Atlantic Writer Admits That Liberals Have Not Reacted Well to Trump's Win and Still Haven't Gotten Over It, and Predicts (Safely) They're Resort to Further Lunacies, Including Violence, When He Wins Again

You don't say.

Yesterday the Atlantic published a piece by Shadi Hamid which makes the argument that if Trump wins the 2020 election, Democrats are not going to handle it well. The basis of his argument is pretty simple. Democrats didn’t handled the 2016 loss very well:

Liberals had enough trouble accepting the results of the 2016 election. In some sense, they never really came to terms with it. The past four years have witnessed the continuous urge to explain away the inexplicable, to find solace in the fact that the voters betrayed them. How could so many of their fellow Americans side with a racist and a fabulist, someone so callous and seemingly without empathy? It was easier to think that those Americans had been lackeys, manipulated and deceived, or that they simply hadn’t understood what was best for them. Moreover, the Russians had interfered, and tipped the balance in an extremely close election through propaganda, fake news, and collusion with the Trump campaign. Perhaps, as former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid suggested, the Russians had even tampered with the vote itself.

You don't say. Why, I hardly noticed.

Still quoting from Hamid:

In presidential elections, once is a fluke; twice is a pattern. I struggle to imagine how, beyond utter shock, millions of Democrats will process a Trump victory. A loss for Biden, after having been the clear favorite all summer, would provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change--at a time when disillusion is already dangerously high....

A certain kind of cognitive dissonance--the gap between what is and what should be--can fuel revolutionary sentiment, and not just in a fluffy, radical-chic kind of way. In such situations, acting outside the political process, including through nonpeaceful means, becomes more attractive, not necessarily out of hope but out of despair.

This distance between what a society should be and the tragedy of what it actually becomes is less of a problem in democracies, because democracies are supposed to be responsive to voters’ demands and grievances. But they aren’t always. The gap will grow larger under a Trump presidency than a Biden one, and this has implications for mass unrest and political violence across American cities.

Really, Nostradamus? You don't say.

You know why I suspect that Democrats may resort to violence, looting, arson, rioting, and targeted assassinations after the election?

Because they've been doing it for 110 days straight, with the left's leaders -- not fringe people, but actual elected political leaders and high-paid media mouthpieces -- defending and justifying the violence and cheering the murderers.

posted by Ace at 02:44 PM

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