One can regard political activists, on either the left or the right, as crying because their demands are not being met. To the extent that their demands are reasonable, then more crying reflects greater sensitivity. If the left has reasonable demands, and they care about them, then that is a good thing. But if their demands are unreasonable, then this means that they are crybabies.
Of course, children only learn what demands are reasonable by crying and observing the results. If it persists into adulthood, someone taught them poorly. (1)
(1) Of course there are rare instances where a reasonable adult would cry, such as the loss of a family member.
The left does not have reasonable demands from government because they have a fundamentally different expectation from government that is itself unreasonable. They see government as a vehicle whose coercive powers can be used for the pursuit of the socialist ideal, rather than as a civic association that protects against abuse so as to allow citizens to pursue their own plans in life free from interference by ill-intentioned actors.
That’s not the unreasonable part; plenty of governments work that way (e.g. Singapore, Japan). The unreasonable part is to assume that such a government will ask nothing of them.
Another way of measuring the ‘reasonableness’ of complaints and demands is whether or not such complaining tends to work and get results.
If you get results, you are not a ‘crybaby’ but a ‘crybully’ (see Juliano’s fun and useful book). If you don’t get results, you are just a whiner. And the actual direction of causation begins with the social calculation of expected effectiveness which then yields the generation of the intense emotions.
When those on the left complain, usually seeking punishments from those with authority over a target – whether its ‘administrators’ or ‘management’ or ‘the government’ – they get results. It doesn’t matter if the issue seems subjectively minor, stupid, or unreasonable so long as the so-called ‘adults’ in the room who are supposed to be gatekeepers filtering out unreasonableness go along with it anyway, and socially validate the legitimacy it by their actions.
Even the word ‘microaggression’ concedes by its very formulation that one is complaining about a minor or trivial sleight and having a thin skin and being hypersentitive about the matter. Still, that does nothing to stop the complains, or to stop those complaints from getting results.
Almost every week there is some story of some university professor (in institutions purporting to respect the ideal of ‘academic freedom’) doing something totally and obviously innocent like using the word ‘Chinese’ to refer to the PRC government, or using examples of filler language from Mandarin, and nevertheless the complaints come forth and administrators bend over backwards and proceed with ‘investigations’ and so forth, and continue to do so even when prominent public intellectuals and other faculty members try to push back and note the clear insanity and injustice of what is happening, and the administrators simply respond with the typical incoherent buzzword salad boilerplate to which we’ve all become quite horribly and exhaustingly accustomed.
What the left has is a coercive apparatus they can aim at anyone who either is the target or who gets in the way of that target’s punishment for any casus belli as defined by mostly by identity-based relations in progressive ideology (oppressor vs. oppressed, Who over Whom?)
What the right has is nothing but a complain-o-sphere or a whine-o-sphere of what are a few handfuls of writers who are able to make their living publishing the latest “leftist outrage of the day” and maybe a few hundred more who specialize in being broadcast repeaters for those few originators. Almost no one on the right seriously contemplates what it would really take to achieve the social peace of a cease-fire and coordinate to stop this kind of nonsense from spinning even more completely out of control.
When someone one the right complains to a university administrator, the answer is never, “We would like to apologize for your hurt feelings. We take all these complaints extremely seriously and will of course place the individual under suspension while we pursue a thorough investigation wherever it may lead.” It is, “Tell it to the judge. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.”
We get what we incentivize.