From: "Jeff Jacoby" <[email protected]
Some gaps in the text (where images were removed); all you need to do is scroll down to the continuation of the article. View web version<http://view.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=3dbe34fb944fe966cdd252e4eb340bdacf5d989f7063a90a1d4614f0a302dc1679449b5c66389916c161ab0a8e0b0b9a4294518781de99ecb7df21bb6ee9b607af74bdcae396a50680d5a6f396135d79e7cbf314ad8b5f3c> Monday, October 15, 2018 Life in the fever swamp Unless you’ve been ensconced in a bathysphere deep in the Marianas Trench these last few weeks, you’ve been seeing angry Democrats and liberals throwing furious temper tantrums and encouraging others to continue the mayhem. There was the horde yelling at Senator Ted Cruz and his wife<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef72f9c295463ff0d34239590428765ab6b2ab06abdf79bb6ebcbb691f5ee24a9228fd00453aaf6d9270cce50b4db33f916> until they were forced to leave the restaurant where they were having dinner. There were the protesters screeching at Senators Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, and Bill Cassidy in Capitol hallways. There was the frenzied mob charging past police to claw at the doors<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef7a84fc5139e0b200bc8aa5f2ce6a49441b470a2e472ab10edfbb244255814da3afe75d20a76f2f39c3df7f2cbf11f27a4> of the Supreme Court building. There was the potentially deadly assault on Republican congressional candidate Rudy Peterson, who was targeted at a festival by a man who screamed obscenities and tried to stab him with a switchblade<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef7de91c4caaf7d2f4184472e60a2e9eafdb5db012fc21020c4c2fed8180f50de291df50ff14a564acce7d42120f911ed09> . This left-wing mob mentality isn’t a new development. When conservative speakers such as Ben Shapiro, Christina Hoff Sommers, or Charles Murray are invited to speak on college campuses, the threat of violence is so severe that authorities are forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and deploy police in riot gear to keep student-gangsters from wreaking havoc. On a video that went viral this month, an abortion-rights activist aggressively heckled a pro-life sign holder standing quietly on a street corner, eventually working himself into such a frenzy that he kicked her to the ground<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef702440689d51fb68134eacd6cc90d4dc7364035dc6b8c02efdab5eebfd4f411fcd8b11a3adfa3a180e94dc533e93bf8d8>. And what grassroots liberals are doing, high-ranking liberals are inciting them to keep doing. Former Attorney General Eric Holder<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef7ebd594a496b026514636581cee32e87ce240947d94f9ec68eaff7df9dc6e3042781c812f27b9d178dfa27dc1de8ed6af>: “Michelle [Obama] always says, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ No. No. When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party is about." California Representative Maxine Waters<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef75f0bf1e4b8bc8e9a421f19e72d75aa12472f2cb1c825c992391f96c24ad0dc9ae296e3a1cf215b133b8b2137cc62d79f>: ““If you see anybody from that [Trump] cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station — you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Former Democratic standard-bearer Hillary Clinton<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef7ca3f6eb5be21edacb6f6cafc9953e7fe622c45c49e4ccae64e5c688d6444262f3e34dda2e461c89e92affa0c129d2fbc>: “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for. If we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.” ThinkProgress justice editor Ian Millhiser<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef7fad2bfdf4ed653b6f466913071adb267175c8fcc840dd0326bd7235a0b7516e299c34f8271e571f776d53c9287ce7fc3> on Twitter: “[C]onfront Republicans where they eat, where they sleep, and where they work until they stop being complicit in the destruction of our democracy.” To be fair, it isn’t only in the Democratic camp that there have been calls for violence and mob brutality. Last week, the Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, Scott Wagner, posted an idiotic video of himself warning<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef7d5c3e8a4563528c2bdbbbc27c12e8a8e30f316ed7605a1404283146180f6b276baee8557ffd93838f59061b7ab56b93c> Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf to “put a catcher's mask on your face because I'm going to stomp all over your face with golf spikes.” Outside a Republican club in Manhattan over the weekend, there was a brawl<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef74f19050b94ac06e61f1f99cce7dc9bd0b11fa056592e04637f1d62b16c6038969420362b72f7732f13b946337222da44> between far-left “Antifa” protesters and members of a far-right group, the Proud Boys. And of course Donald Trump has been making inflammatory statements that appear to endorse violence <http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef789e585036dfc64fc9e9f0895565e9a068037f9a4877ccdd97e0d3b264b61aa260e017c50e4982e94cbdb607eef64b805> since his campaign for president in 2016. He told supporters at a rally that he’d like to punch a protester in the face, encouraged a crowd to “knock the crap” out of hecklers, and repeatedly told audiences that in the good old days demonstrators would have been carried out of an arena on stretchers. He warned Republicans leaders that they would “have riots” if he were denied the presidential nomination. Time and again he has led crowds in hostile chants aimed at the news media. But Trump’s over-the-top language, obnoxious as it is, hasn’t led to mobs of Republicans violently screaming at members of Congress, driving diners out of restaurants, or kicking peaceful abortion-rights protesters to the ground. Liberal speakers on college campuses never require SWAT teams to keep them or their audiences safe. Enraged conservatives haven’t opened fire at a Democratic baseball practice or tried to stab Democratic candidates at a town fair. Mob anger in America today is nearly always a phenomenon of the left. With one notable recent exception — the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. last year — when a