P

ublic shaming, threats of mass violence, dehumanizing the opponent. Members of the Democratic Party have either implicitly or explicitly endorsed these tactics to discredit Republican lawmakers and officials. It’s gone so far that now “progressives” are openly calling for a campaign of nationwide bombings.

Writing in the Splinter, a far-left website, senior writer Hamilton Nolan reminds readers that there were “thousands” of bombings each year in the United States in the 1970s, and then suggests that terror could soon return to America’s streets. “This is what happens when citizens decide en masse that their political system is corrupt, racist, and unresponsive. The people out of power have only just begun to flex their dissatisfaction. The day will come, sooner tha[n] you all think, when Trump administration officials will look back fondly on the time when all they had to worry about was getting hollered at at a Mexican restaurant.”

Nolan is referring to the now-infamous incident on June 20, when protesters surrounded US Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., and publicly humiliated her. Yelling “shame, shame” over the Trump administration’s border policies, the protesters told Nielsen that “if kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace.”

Three days later, Rep. Maxine Waters, a progressive Democrat from Los Angeles, urged supporters to harass and intimidate Trump administration officials whenever and wherever possible. “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up, and if you see anybody from that 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.”

Stirring the flames, Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, opines in a long essay in the Atlantic that “uncivil protest has sometimes been the only way to move public debate in the right direction and to put pressure on elected officials to change their ways.” He then recalls the history of the anti-Vietnam war movement, during which students would sometimes confront public officials. Comparing those days to our own, Zelizer concludes, the tactics of the protest organizers in the 1960s were far less civil than anything that President Trump’s opponents have done thus far, “yet that lack of civility was also integral to their effectiveness. Without dramatic tactics, they would not have gained as much attention.”

It wasn’t a mass demonstration, but a protest vote that hit the Bronx last week, where Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat an entrenched incumbent, Rep. Joe Crowley, 57% to 43%. Ocasio-Cortez won by painting Crowley as the ultimate Washington insider who had taken “insane amount[s] of money from special interest lobbies” and forgotten about his constituents back home.

Emphasizing that she was working for the “working families of New York” she said the race boiled down to “people versus money.” She promised voters she would support Medicare for all, housing as a human right, and a “peace economy” that would bring all American troops home. No great fan of Israel, in May Ocasio-Cortez said that the IDF had been carrying out “massacres” at the Gaza border in response to Hamas members breaching the border fence. She added that “Democrats can’t be silent about this anymore.”

All of this talk of civil insurrection actually has Americans worried. A June 27 Rasmussen poll found that 31% of likely US voters believe there will be a civil war in the United States within the next five years. Interestingly, Democrats (37%) are more fearful than Republicans (32%) or unaffiliated (26%) voters. However, 59% of all voters — Democrats, Republicans, unaffiliated — believe those opposed to President Trump’s policies are the most likely to resort to violence. That number compares to the 53% who believed the same during Barack Obama’s presidency.

As if to make the poll’s point, Rep. Maxine Waters, who reportedly received death threats after her public eruption last week, said Saturday that those who threaten her “better shoot straight” because “there’s nothing like a wounded animal.”

Last I checked, the Republican National Committee had made a montage video of Waters and her fellow travelers for use before the November midterm elections. The video is entitled “The Left in 2018: Unhinged.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 717)