Demonic (24 page)

According to Madison, there were only two methods “of curing the mischiefs of faction”: Eliminate the causes or eliminate the effects. The principal advantage of a “well constructed union,” he said, would be to control the effects of violent mobs by diffusing them and supplying “opposite and rival interests” to counteract one another.
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The French chose the other path: They resolved to remove the cause of faction by always exercising the “general will.” There would be no disagreement because everyone would always agree. But as Madison said, to eliminate the cause of faction, one either had to extinguish liberty or require all citizens to have “the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” That, he said, was a cure “worse than the disease.”
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Two years after Madison wrote those words, the French would embark on their program of eliminating factions by killing people. To fashion a republic of “virtue,” they simply exterminated anyone who did not agree with “the general will.” The only way to ensure unanimity of opinion was to kill those who disagreed. Then—just as Rousseau foresaw—obeying the general will was completely free, because people were simply obeying themselves. All it took was a few years of murder and terror to make man free!

The whole history of liberal thought, back to Marx and ultimately back to Rousseau, is that political authority rests on force—until the revolution gives us true and perfect freedom at the sharp edge of a guillotine. Our founders realized there is no “general will,” and therefore were never required to slaughter citizens in order to create it.

If our revolution had been won by a mob, why would
The Federalist
keep saying how scary mobs are? Why would they jabber on and on about how the new Constitution would prevent mobs from arising? Wouldn’t they celebrate mobs? Why didn’t Americans cheer Shays’ Rebellion, rather than using it as an argument to create an all-new form of government? Both during the Revolution and for the next two centuries, mobs in America were dealt with swiftly and without remorse.

We have had plenty of violence in America. But until fairly recently, mobs didn’t drive events. One of the goriest episodes was the Civil War Draft Riots in New York City in 1863—perpetrated, of course, by Democrats. There was enough burning, pillaging, murdering, and corpse desecrating there to earn professional courtesy from a French mob.

In an explosion of animalistic violence, Irish Democrats, enraged by the Emancipation Proclamation, which they believed would force them to compete for jobs with blacks coming up from the South, ran through the city, lynching blacks and burning black establishments to
the ground. As described in the book by Leslie M. Harris,
In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863:

On the waterfront, they hanged William Jones and then burned his body. White dock workers also beat and nearly drowned Charles Jackson, and they beat Jeremiah Robinson to death and threw his body in the river. Rioters also made a sport of mutilating the black men’s bodies, sometimes sexually. A group of white men and boys mortally attacked black sailor William Williams—jumping on his chest, plunging a knife into him, smashing his body with stones—while a crowd of men, women, and children watched. None intervened, and when the mob was done with Williams, they cheered, pledging “vengeance on every nigger in New York.” A white laborer, George Glass, rousted black coachman Abraham Franklin from his apartment and dragged him through the streets. A crowd gathered and hanged Franklin from a lamppost as they cheered for Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. After the mob pulled Franklin’s body from the lamppost, a sixteen-year-old Irish man, Patrick Butler, dragged the body through the streets by its genitals. Black men who tried to defend themselves fared no better. The crowds were pitiless. After James Costello shot at and fled from a white attacker, six white men beat, stomped, kicked, and stoned him before hanging him from a lamppost.
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So America has always had people capable of behaving horribly. We call them “Democrats.” But the one-week riot had no effect on events.

President Lincoln sent the army from Gettysburg and restored order. The war continued. Even the draft continued. Even Irish service in the army continued.

One year after the Draft Riots, blacks and Republicans in New York City celebrated their alliance with an all-black regiment raised for the war. As the regiment marched through the streets, joined by members of the Union League Club and a hundred policemen, it was remarked upon how much more orderly and sharp the black regiment was, compared to some of the ragtag white regiments.

And then the South was finally crushed, slavery abolished, and
America marched on. The Draft Riots didn’t even prevent Lincoln from carrying New York State in the next year’s elections.

The first exception to Americans’ abhorrence of mob action came in the sixties. The civil rights movement gave mobs a halo. Disgust with the Jim Crow laws overcame Americans’ natural aversion to disorder. At the outset, the civil rights movement consisted of peaceful citizens battling mobs that were oppressing blacks—mobs that were, as always, led by Democrats. Orval Faubus, Bull Connor, George Wallace, and the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan—Democrats all.

But as soon as blacks started to vote in large enough numbers to matter, the whole Democratic Party switched sides. Unable to win elections by appealing to the racist mob, the anti–civil rights wing of the Democratic Party disappeared virtually overnight. In the blink of an eye, the Democrats went from being the Party of Bull Connor to being the Party of Al Sharpton. The Democrats simply traded one mob constituency for a new one. You might say they traded their white robes for a track suit and a giant medallion.

This is the history of the Democratic Party: Find out what the mob believes, then leap in front of the mob in order to lead it.

One man who didn’t like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way—by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court. Marshall was the anti-Rousseau, using words, not pictures, to get justice.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the heir to Rousseau. He used images in order to win publicity and goodwill for his cause, deploying children in the streets for a pointless, violent confrontation with a lame-duck lunatic: Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor.

