Topic: Liberal Fascism
During the 2016 presidential election journalists, pundits, TV talking heads and political professionals were nearly unanimous in their denigration of those monster Trump rallies. Don’t be fooled, we were admonished, they were irrelevant. The large crowds meant nothing! It was money and strategy and the ground game that counted! Trump was a sure loser! Also sprach the Conventional Wisdom. There were dissenters from this CW but they constituted a distinct, often despised, minority.
I was reminded of all this yesterday while watching the coverage of the monster Women’s March in Washington, DC. It was amusing to note that many of those who denigrated the Trump rallies professed to see in the Woman’s March a moment of profound political significance. On the other hand, many of those who had seen something significant in the Trump rallies were dismissive of the Women’s March.
Now at first glance this seems like a classic example of that serviceable old Orwellian concept, doublethink: the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in one’s mind at the same time, and accept them both. But upon further reflection I believe that the latter group—rallies significant, march not significant—are on to something.
When human beings gather together in a large group, the group’s message can only be its lowest common denominator. A rally or march involving tens of thousands of people is not the place for sophisticated discourse; if it won’t fit on a poster, it doesn’t get expressed. And the larger the group, the larger the number of eccentrics, vulgarians, fanatics and just plain head cases it attracts. Even normally well-behaved people, beguiled by the security and solidarity of the group, often feel free to let themselves go.
The mitigating factor, the thing that invites us to overlook the crazy people, is the group’s focal point: a person, a cause—sometimes both. Thus the significance of the Trump rallies: Their focus was Donald J. Trump and the message he embodied. The energy generated flowed, so to speak, into the candidate and he carried it forward to Election Day. Much the same thing happened with the great civil rights marches of the Sixties and even with the antiwar movement of that time. Whatever one’s opinion of the latter it cannot be denied that “Stop the War!” was a powerful, unifying theme.
This brings us to yesterday’s Women’s March and to the question: What was it all about? Well, dislike of Donald Trump, certainly, and the angst so many experienced on the occasion of his inauguration. Every march participant who voted in the election had voted against Trump, so in that sense they were telling us nothing new. You hate the guy; we get that.
But what was the Women’s March for? What was its focal point? That’s hard to say with any degree of precision. Oh, there were the usual factions and organizations pushing the standard issues of the Left, from open borders to LGBTQ—if that’s the current acronym—rights. But mostly the message of the Women’s March was the Left’s standard cry: racist/xenophobe/sexist/homophobe/fascist/Nazi/bad person. That is to say, it was nothing more than a loud and exceptionally ill-tempered expression of the Left’s default reaction to Republicans, conservatives and everyone who deviates from leftist orthodoxy. Sure where Trump is concerned they really, really mean it. Still, we’ve heard it all before and so what?
This was the problem that bedeviled the Women’s March. The lack of a resonant unifying theme meant, inevitably, that attention was focused on the bad actors, of whom two were celebrities—no surprise there. Madonna informed the world that lately she’d been thinking a lot about blowing up the White House: a line that I was sorely, sorely tempted to exploit on Facebook and Twitter. Then there was Ashley Judd—and jaded though I have become where celebrity zaniness is concerned I was disconcerted to see the elegant and comely star of De-Lovely transformed into a grimacing, screaming, foul-mouthed lunatic.
The Women’s March was certainly therapeutic, enabling a large number of disappointed progressives to discharge all that negative energy. But after the euphoria comes the hangover and as time goes by, many of those who clogged the streets of DC and other cities will awake to the realization that their big day was just that: a day, and one with no sequel.
