Several decades ago, back in my socialist college days in Washington in the 1980s, I got arrested. I was at a protest, I shot my mouth off to law enforcement in a way that was personal and aggressive, and the next thing I knew, I was in handcuffs. On the way to the holding cell, the paddy wagon driver had fun slamming on the brakes and bouncing me around in the back.
When my father arrived to pick me up hours later, there wasn’t any talk about how innocent I was or if what the police had done was wrong. “Don’t ever call police Nazis,” Dad said. End of lesson.
If the tragedies happening in Minneapolis have revealed anything, it’s that many liberal American enclaves are filled with lifestyle leftists who don’t live in the real world. Like many other people, I have questions about whether immigration enforcement personnel are being too aggressive in their tactics and whether the two people they shot and killed, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, could have been subdued or arrested in a less lethal way.
Yet there is also the fact that, despite what lawyers, journalists, and the law on the books say, you have to live in the real world. In his 1979 classic The Culture of Narcissism, historian Christopher Lasch claimed that ever since the 1960s, political protests had become “a form of personal therapy” that had little to do with politics. Protesters treated street “resistance” as theater and a platform to vent personal and psychological problems. Many screech at law enforcement the way they would to an absent parent. Or as the poet Robert Bly once commented while witnessing an angry 1960s protest, “They’re all out there looking for their fathers.”
On top of that, there is also the issue of modern Americans suffering from Too Much Positive Reinforcement. TMPR was first diagnosed in 2004 by the writer Alexandra Wolfe in the New York Observer. Viewing TV shows like American Idol and Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, Wolfe marveled at how people with no talent or common sense were swiftly brought down to reality when confronted by Simon Cowell or “fired” by Trump.
Wolfe: “After decades of upper-middle-class parenting designed to shield Junior from all possible failure, and from any honest judgement of his talents, it’s no wonder we need television shows like American Idol and its fellow showcase for TMPR victims, The Apprentice. These shows are delivering the spanking — sorry, the time-out — that our culture of bloated self-evaluation is subconsciously craving. Their success signals that we may be reaching the end of a long national delusion. There is simply not room enough at the top these days for everyone raised to believe they belong there – and, deep down, we all know it.”
Again, I am a political conservative, and I have concerns about the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been interacting with protesters. Law enforcement seems to jump to lethal force without trying tasing or other lesser measures first.
Yet there is also an arrogant recklessness to the way too many protesters are interacting with ICE. Even as a street socialist in the Reagan era, I knew not to use my car to block any police activity and definitely not to carry a loaded weapon as I bowled into a group of officers who were trying to make an arrest.
DEMOCRATIC PROTESTERS ARE GETTING THEMSELVES KILLED
While I think that Good could have been followed and arrested at home, and that Pretti could have been tased and pepper-sprayed by police, there was a baffling insouciance to the way they interfaced with ICE, a cocksure swagger that was wildly inappropriate to the situation they were in. Good’s smiling, confident face seconds before she was shot reminded me of those American Idol contestants who enter the room thinking they own it, only to come face to face with the harsh reality that they aren’t all that. They badly misjudged themselves and the authority figures around them.
I expect that some people will be outraged that I’m comparing real-life tragedies that resulted in the loss of life to TV shows. But it was the leftist protest of the 1960s that introduced the idea of protest as theater, an idea still very much at play with today’s Left. It can end tragically when reality intrudes.