Anger Privilege
Only leftists are allowed to be angry.
June 20, 2017
Daniel Greenfield
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center,
is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left
and Islamic terrorism.
If you want to know who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t,
follow the anger.
There are people in this country who can safely express their anger. And
those who can’t. If you’re angry that Trump won, your anger is socially
acceptable. If you were angry that Obama won, it wasn’t.
James Hodgkinson’s rage was socially acceptable. It continued to be
socially acceptable until he crossed the line into murder. And he’s not
alone. There’s Micah Xavier Johnson, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer
in Dallas, and Gavin Long, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Baton
Rouge. If you’re black and angry about the police, your anger is
celebrated. If you’re white and angry about the Terror travel ban, the
Paris Climate treaty, ObamaCare repeal or any leftist cause, you’re on
the side of the angry angels.
But if you’re white and angry that your job is going to China or that
you just missed being killed in a Muslim suicide bombing, your anger is
unacceptable.
If you’re an angry leftist, your party leader, Tom Perez will scream and
curse into a microphone, and your aspiring presidential candidate,
Kirsten Gillibrand, will curse along, to channel the anger of the base.
But if you’re an angry conservative, then Trump channeling your anger is
“dangerous” because you aren’t allowed to be angry.
Not all anger is created equal. Some anger is privileged rage.
Good anger gets you a gig as a CNN commentator. Bad anger gets you
hounded out of your job. Good anger isn’t described as anger at all.
Instead it’s linguistically whitewashed as “passionate” or “courageous”.
Bad anger however is “worrying” or “dangerous”. Angry left-wing
protesters “call out”, angry right-wing protesters “threaten”. Good
anger is left-wing. Bad anger is right-wing.
Socially acceptable displays of anger, from Occupy Wall Street to Black
Lives Matter riots to the anti-Trump marches to the furious campus
protests, are invariably left-wing.
Left-wing anger over the elections of Bush and Trump was sanctified.
Right-wing outrage over Obama’s victory was demonized. Now that
left-wing anger led a Bernie Sanders volunteer to open fire at a
Republican charity baseball practice outing. And the media reluctantly
concedes that maybe both sides should moderate their rhetoric. Before
listing examples that lean to the right like “Lock her up”.
Why were chants of “Lock her up” immoderate, but not Bush era cries of
“Jail to the chief”? Why were Tea Party rallies “ominous” but the latest
We Hate Trump march is “courageous”? Why is killing Trump on stage the
hottest thing to hit Shakespeare while a rodeo clown who wore an Obama
mask was hounded by everyone from the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri to
the NAACP?
Not all anger is created equal. Anger, like everything else, is
ideologically coded. Left-wing anger is good because its ideological
foundations are good. Right-wing anger is bad because its ideology is bad.
It’s not the level of anger, its intensity or its threatening nature
that makes it good or bad.
And that is why the left so easily slips into violence. All its
ideological ends are good. Therefore its means, from mass starvation to
gulags to riots and tyranny, must be good. If I slash your tires because
of your Obama bumper sticker”, I’m a monster. But if you key my car
because of my Trump bumper sticker, you’re fighting racism and fascism.
Your tactics might be in error, but your viewpoint isn’t.
There are no universal standards of behavior. Civility, like everything
else, is ideologically limited.
Intersectionality frowns on expecting civil behavior from “oppressed”
protesters. Asking that shrieking campus crybully not to scream threats
in your face is “tone policing”. An African-American millionaire’s child
at Yale is fighting for her “existence”, unlike the Pennsylvania coal
miner, the Baltimore police officer and the Christian florist whose
existences really are threatened.
Tone policing is how the anger of privileged leftists is protected while
the frustration of their victims is suppressed. The existence of tone
policing as a specific term to protect displays of left-wing anger shows
the collapse of civility into anger privilege. Civility has been
replaced by a political entitlement to anger.
