The Arson Party By Kevin D. Williamson
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-arson-party/
EXCERPT DECENT AFTER WILLIAMSON’S HABITUAL TRUMP BASHING…RSK
“What evidence do we have that the Democrats will abide peaceably if they lose? Portland? Seattle? St. Louis? Washington? “Never concede”? Why are we talking about peace and order in November rather than peace and order right here and right now?”
Ah, but Republicans, of all people, must affirm their peaceable intent. Anybody remember a bunch of guys in short-sleeved white button-down shirts and ties from Jos A. Banks raising hell in Provo when Mitt Romney lost? Of course you don’t — it didn’t happen. The only time National Review subscribers have ever been close to rioting was when the ship’s bar temporarily ran out of Glenmorangie on one particularly thirsty post-election cruise.
Republicans are always right on the edge of political violence, or so we are told — by people who refuse to acknowledge that Democrats have gone over that edge. Democrats can shoot, loot, and burn all day, and it’s a “mostly peaceful protest.” During the 2000 Florida recount, some Republicans did the very un-Republican thing of staging a protest — not a “mostly peaceful” protest but an actual, honest-to-goodness peaceful one. What did the Democrats call it? “The Brooks Brothers riot.”
(Which will be the name of my next band.)
The people on the left who believe that Donald Trump is plotting to make himself president-for-life are the progressive answer to QAnon. They’re bananas, they’re terrified, and they are having a terrific time. Clive Thompson, writing in Wired, argues that QAnon is a kind of alternate-reality game, one that “poses a mystery that feels so big it can only be solved by crowdsourcing. It’s thrilling to be involved with other people in something bigger than yourself. Plus, it turns one’s armchair-warrior Googling into a heroic quest for truth.”
It is difficult to believe that very many of the Froot-Loops in the Q world actually believe what they say they believe — but, on the other hand, this is America, and America is full of lunatics: Some of those flat-earth guys are just running a grift, but some of them really believe it. The Trump Forever Junta conspiracy theory tends to be trafficked in by slightly fancier people, and so it smells just a little bit more respectable, but it’s basically the same thing — a narrative that is attractive not because it is plausible to believers but because it offers a ritualistic way to lower the social status of the people they hate.
We have seen this before, of course. The last time around, every Democrat with a public platform in North America demanded that Trump et al. promise to “accept the results” of the election — and then they promptly rejected the results themselves when the wonky psychotic ping-pong ball of American democracy didn’t bounce their way. Now, they want Republicans to promise a peaceful transition of power — even as they turn the election season into a season of blood and fire.
Of course Republicans will, if Trump loses the election, see to a peaceful transfer of power, at least on their end. Mitch McConnell is not going to don a beret and man the barricades. Republicans aren’t waiting for the revolution — they’re waiting for TGI Fridays to finally reopen. Republicans aren’t the ones rioting in American cities. Republicans aren’t the ones rioting to keep speakers off of college campuses. Republicans aren’t the ones saying you have to lose your job if you have the wrong political views. Republicans aren’t the ones promising to gut the First Amendment. There’s a lot you can lay at the feet of the contemporary GOP and its tangerine-nightmare clown-prince president, but not that. Republicans are not the Arson Party — they are not the people who already have seen to it that this election season is anything but peaceable.
You can have the riots, or you can have the sanctimony — you can’t have both.
You can have the riots, or you can have the sanctimony — you can’t have both.
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