Three reasons it’s a bad idea.
I’m not sure he’s entirely serious.
[Update a while later]
Related: Why Leftists become thugs:
What turns people into wicked punks while they no doubt continue to believe themselves to be decent and good? Bad ideas, that’s what, ideas that give people license to answer words and policies with terror. What’s the bad idea on the left? Control. The notion that the left’s cause is so righteous it needs to pay no mind to liberty but simply deserves to win by any means necessary. Let five judges on the Supreme Court make law and damn the “outdated” Constitution. Give unelected bureaucracies like the EPA the power to regulate people’s lives without appeal or oversight. Give ignoble gnomes like Peter Strzok the wherewithal to criminalize the political opposition. And of course, bring on the socialism: a philosophy that declares a person’s work, his time, his life, his property belong not to him but to the state. Control.
Yup.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sarah Hoyt: The Left misunderstands the Constitution. Again.
[Late-afternoon update]
The power-hungry Left loses its cool. Though “power-hungry Left” is redundant.
[Late evening update]
Glenn has a good point on how Leftists become thugs. Maybe the causation goes the other way.
Re the Hoyt article, she refers to different graphics but all I’m seeing are some ads.
In any event, I remember on (I think) Instapundit, someone about a year ago posing the question: it the Constitution’s purpose is NOT to limit the power of the federal government, what the heck do you think its real purpose it? It was funny to see “liberals” contort themselves into pretzels to give some halfway coherent answers.
From Andrew Klavan’s article (not Glenn’s):This is an extremely important statement:
” Slavery isn’t wrong because masters rape and whip their slaves. Masters rape and whip their slaves because slavery is wrong; because when you think yourself so superior to others that you no longer need their consent to govern them, you have created in your own mind the right to harass and hurt and bully them. You have turned yourself into a monster.”
Before I read the article, I thought that the idea of causation going the other way was that an emotional cause gives thugs and bullies – who are always looking for a reason to act out – the venue for their thuggishness and bullying. Sort of like how abject goons were attracted to the Nazi party because the Nazis needed some head-breakers.
Klavan’s statement goes up and down the social scale – from grades chool playgrounds to the Federal government.
As for Sarah’s article she is correct in her analysis but she deviates from the topic of understanding the Constitution. But NOT understanding the Constitution and why it was built the way it was built is a major problem and a major reason why we have Lefties.
But it goes deeper than not understand the Constitution. No living American today who was born here has ANY idea what it was like in the Feudal system. No one can remember what it was like when governments were all powerful. When you had no rights. No one here has any idea of what can happen when a nation is run by pure democracy.
Therefore many have no idea of the extreme hard-to-get value of what they give up when they expect the government to do things by fiat:
Liberty.
Nor do they have any idea of how hard it is to get Liberty if you don’t have it.
So therefore they don’t value the purpose of the Constitution because they never had to live the other way.
Lastly, it is my opinion many on the left lose their cool because they have no concept of who they are. They had it all given to them and never had to work really hard got just survive. Life is too cushy. Yu get the Dolezal’s because she wants to belong.
Lefties start out not belonging. And think that they have to. Over the last few decades half the country has turned into this empty shell where grievance has acquired a cachet. And since they have no idea who they are or what they are capable of, they attempt to belong to the grievance crowd.
What the Weinstein events ought to have instructed them is that power is power and it leads to corruption and that aspect does not reside only in the left or right. It resides with the powerful.
And so governmental power needs to be carefully curbed.
Lefties start out not belonging. And think that they have to.
This is why identity politics and in/out group tactics are so effective for them. Most people want to belong. Most people want to be in the cool kids club.
And then there’s us geeks who look at the kind of jerks the “cool kids” are, what kind of total nonsense is required for virtue signaling, and form our own little social group.
Sod off, Swampy!
https://lawofmarkets.com/2017/03/20/sod-off-swampy/
“I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”
I guess youthful commodities traders fortified by lunchtime ale consumption doesn’t fit the narrative concerning the “working classes”?
Democrats have been using violence in the name of politics for well over a hundred years now. It would be nice if we had a media that pointed this out as a reminder that the organized and unorganized violence and bullying we see from them today isn’t new but has a long history.
Confronted with their own past, they would have no other choice than to disband their own party and replace it with… Well, we all know what they would replace it with in year zero of the new party.