The left prides itself on an unearned moral superiority (“When they go
low, we go high”) reinforced by its own echo chamber even as it has
become incapable of controlling its angry outbursts. The national
tantrum after Trump’s victory has all but shut down the government,
turned every media outlet into a non-stop feed of conspiracy theories
and set off protests that quickly escalated into street violence.
But Trump Derangement Syndrome is a symptom of a problem with the left
that existed before he was born. The left is an angry movement. It is
animated by an outraged self-righteousness whose moral superiority
doubles as dehumanization. And its machinery of culture glamorizes its
anger. The media dresses up the seething rage so that the left never has
to look at its inner Hodgkinson in the mirror.
The left is as angry as ever. Campus riots and assassinations of
Republican politicians are nothing new. What is changing is that its
opponents are beginning to match its anger. The left still clings to
the same anger it had when it was a theoretical movement with plans, but
little impact on the country. The outrage at the left is no longer
ideological. There are millions of people whose health care was
destroyed by ObamaCare, whose First Amendment rights were taken away,
whose land was seized, whose children were turned against them and whose
livelihoods were destroyed.
The angry left has gained a great deal of power. It has used that power
to wreck lives. It is feverishly plotting to deprive nearly 63 million
Americans of their vote by using its entrenched power in the government,
the media and the non-profit sector. And it is too blinded by its own
anger over the results of the election to realize the anger over its
wholesale abuses of power and privileged tantrums.
But monopolies on anger only work in totalitarian states. In a free
society, both sides are expected to control their anger and find terms
on which to debate and settle issues. The left rejects civility and
refuses to control its anger. The only settlement it will accept is
absolute power. If an election doesn’t go its way, it will overturn the
results. If someone offends it, he must be punished. Or there will be anger.
The angry left demands that everyone recognize the absolute
righteousness of its anger as the basis for its power. This anger
privilege, like tone policing, is often cast in terms of oppressed
groups. But its anger isn’t in defiance of oppression, but in pursuit of
oppression.
Anger privilege is used to silence opposition, to enforce illegal
policies and to seize power. But the left’s monopolies on anger are
cultural, not political. The entertainment industry and the media can
enforce anger privilege norms through public shaming, but their smears
can’t stop the consequences of the collapse of civility in public life.
There are no monopolies on emotion.
When anger becomes the basis for political power, then it won’t stop
with Howard Dean or Bernie Sanders. That’s what the left found out in
the last election. Its phony pearl clutching was a reaction to the
consequences of its destruction of civility. Its reaction to that show
of anger by conservatives and independents was to escalate the conflict.
Instead of being the opposition, the left became the “resistance”. Trump
was simultaneously Hitler and a traitor. Republicans were evil beasts.
James Hodgkinson absorbed all this. The left fed his anger. And
eventually he snapped.
Anger has to go somewhere.
The left likes to think that its anger is good anger because it’s angry
over the plight of illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists, transgender
bathrooms, the lack of abortion in South Carolina, the minimum wage at
Taco Bell, budget cuts, tax cuts, police arrests, drone strikes and all
the other ways in which reality differs from its utopia. But all that
anger isn’t the road to a better world, but to hate and violence.
Millions of leftists, just like Hodgkinson, are told every day that
Republicans are responsible for everything wrong with their lives, the
country and the planet. Despite everything they do, all the petitions
they sign, the marches they attend, the donations, the angry letters,
the social media rants, Republicans continue to exist and even be
elected to public office. Where does that anger go?
Either we have a political system based on existing laws and norms of
civility. Or we have one based on coups and populist leftist anger. And
there are already a whole bunch of those south of the border.
Leftist anger is a privileged bubble of entitlement that bursts every
other election. Its choice is to try to understand the rest of the
country or to intimidate, censor, oppress and eventually kill them.
James Hodgkinson took the latter course. His personal leftist revolution
ended, as all leftist revolutions do, in blood and violence. The left
can check its anger privilege and examine its entitlement.
Or his violence will be our future.
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Machiavelli wrote:It is necessary for the state to deal in lies and half
truths,
because people are made up of lies and half truths. Even Princes.' And
certainly, by definition all Ambassadors and politicians