George Rebane

Yesterday was the day kids across the country were organized to walk out of their classes and protest ‘gun violence’.  Given what the little darlins are (not) taught in schools, they appeared to have no idea of what had happened in Parkland and what they were actually protesting with signs like ‘Choose me, not guns!’  They were simply pawns in the most recent progressives’ plan not to waste another tragedy to advance their agenda.  One of my favorite political observers put it this way –

If the kids doing the demonstrating/walking out were protesting massive failure at EVERY level of government and were protesting the dereliction of duty by the adults in their school, community, state, and federal government who are sworn to protect them and didn’t – great.  Call attention to the fact that every single warning sign was ignored, pushed under the rug.  Call attention to the fact that there was cowardice and incompetence.  Call attention to the school which failed to refer the shooter to the police, call attention to the social workers who didn’t do anything, call attention to the sheriff and to the FBI who didn’t do anything.

I am suspicious that the kids’ desire to be kept safe from harm was and has been hijacked by political activists for THEIR intent to disarm American citizens.  The response of the MSD HS students and elsewhere has been professionalized.  When entities like the Miami Herald, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Women’s March, Michael Bloomberg, MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood, and the Broward County American Federation of Teachers all provide instant organizing assistance, buses, money (from celebrities too), publicity… you know the kids didn’t do it alone. 

The president of the AFT told BuzzFeed that they are also behind the national school walkout.  Now that is inappropriate.  That is using children. 

I would add that had the kids not been professionally goaded, they may not have done anything of this nature or coordinated on a national scale.  Their reason-restricted and one-sided protest against the access and ownership of guns is prima facie evidence of their having once more been marshalled as the Left’s “useful idiots”.

The Left’s alarming increase in the use of ‘action’ instead of reason to advance their cause highlights their lack of the latter to support their arguments.  Agreeing with this observation we now have the voice of Michael Walzer, the long-heralded dean of the American Left and 30+ year editor of the leftwing magazine Dissent.  In his just published book Foreign Policy for the Left (2018), Mr Walzer explains why the Left has substituted action (e.g. the managed student demonstrations) for reason in their apologetics.  As a champion of the Left, Walzer has been a longtime proponent of the moral argument for collectivism.  “He believes, a priori, in practicing human decency: a moral sensibility toward other people and their existences. He thinks that capitalism’s inequality has coarsened this sensibility but that capital’s productive capacity can be harnessed, through political action, to transcend the capitalist system: to create societies where people can live more equally and so be more decent to one another.”

Walzer sees the danger in the Left’s “vanguardism, under which acolytes of an ideal believe that the ideal is more important than how they reach it.” – in short, the end does justify any available means.  We see that every day, especially in the Left’s rabid efforts to ruin Trump’s presidency, and in their longer term opposition to anything American as a force for good in the world.  Walzer advises the Left adopt a “politics of sympathy and distinction”, but concludes his anguished analysis with a fear that today America’s Left is too far gone in their ingrained practice of public “indecency”.

Martin Peretz, the former editor of the leftwing New Republic, reviews Walzer’s book (here) and asks “can there be a ‘decent’ Left?”.  He adds his own “explanation of the Left’s indecency” that originated with the teachings of Herbert Marcuse, “the intellectual influence behind the New Left of the 1960s”, who “urged his followers to practice varieties of extreme experience”.  Echoing Marcuse, today’s leftists claim that reason “is a scrim for forces that want to oppress (the people) – their identities, their economic interests, their self-regard.  So words no longer matter, only actions.”  That is their “explanation for why other viewpoints are not worthy of attention”.  We have seen a profusion of such sentiment expressed in these pages.

[7apr18 update]  The much celebrated community cartoonist, thought leader, and RR reader RL ‘Bob’ Crabb takes a bit of a swing at this little conservetarian trumpet.  Bringing us again to the attention of the county’s cognoscenti is much appreciated.  However, a careful perusal of Bob’s artful commentary – filched from the pages of the 7apr18 Union – did not reveal the whereabouts of the well-organized and funded handlers of the pubertistas.  Their omission must have been an oversight, for it’s hard to imagine that such an oft-declared center roader would just continue parroting the lamestream’s line that the kids did it all by themselves.