Which Side Are They On?

The editors of Wall Street Journal, no particular fans of Donald Trump, wonder what side the “protesters” who attempted to disrupt the California GOP Convention are on:

It’s counterintuitive, but we’re beginning to wonder if all of those protesters showing up at Donald Trump rallies aren’t secret supporters. They couldn’t possibly be doing more to persuade millions of Republicans to vote for him, if only to defend the right to free speech and association.

The protests are picking up in volume and disruption as the candidates campaign in California ahead of the June 7 primary. Protesters blocked traffic, punched vehicles and cursed Trump supporters in Costa Mesa Thursday, and hundreds blocked the entrance to the GOP convention in Burlingame on Friday. About two dozen people tried to rush barriers near the Hyatt Regency, and Mr. Trump and his aides had to get out of their cars and walk into the convention.

“I think it’s going to get worse if he gets the nomination and is the front-runner. I think it’s going to escalate,” Luis Serrano, an organizer with California Immigration Youth Justice Alliance, told the Los Angeles Times. “We’re going to keep showing up and standing against the actions and the hate Donald Trump is creating.”

Even Americans who don’t support Mr. Trump may hear this and wonder who is really creating hate. The spectacles are made-for-ratings cable TV fodder, and Mr. Trump knows it. Every protester who breaks the law or waves a Mexican flag as a political statement in favor of illegal immigration might as well be voting for Mr. Trump.

Strategically, all of these actions, i.e. blocking access, rushing barriers, and waving Mexican flags, are counter-productive. They’d be much better off with completely peaceful protests and ensuring that the flags that were waved were American flags, emphasizing how American they are.

Presumably, the most benign interpretation is that they’re romantics who are less concerned about the practical effects of their actions than they are about blowing off steam. More likely is that they are radicals who are attempting to provoke a response. I think that gravely over-estimates their power, even in California.

15 comments… add one
  • Modulo Myself Link

    I’m not so sure how counter-productive this all is. Outside of the WSJ old white man bubble, I really wonder.

    To what seems to be a majority Trump seems to have started this. There’s a connection between somebody writing ‘deport them all’ outside a Hispanic student union in San Diego and the GOP candidate talking about Mexicans being rapists. At least there is to me. And this connection seems to precede everything else.

    Also–a Mexican flag, bad words, traffic being blocked? Honestly, were there Mexican trans people about to use a bathroom? Because both of these are just shocking!

    The good thing is that there’s a national election, and as dumb as it will be, either Clinton’s overconfident supporters will be proven wrong, or the hope that there’s a silent majority out there for Trump will proven wrong. If the former happens, as dumb as Clinton’s supporters are, they will have at least some sort of realistic idea of why they lost. Trump? Forget about it.

  • Gustopher Link

    I’m pretty sure this solidifies Trump’s support with part of his base — the portion well described by Cleek’s Law (today’s conservativism is whatever pisses off liberals, updated daily), but I don’t think it helps in the general election.

    People just want that crap to go away, and blame both the attacker and the attacked. Ultimately, it will have the same effect as the Endless Benghazi hearings and the email and the other made up scandals plaguing Clinton — it adds a layer of slime to the process that pushes the less committed supporters away.

  • michael reynolds Link

    MM:

    I swear to God, it’s deja vu. These are the same kinds of rationales used to justify the protests in 1968 – the protests that elected Richard Nixon and resulted finally in tens of thousands more dead in Vietnam, the Cambodian holocaust, and the Watergate trauma. But sure, feels good to wave those Vietcong – er, sorry, I mean Mexican – flags.

    The Right swings authoritarian, and the Left responds with an orgy of narcissistic, feels-fun, self-destructive stupidity. I already saw this movie, and I know how it comes out.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    Michael:

    Or it’s not the same movie. It’s not Vietnam, and no one except the rubes are afraid of protests against Trump.

    I mean, time will tell, obviously, but I think people are gratuitously reading the sixties into this for reasons I can’t or don’t want to fathom, mostly because I’m both approaching middle-age and yet I was born in 1976, long after the movie first ran.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    PS.

    I’m not saying I’m right, I’m just saying it’s hard for me to be convinced that America in 1968 (Vietnam completely unpopular, assassinations, mass race riots and a shocking mass counterculture) is in any way similar to America in 2016.

  • PD Shaw Link

    In a Jacksonian period, those opposed to Jackson will themselves break the law, destroy property and in some cases use murder as tools of opposition. The cycle of violence is a contagion, with each round justifying the next.

  • Gustopher Link

    When one of the complaints against Trump is that he is a racist carnival barker who incites violence, it is actually helpful to have some victims handy. The images of the protester being escorted out by security, and a Trump supporter sucker punching them in the back of the head demonstrates that far more than Trump’s words alone.

    And, this isn’t the 1960s. One of the key differences is that everyone has a camera with them at all times. Another is that people remember (or have heard of) what was protested in the 1960s, and generally look back and think the protesters were right.

