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发帖数: 2018 | 1 越来越发现Wall Street Journal还是值得一看的。
Well, that was a bit embarrassing. Antifascist liberals mounted thousand-
strong counter-rallies all weekend against a Nazi threat that proved
nonexistent or thin on the ground. Leftists imagined themselves to be modern
-day versions of the Czech resistance or the Warsaw uprising, but it turns
out they were the majoritarian mob shouting down a handful of losers who’ve
been an execrable but small part of the American pageant for as long as
most of us can remember.
We don’t know what speakers at Saturday’s “free speech” rally in Boston
might have said. It was organized, according to the local papers, by
libertarians protesting campus speech codes, though they opened their
platform to anybody, left and right. The meeting ended early; the speakers
were all drowned out. Nazis and white supremacists, if any were present,
were shown to be vastly outnumbered by Americans who reject such doctrines.
To state another obvious point, our civil liberties are meaningless if they
don’t protect unpopular views. It’s not the mob but the mob’s targets
that need protection.
For the record, of the 20th century’s malign ideologies, Nazi ideas of who
should be murdered and why strike me as slightly more odious and frightful
than Maoist or Stalinist ideas of who should be murdered and why. The
applicability to current U.S. events is slender, though.
More relevant is the principle that large mobs are more dangerous than small
mobs, and likely to harbor more psychopaths. Apparently running out of
Nazis to resist, Boston protesters threw rocks and urine-filled bottles at
police. Any shortage of white supremacists can always be corrected by
expanding the definition. Opponents of a $15 minimum wage are racist.
Skeptics about a pending climate crisis are racist. Anyone questioning the
utility of pulling down old statues is racist.
The slippery slope of civil-rights erosion is manifest every time certain
members of the vituperative left open their mouths.
Hard to escape is a lesson about incentives: Majoritarian violence is the
predominant risk even when its targets are people otherwise impossible to
sympathize with.
Which brings us back to Charlottesville. Serious professionals in every
field know first reports are unreliable. We aren’t counting certain modern-
day news sites, of course. Their job is manipulating passing, news-related
symbols in ways that pleasure their target audiences. Bandwagons are their
profession.
For the record, however, Donald Trump’s press conference, in its entirety,
is available online and takes 23 minutes to watch. He did not fail to
denounce Nazis and racists.
An account of events in Charlottesville is also taking shape. Mr. Trump
feels he has been treated unfairly. Guess what? That’s politics. Your
opponents aren’t required to give you a break. Outsmart them. President
Obama would have spoken carefully, starting with: Though we don’t have all
the facts, one thing Americans can agree about is that Nazi ideology and
racial hatred are offensive to American ideals.
Even an Obama Justice Department, though, would be open to the possibility
that Americans holding a legally permitted rally were beset by a mob while
police failed to keep order, if that’s what the facts eventually showed.
From the Washington Post comes an interesting social characterization of
today’s young white nationalist idiot—but also a description of how their
van was attacked with flying bottles and other objects.
According to Charlottesville’s Daily Progress, there were two armed
militias, one representing a pro-Constitution group, the other a left-wing
group. No shots were fired. They worked together to break up fights. Neither
supported the Nazis, and both promptly withdrew when the governor declared
an “unlawful assembly.”
In a tweet she has been made to regret, the New York Times ’s Sheryl Gay
Stolberg reported: “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw
club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the
park.”
For its part, the FBI has put out a call for witnesses and video of James
Alex Fields Jr. before he got in his car.
Messrs. Trump and Obama may have different ideological bents, but no
president wants to be consumed by passing political furies. Every president
over a longer horizon, we also semi-confidently presume, would have a chief
magistrate’s willingness to let the true facts emerge and fill in public
perception of events.
Many reputations are now tied to a false version of what Donald Trump said,
and a version of events in Charlottesville that may or may not survive
careful documentation. Do not expect moral courage or any apologies. Mobs
are mobs. Nazis whose every thought is reprehensible will still quail in the
face of a lawless crowd. CEOs of publicly traded companies are not in the
business of being brave. And yet the natural order is holding. Neo-Nazis and
white supremacists may be a continuing American embarrassment and eyesore,
but they are not today’s most pressing threat to our civil liberties. |
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