Friends, my latest article explores two leftist fixations: their love of violent and intimidating protests, and their love of vote-by-mail. I suggest that there could be a connection here, and the Left could be laying the groundwork for permanent domination of our culture and our political system, based on coercion. See what you think:
Is there a Connection Between the
Left's Enthusiasm for Protest-Related Violence and for Voting By
Mail?
Americans need to
start asking: could the Left be looking to replicate its stranglehold
on higher education — obtained through years of intimidation and
persecution of moderates and conservatives — on the national level?
Will the stifling orthodoxy of “wokeness” at Berkeley, Harvard,
and Vassar become the norm everywhere? Will even our democracy
succumb?
There are signs
that it could happen.
In recent years,
leftists have enjoyed numerous successes in exerting power over
academia. They have done so partly by dominating the ranks of
administrators and professors, but also through the adoption of
highly aggressive tactics: marches, sit-ins, boycotts, harassment on
social media, disruption of speakers, attacks on statues, buildings,
and other infrastructure, and occasionally direct physical violence
against conservatives and free-thinkers.
One
might expect that such anti-social and anti-democratic methods would
cause higher ed's leadership to bristle with outrage and to resist
related calls for “reform”. One would be wrong. The trend instead
has been to placate the forces of anarchy and extremism. Time and
again, the bourgeois
Bolsheviks on campus have been rewarded for their lawless agitation.
Colleges and universities have altered curricula, created new majors,
built new dormitories, invented new scholarships, segregated
graduation ceremonies, hired and fired administrators and professors,
renamed buildings, and removed time-honored statues and memorials —
all to keep the left-wing mob at bay.
These zealots aren't stupid: they howl and they smash precisely
because they know that it works.
The violence and disorder that has washed over urban America in the
last month is, among many other things, an exercise is transposing
the aggressive tactics that the Left has employed to browbeat
academia to the arena of mass politics and popular culture. Hurling
rocks and setting stores on fire are only the bluntest instruments in
the Left's arsenal, moreover. Not by accident, the mailed fist has
been coupled with more intimate forms of coercion. The slightest
deviation from the party line of cringing subservience to the agenda
and rhetoric of Black Lives Matter has earned those foolish enough to
voice it the white-hot animosity of the Left, in addition to swift
punishment in the form of social media shaming, loss of employment,
death threats, etc.
If
the current attitude of celebrities, corporate leaders, and
politicians — Republican and
Democratic — is any indication, the tactics of intimidation are
working. Not only are most sensible people avoiding any criticism of
BLM as a movement, and of the protesters and rioters more generally,
but they are also making haste to show their support for the cause,
lest the forces of righteous indignation swallow them whole.
While the successes of the Left in strong-arming the American people
are undeniable, and while the resistance to and condemnation of such
coercive tactics has been almost entirely absent, especially among
Democrats, the most important thing now is to ask: where does all
this go? What will liberals' next step be?
Surely,
the ultimate prize for the Left is the permanent
and total
conquest of political power. Could their well-orchestrated campaign
of intimidation on campus, and now in the streets of our biggest
cities, provide a model for how to achieve their most cherished goals
of all: the silencing of dissent in
toto,
and the obliteration, once and for all, of the Republican Party?
Consider that liberals are, in addition to rioting in the streets,
calling for the transformation of American and Western democracy.
They claim (disingenuously) that “voter suppression” is taking
place on a massive scale, and that minorities, who are actually
voting at record levels, are routinely denied their democratic
rights.
Their preferred solution? Eliminate all I.D. requirements for
voting, expand voting rights as widely as possible, and make voting
easier, by allowing people to vote when they wish and by mail or
online.
Consider
also, however, that the secret ballot is the keystone of modern
democracy. Ever since the 19th
century, advocates for democracy have understood that merely giving
ordinary people the right to vote changes very little, when an
“ordinary Joe” can be browbeaten by agitators, by his employer,
by his landlord, by clerical or political authorities, or even by the
secret police, into supporting whomever the elite prefers.
The Left, however, wants to jettison the secret ballot and allow
“ballot harvesting,” whereby activists visit people's homes,
provide them with ballots, assist them in filling them out
(“correctly”), and deliver them to the Board of Elections! And
liberals actually scoff at the idea that any form of “fraud”
could flourish in such a political environment. Ha!
Does anyone believe that Donald Trump would have won the 2016
election, if each voter had to announce his vote publicly? No,
certainly not. The powers-that-be had made it very clear that only a
“deplorable” would support Trump. And yet he won, in one of the
greatest blows for government-by-the-people that has ever been
struck.
My strong suspicion is that the Left intends to ensure, by
blanketing America with intimidation and by demolishing the secret
ballot, that similar surprise election results will never recur. They
will do it by terrorizing and manipulating the voters, in the same
way that they have already terrorized and manipulated university
presidents, deans, and professors. Vote-by-mail is a means to that
end.
Beware, America! So far the left-wing mob has merely frightened you.
If you are not very careful, however, it will do far worse, and it
will take far more.
Just as many institutions of higher education have been left with
nothing but the tatters of liberal learning and free thought, so
America might be left with only the husk of a democracy. Meanwhile,
the thought police will reign supreme, while the real police —
those alleged super-racists — will be as cowed and helpless as the
rest of us.
Dr.
Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred
and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com.
He appears weekly on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480/106.9.
