The Desperate Revisionism of the Left

Hillary, contrary to her new tale of victimhood, had all the advantages.

 In possession of government power, liberals pompously invoke established customs. But once out of power, they immediately start breaking them. No sooner had they lost the White House than they returned to the primitive and infantile stance of 1960s-style radicals.

Liberalism is willfulness writ large. Its relationship to law and custom is determined not by fixed principle but by whatever liberals want at any given moment. Insofar as law and custom are useful to retaining power, liberals demand that others follow them. But the moment law and custom become an impediment to regaining power, they give themselves permission to violate them. The “ends” suddenly justify the means, and anyone who questions their bad behavior fails to see the “higher” good at stake.

Hillary spent much of the campaign harrumphing about Trump’s “horrifying” disdain for decorum and election-year proprieties. But in defeat, she and her aides have now exceeded whatever post-election pouting they claimed Trump would indulge. Their hypocrisy so far has been hapless, losing votes in recounts that they demanded and electors from an electoral college that they intimidated.

So much for the “temperament” of Hillary and her supporters. They alone, according to the media, had the “maturity” and “stability” to save a serene republic from Trump’s tantrums. Now they behave like demented flower children. Soon we will see them throwing pies, as they did during the Bush years, at government officials and holding endless “marches on Washington.”

Never far below the vestments of liberal establishment respectability lies the shabby attire of radicalism. Out come the obscene placards the moment liberals lose. In defeat, their rhetoric grows unruly and revolutionary, with old contempt for the “bourgeois” resurfacing in jeremiads against “talk radio” and “white privilege.” They grow more paranoid, blaming enemies, both foreign and domestic, for their loss of power.

In their mutterings about conservative FBI agents, Russian hackers, and a “basket of deplorables,” Bill and Hillary sound like the 1960s radicals and George McGovern campaign volunteers they once were. Back then, they blamed McGovern’s loss on Nixon’s appeals to “hard hats” and a populace too unenlightened to appreciate McGovern’s platform of acid, abortion, and amnesty. Not much has changed. According to Bill, Trump won because of his appeal to “angry white men.”

The revisionist spin they are putting on the race is laughable, given the lengths to which the ruling class went to pull Hillary across the finish line. She had all the advantages in the race — more money, more media, a Democratic establishment propping her up, a Republican establishment tearing Trump down. She had an attorney general and FBI director who saved her from indictment. She had endorsements from almost every newspaper coast to coast, multiple cable channels and networks functioning like adjuncts of her campaign, and Hollywood and academia churning out propaganda for her daily. And she still couldn’t win.

In her post-election analysis, she alternates between insulting the people and infantilizing them. She casts them as pawns of Russian manipulation. Never mind that at the debates and in the campaign she had warned the people that “Putin wanted” Trump to win and had hacked into the DNC to accomplish that goal. Indeed, that was one of her favorite talking points. So it is not as if the people weren’t aware of that charge. They heard it and discounted it as a reason for voting against Trump.

Often, losing politicians bemoan an uninformed electorate. Hillary trashes an informed one. She is mad that they knew too much about her. She was undone not by lies but by the truth.

It was the media in her pocket, not the hackers, who sought to deceive the people and push Hillary to victory. The people had no reason to question the veracity of the hacked emails. But they had plenty of reason to question the truthfulness of the fawning press coverage that she received.

Survey after survey shows that 90 percent or more of reporters vote Democratic. Hillary is apparently upset that that support is not at 100 percent and that media outlets deigned to report the hacked emails. She feels that they should have all banded together and suppressed the story.

She had come a long away from her days as a Watergate committee staffer who extolled the Pentagon Papers. In power, she had become like Nixon, adopting a sinister view of leakers and investigators and a sense of entitlement that led her to set up an illegal email server. But now out of power, she will dust off her senior thesis paper from Wellesley on Saul Alinsky and return to her radical roots.

https://spectator.org/the-desperate-revisionism-of-the-left/