Unwitting Progressives for Trump
Does
Joe Biden have the nerve to stand up to the far left?
Opinion
Columnist
·
Aug. 31, 2020
On Thursday, as Donald Trump was about
to accept the Republican nomination from the South Lawn of the White House with
warnings that “No one will be safe in Biden’s America,” National Public Radio
was doing its small part to make sure the president would be re-elected.
NPR’s assistance in this matter was
surely unwitting. But that doesn’t make it any less effective.
The assist came in the form of a lengthy interview by
NPR’s Natalie Escobar with Vicky Osterweil, author of “In Defense of Looting.”
The book makes the case for looting because it “attacks some of the core
beliefs and structures of cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist society”;
“rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property”; and “reveals all
these for what they are: not natural facts, but social constructs benefiting a
few at the expense of the many, upheld by ideology, economy and state
violence.”
To judge by the NPR interview, “In
Defense of Looting” is not an interesting book. It speaks for almost nobody
beyond the fringe left — and certainly not for looters who hadn’t thought about
“cisheteropatriarchalism.” The fact that the publisher is an imprint of the
international conglomerate Hachette (2018 revenues, approximately $2.7 billion)
compounds foolishness with hypocrisy.
Nonetheless, the book
is symbolically important. I became aware of it when several friends separately
forwarded to me the NPR interview. Many of these friends, I suspect, will
reluctantly vote for Trump — not out of sympathy for him, but out of disgust
with defenses of looting and other things they see too often on the left.
What else are they seeing? A CNN chyron from
a burning Kenosha: “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police
shooting.” A video of an
outdoor diner at a Washington, D.C., restaurant being yelled at by Black Lives
Matter protesters because she won’t raise a fist in solidarity. Republican
Senator Rand Paul and his wife getting harassed by a swarm of
protesters as they left the White House.
And more: Trump being mocked in 2017 for
warning that if statues of Robert E. Lee come down, then George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson statues will be next — and then radical demonstrators doing exactly that three
years later. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York scolding Orthodox Jews in
April for appearing to flout social distancing rules at a Brooklyn funeral, but
then making an exception for Black Lives Matter demonstrations a few months
later. Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, celebrating a “summer of love” in
the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” and then watching the area descend, with depressing predictability, into
violent anarchy.
The list could be longer, but the
question it leaves in the minds of wavering voters is exactly the question
Trump most wants asked: Can the left be trusted with power?
Let me ask that question more
specifically. Can the left be honest that the tragedies unfolding today in
American cities are as much the story of insufficient policing as they are of
abusive policing? Does it get that “law and order” is a precondition to civil
liberty, not an impediment to it? Is it willing to say that the American
founders who bequeathed us the institutions of liberal democracy should be
honored, not despised? And does Joe Biden have the nerve to stand up to the
extremes in his own party, or does he just mean to appease them?
Is he Bill Clinton, or George McGovern?
I’ve been fairly enthusiastic about Biden’s candidacy, largely because I think he
represents the best chance for the moderate Democratic wing to prevail over its
left one. But his wan and sometimes unsteady speech in Pittsburgh, with its
brief defense of the police and its anodyne call for healing, isn’t going to
assuage the voters he needs in swing states.
And need them he does. It’s always
possible that Trump will overplay his hand on law and order. And Biden may
still have a commanding lead in national polls. But he’s up by an average of
just 2.7 points in battleground states, according to
the RealClearPolitics average of polls. And the phenomenon of the “shy voter”
is coming into sharper focus: Nearly 12 percent of Republicans and 11 percent
of independents say they’re unlikely to give telephone pollsters their true
opinion on how they’ll vote in November because they think “it’s dangerous to
express an opinion outside of the current liberal viewpoint,” according to a
study cited by Bloomberg. When did we hear that before?
Biden can do something about this. He
can publicly call out far-left ugliness (not just violence) the next time he
sees it. He can pay a visit to the people who’ve had their businesses burned to the ground in Kenosha
and tell them that their grievances will be heard, and their property
protected, in a Biden administration. He can even call the family of the
right-wing activist killed on Saturday in Portland. What better way to prove
that a Biden presidency stands for unity than to express sympathy for the
victims of violence, regardless of their politics.
Too many progressives are unthinkingly
helping Trump. Biden helps himself when he tells them, publicly, that their
sort of help isn’t needed.
