatever you think of him, he remains the most formidable candidate the GOP had to offer this year: the rest were certain losers, and while Trump’s odds remain low, for now, they are still higher than zero, unlike what would have been the case for the rest of the field. The left’s dream candidate wound have been Cruz, who would have been crushed even worse than Romney since the constituency for True Conservatism has now permanently shrunk below the critical point where there would be any hope left to salvage.
One of the problems with modern discourse is that any non-mainstream or contrarian position, no matter how accurate, will inevitably attract a lot of defective personalities who are ‘right’ for the wrong reasons, and that makes it very difficult to offer positive arguments and explanations without exposing oneself to guilt by association and accusations of being in the intransigent weirdo cult of unshakable faith that won’t listen to reason. At least without having to constantly go over-the-top with signaling disaffiliation with such unsavory characters for spurious reasons.
Hopefully I can avoid such nonsense when I say that the literate top 10% constantly misjudges Trump because they are projecting their own attitudes, preferences, and reactions onto the whole population, the other 90% of whom they no longer understand or relate to, and from which they have never been more different and segregated.
This cognitive apartheid means they do not understand that something egregiously ‘offensive’ which is an obvious negative in their own social milieu can actually be a strong positive in another. Lots of elites hate the Kardashians, can’t figure out what’s so fascinating about their tawdry, crass (and contrived) escapades, and while one can’t judge merit by the herd, market success speaks for itself.
We are all living in Generation Kardashian now, and the optimal marketing (and media hacking) strategies needed to win general elections (without the winds of the progressive establishment at ones back) has clearly shifted far, far away from any standards the chattering classes have traditionally used to assess suitability and electibility, and so they are constantly being surprised. Well, welcome to late-stage Democracy.
The word ‘contrived’ above is also key, and I’ve been dismayed to observe one high quality commentator after another lose their senses and take what Trump says seriously, without taking the man himself -as a genius marketer and salesman – seriously. That’s the opposite of the right way to understand these events. Reality shows aren’t real, and Trump is acting the part necessary to win, regardless of how ‘shocking and unacceptable’ that might seem to the pundits.
Never underestimate peoples stupidity at undermining their own cause, but the inflamed passions of self righteous zealotry are too instinctual for many to escape.
The hateful and often violent protests against Trump are of the same kind as the destructive protests in Ferguson and Baltimore. They will become even more hateful and violent as we get closer to the November election.
“pumpkin-haired, nonsense-spewing, bloviating demagogues.”
I didn’t know Bernie Sanders used to be a ginger. See how stupid these guys are? I guess charitable would be to say they are “unobjective.”
Trump has demagogued, what, twice? More like one and a half times, really? The rest is media fabrication. Bernie’s entire campaign is wholly demagoguery. But, it’s whatever, as the kids say.