  • michael reynolds Link

    MM:

    Unpopular war: check
    Lots of social changes: check
    Democratic candidate dismissed as too mainstream: check
    Republican candidate a psychopath with ‘secret’ plans: check
    Campus-powered opposition: check
    Republican candidate supported by angry white males: check

    As the saying goes, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. This is why we study history, and it’s also why we don’t dismiss the observations of the ‘old’ because if you have long-term cycles they will not be visible except to those who lived through the previous round.

  • michael reynolds Link

    Gustopher:

    We’ve evidently done a lousy job of teaching the history of the 60’s. Yes, the protesters were right. Who gives a shit? They helped in a major way to give us two Nixon terms, a prolongation of the Vietnam war costing thousands of lives, and the killing fields of Cambodia.

    So, goodie for them. They were right. Except for the fact that their actions as opposed to their words resulted in massive numbers of deaths. But hey, what’s a million dead Cambodians so long as some radical professor can reminisce about standing up to the man?

  • TastyBits Link

    … But hey, what’s a million dead Cambodians so long as some radical professor can reminisce about standing up to the man?

    There’s 100% snag free, wash & wear, dacron polyester Sans-a-belt slack, leisure suits, disco, and cocaine. Plus, the ex-hippies learned that soap is not toxic.

    As to Nixon, I would not be opposed to digging up his bones, grinding them into powder, and scattering them into the wind, and just to be safe, we should sterilize or exterminate any of his progeny. I would even include his close relatives. Being a nice guy, any deaths would be quick and painless.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    Michael,

    My guess is that outside of the internet, the idea of campus protest and rampant discord is a mythical concept. Are the SJWs really the equivalent of the SDS? It’s so doubtful that it makes me wonder if it’s wishful revanchist thinking.

    The angry voters for Trump aren’t reacting to this by the way–they’re reacting to the fact that in their own families and personal worlds (e.g. not far off elites in New Haven) they are finding superior resistance to their views. They’ve gone with the repression bit because that’s what that type of person does when they lose an argument.

  • michael reynolds Link

    By the way, if you want effective protest, organize general strikes where Trump appears, particularly strikes by POC. If Trump appears in Indiana, every Latino and every African-American (joined I would hope by large numbers of sympathetic whites) would call a general strike for 24 hours. You’d shut down services all across the state. The point would have been forcefully made, without violence, without attacking free speech, without inflammatory morons talking about Mexico taking back Texas.

    Of course this would not indulge the desperate need of college kids to yell, but what with the future of American democracy in the balance, maybe the college kids could be convinced to delay gratification for a few months. Or not.

  • michael reynolds Link

    MM:

    It’s not a question simply of whether Trump voters are primarily motivated by these protests, it’s the fact that these protests confirm Trump’s narrative in their minds. It solidifies his existing vote.

    It also forces rational Trump opponents to spend half their time justifying the latest campus idiocy. And it draws focus from rational opposition because as we know, if it bleeds it leads.

    If Trump is to be stopped, the Left has to come together. Together around giving Texas back to Mexico? Um, no. Come together around free college? No. Come together around confiscatory tax increases? Ain’t gonna happen. This ‘revolution’ has already failed – Hillary has 2 million more votes than Bernie.

    If Trump is to be stopped, the Left has absolutely no rational choice but to rally quickly and decisively behind Hillary. We need voter registration drives, not protests that serve to help Trump.

    What the Left does not wish to admit about 1968 is that not only did college kids know Vietnam was a loser, so did LBJ, (it’s on his WH tapes) and so did Hubert Humphrey, the brave and principled man who more than any other individual pushed the Democratic Party to support Civil Rights. Humphrey, though, wasn’t quite pure enough for the campus left. Humphrey would almost certainly have ended Vietnam a year into his presidency. Instead we got Nixon and six more years of war.

    You want to see what happens when the Left gives into its narcissism? There’s a long black wall in Washington DC with the names of those the Left failed utterly to save.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    Michael–
    The collapse of the New Deal in the sixties was a tragedy. The collapse of Clintonism was a farce. Team Clinton could very well be running a candidate who was the architect of a can’t-miss plan to intervene on the side of ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels. That’s not Humphrey or anyone else with ties to real political movements–she’s a creature of a time her campaign has gone out of the way to disown.

    Their best move is to let their candidate pander softly and decently like a good politician, which is what she’s been doing, and doing well, in fact. Trump is coming from behind and his good lines about free trade and the opportunity that low interest rates present will be lost as he starts asking if Hillary is in on the rag or is just not getting laid enough. This will be interpreted as ‘novel’ by idiots who have had millions of imaginary conversations where they have defeated evil bitches, but she’s going to tear him the hell apart and that will be it. He has one shot to get out of his cliches and she’s not Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    Also, note that when LBJ found out that Nixon sank the peace talks in 1968 and committed treason he couldn’t do shit because he couldn’t reveal that the FBI was bugging everybody. Revealing that would have shattered the ‘purity’ of the good decent liberals in the American establishment, none of whom would ever have been bugging their political opponents. Johnson and his party were quite happy to have treasonous Richard Nixon come in after them if it meant keeping their records clean.

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