The Left Is Eating Itself By Daniel Greenfield
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/the-left-is-eating-itself/print/
In the hot days of summer, the progressive revolution that took over cities and even the national government is frenziedly devouring itself.
The media is pounding away at Hillary Clinton, not because it cares about her foundation’s dirty deals or the contents of her email server, but because it doesn’t trust her ideological commitment. If the media were sure of that, both stories would have been treated like Benghazi; mocked, ridiculed, falsely fact checked and then buried in a haunted Indian graveyard under the New York Times building at midnight.
Instead the media pined for Elizabeth Warren. When the Native American Rachel Dolezal declined to jump into the race, they switched their allegiance to Bernie Sanders; a senile Socialist who fondly reminisces about 90% tax rates. Now Ready for Warren is throwing its support behind Bernie.
This is just the media’s ploy to push Hillary harder and farther to the left. But it’s hard to know how far out there she can go without putting on a big fur hat and belting out The Internationale and the more leftward she moves, the less electable she becomes as she sheds independents and white voters.
The combination of media scandals and leftward moves is doing a lot more damage to Hillary than any of her Republican rivals by leaving her with no choice except to recreate the Obama coalition.
Media insiders think that Bernie Sanders will quietly slink away once Hillary has taken the correct position on capitalism (filthy profiteering swine, except the ones who fund my campaign), the Second Amendment (the only people who should have guns are the nine bodyguards protecting Michael Moore) and the justice system (let’s legalize crime); but they may just be in for a rude surprise.
Bernie Sanders is eccentric and like his former pal, Ralph Nader, may just decide that undermining the Clintons is more important than keeping a Republican out of the White House. The last time that happened, Al Gore lost in Florida and the Bush dynasty began. The progressives feeding his ego now may be crying when President Ted Cruz takes his oath of office on a bible written with liberal tears.
But it doesn’t matter how much Hillary twists the wheel; no left turn is ever good enough for the left.
Obama let ISIS and Iran carve up the Middle East, but occasionally he lets the boys with the joysticks take out a terrorist with a drone. And to “thought leaders” like John Cusack and Cornel West, he’s no better than Bush. Bernie Sanders was accused of dual loyalty to Israel on NPR despite boycotting Netanyahu’s speech. Martin O’Malley is denounced for having ever tried to fight crime in Baltimore instead of progressively giving the criminals “space to destroy” like its current city government does.
If Elizabeth Warren did enter the race, the Socialist sweetheart would swiftly be torn apart.
Not long ago, the progressives were embracing New York City’s Bill de Blasio as the guy who made Obama look like a Republican. The incompetent Socialist mayor got together with such notable thinkers as Susan Sarandon and Van Jones to draft a Progressive Contract with America. The contract debuted to yawns while New York City leftists ranted that their former golden boy was letting them down.
Russell Simmons, who called Louie Farrakhan his second father, whined that Mayor de Blasio was a “punk” who was letting the police commissioner push him around like a “bitch”. Melissa Mark-Viverito, the Puerto Rican separatist and terrorist supporter serving as City Council Speaker, vowed to defy him by pushing forward a bill that would force taxpayers to put up bail money for indigent criminals.
That giant ball of lefty craziness still isn’t good enough. Nothing is.
New York City still has a police department. It arrests criminals. A giant housing project hasn’t been built on top of Central Park. The entire city budget isn’t going to welfare and Black Panther graffiti murals.
Who knew Bill de Blasio was really a Republican monster who doesn’t care about minorities and drinks the blood of the poor from Big Gulp cups (yet to be banned) while (probably) laughing at racist jokes.
Over in Chicago, Rahm Emanuel had to fight off Jesús “Chuy” García, who was being touted as that city’s Bill de Blasio. And Emanuel may still end up facing that city’s answer to Mark-Viverito, Chicago Teachers Union boss Karen Lewis, if she recovers from her brain tumor.
But if Karen Lewis or Mark-Viverito ever did take over, the left would eventually eat them too.
Obama unleashed the left. His victories nurtured its sense of inevitability. Its activists are convinced that he would have won even bigger if he hadn’t held back at all on his radical agenda.
The Democratic Party has gone from feinting moderate before moving left to being overrun by swarms of lunatics organized around social media and funded by radical billionaires. They are convinced that they have a permanent mandate for total change backed by demographic transformation that will let them do anything they want. The Clintons, whose disingenuous triangulation made it possible for them to get this far, are dismissed as sellouts. The same fate awaits every other Democratic politician.
Anything short of the most radical agenda possible is treason. And the most radical agenda is constantly being redefined so that no one can possibly meet that evolving standard. Even trying to meet it only moves the goal posts as lefty activists establish their credibility by being more out there than the establishment. Even when they really are the establishment.
The same process that wiped out the revolutionary movements of the left in the past is doing it again to its historically illiterate descendants.
Lefty journalists like Jonathan Chait and Michelle Goldberg whine about social justice warriors harassing their friends on social media; though they don’t dare actually call them that. Lefty professors whine that the group whose name they dare not speak is terrorizing them in the classroom with insane demands.
The left is caught in a process of perpetual purges cloaked in demands for justice that shouldn’t have surprised anyone who was at all familiar with the French Revolution or the Bolshevik breakdown. The radicals can’t stop. That is what makes them radicals. And their creed of self-righteous extremism rejects any legal or rational norms leaving them with no resolution except outraged political annihilation.
Yesterday’s radicals become despised moderates to be hounded by the mobs they had once commanded. The Clintons stop being radicals and become symbols of the old regime they had undermined and helped bring down. And then the same fate befalls the man who unleashed the mob.
When Obama couldn’t make anything work, he switched to loudly selective radicalism to turn out his base. It worked and it also created the unsustainable pursuit of radicalism for its own sake.
Every candidate has to run to the left of Hillary. To survive, Hillary must run to the left of Hillary leading to awkwardly hilarious gaffes like the time she announced “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs” or when she attempted to denounce the flow of dark money while her own SuperPACs were fighting with each other over political influence.
Democrats are tumbling into unpopular and ridiculous political positions to appease an unappeasable base. They are caught between an electorate that has already been pushed too far to the left for its own comfort and a base that demands they jump off the cliff and land in a utopia in which everything except crime is outlawed, in which everything except solar panels is taxed and in which nothing makes sense.
Obama unleashed the worst impulses of the left and now the left is destroying itself.
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