political crowd is rampaging out of control, it’s a crowd of seething progressives. During the heyday of the Tea Party movement, the vast conservative crowds were so orderly and polite that they made a point of carefully cleaning up their trash<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef7a1f61ecf7a39d1a2ee05a557e8de84d4b51868f13eae2283b9f37b816e69ffe76300d2386a864fdc15ac587ee0e8d6f2> . The left-wing Occupy Wall Street movement<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef707e5062476df0ad4ac15a40d4feff51d4ff6bf8cc8247d3bad65e5d6d88e1713a32b94fb7b0d6d3b435554e541107b34>? Very different. Left-wing protesters fought with riot police when conservative commentator Ben Shapiro spoke at the University of California Berkeley in 2017. There has been a torrent of commentary in recent months about the intensifying incivility and nastiness in American public life. All the while, the incivility and nastiness has been getting worse. Do voters care? There have been times in our electoral history when they cared very much, and took to the polls to rebuke those they held responsible for poisoning the civic well. On one such occasion, as the historian Robert Caro describes in his sweeping biography<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef7191658df1a3f91aa924b61605465f1b141b4eca7052832b7f315de7179ff22360dbc52901b34e2b3b94c38bddf7507b5> of Lyndon Johnson, the voters rebuked Republicans for acting like an enraged mob — and so effective was that rebuke that it swung Texas behind John F. Kennedy, delivering the White House to the Democratic Party. The event occurred in Dallas on Nov. 4, 1960, just four days before that year’s presidential election. Though Johnson — JFK’s running mate — was the senior senator from Texas and its most powerful political figure, he had been unable to decisively bring Texas voters behind the Democratic ticket. If Texas were lost, odds were high that the election would be lost, and Johnson was haunted by poll numbers that showed Democrats were behind. But in those last few days before voters went to the polls, Johnson was blessed with a stroke of fortune: a nasty throng of Republicans at the Adolphus Hotel, where a Democratic rally, headlined by Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, was to be held. Caro tells the story: Hearing that the Johnsons would be arriving shortly, [the Republicans] crowded into the hotel’s lobby, their hatred simmering, joining a group of placard-carrying men who had been organized by the state’s only Republican congressman, Bruce Alger of Dallas, and as Lyndon and Lady Bird entered the lobby, they swarmed around them, shouting and cursing. Alger was raising and lowering his big sign, “LBJ SOLD OUT TO YANKEE SOCIALISTS,” like a piston, and it came dangerously close to Lady Bird’s head. One woman snatched the gloves out of Lady Bird’s hand, and threw them on the floor, and there was spitting in her direction. At one point she fell several steps behind her husband, and there was a frightened expression on her fact. Several Dallas policemen were escorting the Johnsons, but Lyndon told them to stand aside. . . . It took the Johnsons 30 minutes to negotiate the 75 feet between the front door of the Adolphus and the elevators that took them up to the ballroom, where two thousand Democrats were waiting to greet them. Not everyone who witnessed the scene was sure it had to take that long. “LBJ and Lady Bird could have gone through that lobby and got on the elevator in five minutes, but LBJ took 30 minutes to go through that crowd, and it was all being recorded and played for television and radio and the newspaper, and he knew it and played it for all it was worth,” says [one Texas political operative]. . . . Television that evening showed Lady Bird’s frightened face and Lyndon saying, at the Democratic rally, that he had told the police to leave because “I wanted to find out if the time had come when I couldn’t walk with my lady through the corridors of the hotels of Dallas.” In Caro’s judgment, the mob scene at the Adolphus turned the tide in Texas. Tens of thousands of Republican voters, mortified at how a crowd of their party’s members had behaved, shifted to supporting the Democratic ticket. More Caro: The next day, the Johnsons flew to Houston. Ashton Gonella [LBJ’s personal secretary] recalls that “we had been told ahead of time that [Houston] was really going to be ugly to us because they were very conservative; up to then, Texas had really not been that much for Kennedy-Johnson.” When the Johnson plane arrived at the Houston airport, however, “it couldn’t have been more overwhelming. Everybody had signs: ‘WE APOLOGIZE,’ ‘WE LOVE YOU.’” And during the remaining time before the election, the Johnsons were greeted everywhere in Texas with standing ovations. Theodore Sorensen, JFK’s longtime aide and biographer<http://click.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=6cb4e3a594733ef7202b5aa134dbc170fcd036b5facd6f3c1d9fa855e643c29d389b0c1914d3538d41f4cae57f99c62a0a4438fefaa511ec>, agreed. The mob hostility to which the Johnsons were subjected at the Adolphus Hotel, Sorensen wrote, “undoubtedly helped switch more than the 23,000 voters who provided the Democratic margin in Texas.” It was that margin — an electoral spanking by voters outraged at a single shameful episode of venomous incivility — that arguably put Kennedy in the Oval Office. Nearly six decades later, it is impossible to imagine American voters reacting the same way. Mob anger, especially on the left, has become almost routine, and it is fueled by taunts from a Republican president devoid of personal decency and common courtesy. In 1960, there were still norms of public political behavior; when party loyalists openly trashed those norms, voters reacted with shock. Today the old norms are in shreds. Leaders urge their followers to engage in intimidation and menacing aggression. Many of those followers don’t need to be told twice. Millions more egg them on from the sidelines, their resentment and self-righteousness steadily sharpened by malignant social media. We are all living in a fever swamp, and getting sicker by the day. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
