Rich Lowry of National Review focuses his attention on post-election protests targeting president-elect Donald Trump.
Pity the anti-Trump protesters thronging the streets of American cities.
Apparently, no one ever told them that they live in a geographically, economically, and ideologically varied nation, and that about half of its inhabitants might support a Republican candidate for president. They mistook the country for the campus of Oberlin College.
The news that it actually isn’t arrived with the force of a thunderclap on November 8. The shock of Donald Trump’s election has occasioned tears, rending of garments, and days of protests showcasing the rank infantilism of the American Left.
Prior to the election, liberal commentators obsessed over Trump’s rumblings about not accepting the outcome, and they worried about his supporters lashing out. Trump shouldn’t have preemptively declared the election rigged, but the specter of Republican mayhem was always far-fetched. When was the last time that GOP protesters ran out of control and burned down local business establishments? Tea-party rallies were famous for their orderliness — participants in a massive rally on the Mall in Washington, D.C., even picked up their own trash.
It is left-wing protests that invariably devolve into lawbreaking, and so it was that the same kids who think that Donald Trump is too divisive were soon smashing windows and throwing projectiles at police in behalf of their supposedly more open-minded vision of America. (The Left’s street protesters act as if there is no social or political problem that can’t be addressed by hurling things at cops.)
The same media that would have denounced pro-Trump protests as a threat to democracy have treated the anti-Trump protests as a natural symptom of a divided country. Erupting in rage at the result of an election went from a grave offense against our system to the latest front in the battle for social justice right around the time that the Upper Midwest was called for Trump.
