When Liberals are the Oppressors

Liberal ideas were developed in the good old days when landowners, slave owners, and business owners were the bad guys.  So liberals developed the notions of protest, civil disobedience, and passive resistance as the means by which the oppressed, assisted by their educated allies, could register their protest against injustice, expose the hypocrisies of the powerful, and win through to a just society.

But now a new justice movement has emerged onto the political radar.  Only this time it is not a liberal movement, enthusiastically supported by our liberal friends.  Instead this movement, the Tea Party movement, is anti-liberal.  It has arisen to oppose the injustices of liberalism.

As you might expect, our liberal friends are not reacting very well.  Protest, civil disobedience, mass meetings are one thing when they are used for a progressive purpose.  When used by conservatives--even conservative religious women--liberals talk of "incivility", of "terrorism", of racism, and worse.

Over the last week we have seen a ton of bad behavior from liberals on this matter.  Exhibit A is probably the head of the Teamsters union, Jimmy Hoffa, who introduced the President of the United States by calling workers everywhere to a war on the Tea Party.

Let's take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong,

 Hey, we all like to throw out red meat to our supporters.  But using war metaphors is considered inappropriate for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.  So why is it OK for a labor union leader?

Then there's the remarks of Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting.

Some of these folks in Congress right now would love to see us as second-class citizens. Some of them in Congress right now with this tea party movement would love to see you and me — I’m sorry, Tamron — hanging on a tree.

Mike Adams, a professor of criminology, is a practiced provocateur.  His latest wheeze is to exploit the new federal edict on sexual harassment, requiring vigorous prosecution on campus using a "preponderance of the evidence" standard.  So, writes Adams, that means that when an impressionable young woman hears her lefty professor refer to Tea Party members as "tea-baggers," a reference to oral sex, that young woman is clearly being sexually harassed.

Obviously, when a male political science professor dismisses a female supporter of the Tea Party as one who enjoys oral sex, he has offended her. And that falls squarely within the university definition of sexual harassment.

Adams wants this followed up.  For either we will get rid of a bunch of obnoxious lefty professors or our liberal friends will suddenly discover that a higher standard of proof is needed in sexual harassment cases.

Nothing here is all that remarkable.  It's what you expect from a ruling dynasty when it loses the Mandate of Heaven and finds that the peasants are restless.   Agitators! Traitors! Murderers!

Right now I am listening to a grand liberal apology on audio from The Great Courses, The Meaning of Life, by Prof. Jay Garfield of Smith College.  We've just got to Gandhi and his non-violent protest against British racism and colonialism.  In the rehearsal of Gandhi's life Garfield talks about how the British divided the Indians, religion against religion, caste against caste, even extending to dividing Bengal in 1905.  Government should not divide people like that.  "Government could not be an institution that allows some people to benefit and others to suffer."

The Greek philosopher George Maroustos once said that you can't tell how good a dog is when it's out hunting.  You can only tell when it's being hunted.  The measure of liberalism will be how it deals with political and moral adversity, when it is challenged to live up to its values by forces with which it disagrees.

Things are not looking good right now, as liberals find that they are being hunted.  Liberals are responding to their troubles badly.  My guess is that we ain't seen nothing yet.