TRUMPED-UP OUTRAGE

 

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Notable & Quotable: Trumped-Up Outrage

‘Tears were another favored response to the tragedy.’

December 3 – 4, 2016

Roger Kimball, writing in the December issue of The New Criterion, on the popular reaction to the presidential election:

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  Perhaps the most perceptive comment on this tsunami of anguished and vituperative incredulity came not from a traditional pundit but from the cartoonist and bloggerScott Adams, who suggested that the whole anti-Trump fraternity “look as though they are protesting Trump, but they are not. They are locked in an imaginary world and battling their own hallucinations of the future.” What they fear and loathe is not Donald Trump, who—whatever his primary rhetoric—has proposed a reasonable platform of pro-growth and pro-American reforms. What they fear is a bogeyman of their own manufacture. At least since the Sixties, the left-liberal consensus in America has worked to undermine traditional notions of decency, order, merit, and achievement. So monolithic was that consensus that a sudden reversion to normality came as a terrifying disillusionment. Hence the surreal, paranoid, and tantrum-filled response of the coddled beneficiaries of our society. We think of a mot often attributed to Teddy Roosevelt: “To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.”

As we write, protests, some of them violent, many funded by left-wing activists like George Soros, have been a nightly occurrence several days running in a handful of cities across the country. Store windows have been smashed, automobiles and other property vandalized, and there has been at least one shooting in the midst of the marauding. Although those spectacles have garnered huge headlines, we suspect that they are among the least significant of the responses to the election. For one thing, they are likely to be short-lived. The host communities will see to that. (Though brace for a reprise at the inauguration.) For another, the rage that they express is unfocused and almost comically dispersed: a primal scream, not a well-defined grievance. For what, when you come right down to it, are they protesting? That one candidate, not their candidate, won a free and fair election. What if it had gone the other way? . . .

Tears were another favored response to the tragedy. Cornell University even held a “cry-in” at which students were furnished with poster boards, markers, and chalk to express their emotions about the dread event. Many institutions mentioned Play-Doh and puppies. . . .

Perhaps the most perceptive comment on this tsunami of anguished and vituperative incredulity came not from a traditional pundit but from the cartoonist and bloggerScott Adams, who suggested that the whole anti-Trump fraternity “look as though they are protesting Trump, but they are not. They are locked in an imaginary world and battling their own hallucinations of the future.” What they fear and loathe is not Donald Trump, who—whatever his primary rhetoric—has proposed a reasonable platform of pro-growth and pro-American reforms. What they fear is a bogeyman of their own manufacture. At least since the Sixties, the left-liberal consensus in America has worked to undermine traditional notions of decency, order, merit, and achievement. So monolithic was that consensus that a sudden reversion to normality came as a terrifying disillusionment. Hence the surreal, paranoid, and tantrum-filled response of the coddled beneficiaries of our society. We think of a mot often attributed to Teddy Roosevelt: “To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.”

 

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