The ruling class is the liberal 'resistance'
The liberal push-back through the judiciary against the controversial Trump immigration executive order tells us a lot about our liberal friends.
For instance, the Seattle liberal judge who stopped the E.O.'s implementation was concerned about the impact on "businesses, universities, and citizens."
Yes, Your Honor. Government actions very often have that sort of effect on business and universities. Government is very bad for business. Hadn't you noticed, old chap? You tell me about the impact of a government that taxes the people out of 36 cents for every dollar, as reported by usgovernmentrevenue.com, would be. Better put a stop to that, too, before big government crashes the economy.
President Trump, rightly or wrongly, has declared that immigrants and refugees are a danger to the United States homeland. It is beside the point to worry about the effect of the order on normal business operations.
Of course, if you are an anti-Trump judge, that is where you have to go to oppose the order. You cannot pretend to act as judicial commander-in-chief, empowered to second-guess the president on matters of national security. That would be a bridge too far, even in 2017.
If you are a liberal in the United States in 2017, you feel yourself empowered to impose your will on the American people on everything from education to marriage to abortion. If you are right about all that, and you know you are, then it is a small step to imposing your will on the American people when it comes to immigration and terrorists and defense in general, whatever the president may say.
And why not? Today's world is good to liberals. They get to monopolize all the comfortable sinecures at the nation's universities and NGOs. They get to flit from one international metroplex to another for sabbaticals and visiting professorships. Their women get to slough off the dirty work of life, from cleaning to child-raising, onto the lower orders, as women of the first rank have always done.
It's a great life, and worth defending. If you are a liberal.
The problem for liberals is that, while they have been living off the fat of the land, as ruling classes always do, things have not been going so well down on the farm.
And the beauty of democracy and universal suffrage is that it permits the peasants to peaceably assemble at the voting booth and advertise their grievances without resorting to the extreme measures of rebellion and civil war. There is no need for "resistance."
Instead, the "resistance" turns out to be the ruling class and its supporters: liberal rich kids at Berkeley, the black liberal rich kids of Black Lives Matter, and the liberal judges in Seattle and San Francisco, vigorously asserting their droit de seigneur over the peasants. These privileged scions of the ruling class, who have spent the last ten years clutching their pearls at every rumor of right-wing extremism, are loudly calling for violence and "resistance" against a routinely elected president of the United States.
A ruling class is sending its supporters into the street to bully and intimidate. What else is new?
Ever since the election, I have tended to wake up in the night with anxiety about where our nation is headed. It seemed that life was easier in the old days before Trump, when conservatives didn't challenge our liberal masters and did not dare to provoke "resistance" from the ruling class.
Yet conservatives decided they couldn't take it anymore and resolved to elect leaders who would fight back against liberal hegemony. President Trump is the result of this rising tide of rage in the conservative base.
Now conservatives are in the position of the dog that caught the bus, as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has gently observed. For years, conservatives have complained about the yoke of liberal government, but now we have the power to do something about it.
Do we have the cojones to do it, from Trump down to the individual American? To push back against mostly peaceful liberal protesters? To push back against liberal judges?
The simple fact, as Eric Raymond writes (H/T Instapundit), is that "[w]e have to eject postmodern leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our politics, and volk-Marxism from our media."
We have to resist the "resistance" of the left and roll it back. If we don't do it now, under President Trump, we'll have to do it later. And the later we do it, the messier it will be.
As Sarah Hoyt often writes at the end of a post:
Be not afraid. Go forth and work and teach as you go. In the end, we win they lose... Go and do it.
Because courage is overcoming fear.
Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.