Connor was a machine-politics, pro-union Democrat who had been elected to the Democratic National Committee from Alabama. He was also a vile racist, endorsed by Alabama’s Democratic, segregationist governor, George Wallace. After witnessing Connor’s brutal tactics to enforce segregation, the good citizens of Birmingham stepped in to remove him from his position as Commissioner of Public Safety. Birmingham’s middle class, business leaders, and Jewish community weren’t interested
in having beery KKK nightriders in their town. First, they voted to eliminate Connor’s office; then—to be extra clear—they decisively voted against Connor when he ran for mayor.

It was over—responsible citizens and civil rights advocates had won. But Martin Luther King planned one last protest before Connor’s term expired. City merchants, including the black millionaire A. G. Gaston, opposed King’s protest on the grounds that Connor had already been beaten at the ballot box. On the day of Connor’s electoral defeat, Burke Marshall, a champion of civil rights in Kennedy’s Justice Department, called King and asked him to call off the Birmingham protests.
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But King decided to deliberately provoke Connor, who was insane. This was a way to extend the movement, just as, years later, King would branch out from racial justice into “social justice.”

With television crews crawling all over Birmingham, King arranged for hundreds of black children to march on the city. As expected, this led to a total conflagration when Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on little children, some as young as six years old. The explosive images from this confrontation were instantly broadcast around the world.

King had stoked this incredible fire to ignite his dying movement—dying because civil rights had won in the courts, at the ballot box, and in the hearts and minds of Americans. But King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Wyatt Walker were “overjoyed” at the mayhem they had caused. Walker gloated, “There never was any more skillful manipulation of the news media than there was in Birmingham.”
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Connor was delighted, too—the protests helped him rally his dwindling racist following.

The only people who weren’t happy were the decent citizens of Birmingham, pro-integrationists in the Kennedy administration, and civil rights lawyers. As businessman Gaston put it, King was “messing things up just when we were getting a new start.”
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Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King’s methods, calling him an “opportunist” and “first-rate rabble-rouser.”
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Indeed, when asked about King’s suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men’s work
and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was “a boy on a man’s errand.”
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But it was too late. Americans had capitulated to the idea of the “good mob,” and that opened the door to near-constant riots and protests for every group of citizens upset about a hangnail. The civil rights movement had made mobs respectable, to the great misfortune of the nation. In no time, liberals began engaging in what I believe Gandhi called “active resistance” every time they didn’t get their way through legitimate legal processes.

Democrats have made out like bandits—this is their moment! They are skilled manipulators of the mob. It was Democrats who kowtowed to Southern racists, blocking the schoolhouse door and campaigning on “segregation forever!” It was Democrats who responded to the Black Power movement by demanding racial quotas and Kwanzaa celebrations in the public schools. (The Democratic Party has consistently favored racial discrimination, it just switched which race should be discriminated against.) It is Democrats who have adopted every crackpot “share the wealth” program from Huey Long to Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama. It was Democrats who instantly transformed themselves into the antiwar party in response to protests during the Vietnam War. It was Democrats who embraced the wacko Marxist cult leader Jim Jones, who got nine hundred of his followers to commit “revolutionary suicide” by drinking cyanide-laced grape Flavor Aid at the cult’s “Jonestown” settlement in Guyana. It was the Democratic Party that welcomed former leaders of the SDS and the Weather Underground into their party. It was Democrats who turned themselves into the abortion-on-demand party to grab the feminist vote—with the Reverend Jesse Jackson going to sleep one night against abortion and waking up the next morning in favor of abortion and a viable Democratic Party candidate. It was Democrats who co-opted the labor union movement and then invented the absurdity of government “unions” providing them with a new guaranteed voting bloc.

By now, mob action has become so integral to the Left that it permeates every aspect of their political behavior. Don’t like Bush? Burn him in effigy. Upset the Kyoto treaty wasn’t signed by the United States? Throw rocks at cops. Don’t like the international monetary system?
Smash a Starbucks window. A stripper claims she’s been raped by rich frat boys? Bang pots and pans outside the athletes’ home.

Republicans are baffled by mobs, opposed to disorder, but paralyzed with indecision about what to do. Meanwhile, Democrats are hurling bricks from the barricades. If Democrats knew who he was, they would admire Robespierrre. Liberals’ history is not this country’s history—theirs is the history of the mob.

PART III:
THE VIOLENT
TENDENCIES
OF THE
LIBERAL

NINE
THE SIXTIES:

THE MOB GOES TO
COLLEGE

T
he closest this country has been to the violent mobs of the French Revolution was the upheaval of the anti-war protests and race riots of the late sixties—all led by liberals.

The beginning of the student insanity of the sixties is commonly marked by the June 1962 Port Huron Statement issued by the Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Michigan. Among the vaporous idiocies of this proclamation was the demand that work “should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated, encouraging independence; a respect for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social responsibility.”

So it was either the manifesto of the New Left or a cheap imitation of
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
. Written mostly by Tom Hayden, the manifesto pompously drones on about “the emptiness of life.” This from a man who married Jane Fonda, whose most important career move was getting breast implants. But Hayden’s nails-on-a-blackboard, Valley Girl gibberish was hailed as the voice of the new “Youth Culture.”

In no time, a series of student riots erupted on college campuses based on rumors and hyperbole, following the French pattern. Students
would create chaos and tumult, and then the college administrations would promptly capitulate to the student mobs and their incomprehensible causes. Nathan Glazer said that the student protests all came down to the argument that “any mob is right as against any administrator, legislature or policeman.”
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