Andrew Cline explains at National Review Online that liberal opponents of President Trump are turning against a key tenet of the progressive world-view.
During Donald Trump’s many decades as a famous American tycoon, even his most disgraceful antics never provoked a nationwide “resistance” movement. Most people — progressives included — shrugged, went about their lives, and let the Donald be the Donald. Only when he obtained the power of the presidency did progressives put Princess Leia stickers on their Priuses and rise up to “resist.”
This behavior is inconsistent with progressive doctrine, which holds that a powerful and assertive national government — with most power concentrated in the hands of an energetic president — is far from a threat to individual liberty. On the contrary, progressivism hails government as liberty’s greatest protector and big business as liberty’s greatest threat. …
… Progressive premises about power, however, are undermined by their own reactions to Trump’s election. Were billionaire businessmen more of a threat to liberty than an all-powerful state, they should have risen up to resist Trump the billionaire businessman and then shrugged off Trump the president.
The Left’s “resistance” to Trump is a tacit acknowledgement that conservatives have been correct all along: The great threat to individual liberty is government. They would argue that it is not government per se, but “business interests” obtaining control of government. But were government powers successfully checked through Madisonian divisions and subdivisions, and thereby widely dispersed among a diverse and independent people, there would be little to fear from a tycoon in the Oval Office. Only the consolidation of power in Washington and its concentration in the office of the presidency — as advocated by progressives for more than a century — would allow business interests to implement their agenda rapidly and largely intact.
