Liberals discriminate by vilifying opposing views

OPINION:

The hate group resolution, passed by both Houses unanimously on Sept. 11 and signed by President Trump three days later, rejects “White nationalism, White supremacy, and neo-Nazism as hateful expressions of intolerance.” It directs the president and his administration”to speak out against hate groups that espouse racism, extremism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and White supremacy.”

It goes further. Because of what it calls the “growing prevalence” of such people, the attorney general and the secretary of homeland security are to “investigate thoroughly” them and “associated groups” to prevent them “from fomenting and facilitating” violence. All federal, state and local agencies are to “improve the reporting of hate crimes, and to emphasize the importance of the collection, and the reporting to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of hate crime data.”

The resolution’s premise is the politically correct reverse of the truth. It was crafted by Democrats in pursuit of their party’s long-standing objective to delegitimize opposition by tarring it as racist. The terms Nazi and White Supremacist are now added to the familiar litany. In reality, America is not being haunted by any “growing presence” of Nazis and “White Supremacy.” In fact, our overwhelmingly white (and supremely privileged) progressive ruling class fears ordinary voters who are fed up with their pretensions and perquisites.

As for political violence, the public sees for itself that the danger comes from people who burned and looted parts of Washington, D.C., during the 2017 presidential inauguration, who have shut down parts of Oakland, St. Louis and Chicago, who riot, loot malls, and shout that only the lives of one race matter. These people are not Trump voters, they’re often not white, and they’re certainly not Nazis.

Rather, they are the point of the Democratic Party’s resistance to the 2016 election. Political violence in America today is, almost exclusively, part or consequence of that resistance. The resolution tells the American people to disregard what their own “lyin’ eyes” tell them, and instead to believe in the ruling-class narrative. Sadly, this official and gratuitous identification of the political right with violence perversely encourages the Democratic base, as well as those who wield the U.S. government’s vast powers, to treat the ruling class’s socio-political opponents as public enemies.

This has been coming a long time. More and more, year after year, the ruling class has been using its position atop the government’s and society’s commanding heights, public and private, to make socio-political war on Americans whom they consider stupid, backward, dangerous underlings.

Starting in 1963, the press convinced millions that “the climate of hatred” in conservative Dallas had killed President John F. Kennedy (though a communist had shot him.) Today, computer searches find the term “extremist” correlates with “conservative” at 12 times the rate at which it does with “liberal,” “progressive” or “left wing.” Since 2006, the Department of Homeland Security’s “intelligence fusion centers” have compiled ominously worded dossiers concerning “pro-lifers,” “home schoolers” and “gun owners.” The department has the Southern Poverty Law Center as a consultant. The FBI infiltrates tea parties, and the U.S. Army’s Small Wars Journal published an article by Col. Kevin Benson arguing for contingency plans to seize small towns ruled by tea parties. In September 2010 President Obama termed “enemies of democracy” the very groups that the IRS was then subjecting to punitive auditing. He also argued the line — standard in academe — that treating conservative arguments as if they had any right to equal consideration as “false equivalence.”

Hence, when Hillary Clinton put half of Mr. Trump’s supporters into the “basket of deplorables — racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, you name it,” and the other half into a basket to be pitied, she was explaining her party’s long-standing business model and strategy for the future: encourage members of the ruling coalition’s components to firm up their identification with it by maximizing their sense of superiority over the coalition’s opponents; together, push these opponents to society’s margins by intimidating them; and then out of existence, by depriving them of recourse against the modern administrative state’s instruments as well as the prerogatives of major private institutions.

This resolution does not repeal the First Amendment. No one will be put in jail for whatever they might say. Nor need they be. The unaccountable administrative state, judiciary and corporate America, backed by the media, have more than enough power to discriminate against and demean people for opposing the ruling class. Lincoln tried to stave off the looming Civil War by promising not to discriminate against his opponents. Today’s American civil war is cold. This resolution is all too certain to turn up its temperature.

• Angelo M. Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University.