When Meryl Streep delivered her diatribe against President-elect Trump at the Golden Globe Awards ceremony on Sunday, it was neither more nor less courageous than any of the high-dollar fundraisers that Hollywood stars held for Hillary Clinton during her doomed campaign.
It was no more courageous than the popular (in Hollywood) view that Roman Polanski, a convicted child predator, is worthy of praise, public honors and standing ovations from the likes of Streep.
As uniquely unfit as Hollywood is to dictate politics or morality to the rest of us, so too are Hollywood’s popular themes of tyranny and resistance inapt for describing today’s politics. Yet with Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, an entire political industry is springing up to support this narrative.
The same players who cheered and enjoyed the precedent-setting abuses of President Obama in the interest of political partisanship are now moved by precisely the same interest to cast themselves as the heroic “Resistance.” Listen and you can hear excited squeaks of giddy excitement from these gritty freedom fighters buckling on their armor to battle The Man. It’s fun, exciting and self-aggrandizing to imagine oneself in such a role. But it’s make-believe, not reality.
It implies that Trump is Darth Vader to their rebellion; or Hans Gruber to their brave John McLane. The name “Resistance” also harks back to the French underground taking on fascism. Trump has frequently and hyperbolically been compared by his detractors to Hitler.
This theatrical conceit is really just cover for the same desire for power that existed before Trump was a candidate. It is partisanship masquerading as principle. It will become an appropriate metaphor the moment Trump sends the Death Star to destroy another planet or tries to make Congress pass his own set or Nuremberg laws — that is, never.
Streep, who spoke on Clinton’s behalf at the Democratic National Convention, was actuated by disappointment over the election outcome rather than by plausible fear that America is slipping into fascism. Equally disappointed are millions of liberals and tens of thousands of left-wing activists, who believed wrongly that Obama’s popularity, which persists even now, fundamentally reshaped the nation’s politics in their image and likeness.
Obama’s presence in the White House for eight years soothed them but also atrophied their sense of political reality. The return to unified Republican government in Washington is such a rude awakening, such a cosmos-shuddering jolt, that they take refuge in the fantasy that they are not merely a political opposition but rightful government.
“Resistance” members have fallen for the self-flattering idea that their opponents are either fools or knaves, most likely both. In truth, each side of the political spectrum is peopled by ordinary citizens who simply disagree about which rights and which groups deserve support or disdain.
If we are going to create silly metaphors for American politics, let us not forget that Emperor Palpatine, the absolutist commander of the Empire in the Star Wars movies whose excesses were justified on the grounds that his agenda could not wait for the constitutional niceties of galactic democracy. His imperial highness was perhaps the model for Obama, who realized his agenda could not wait at precisely the moment that voters took control away from his party in Congress.
In a more serious vein, Democrats’ systematic assault on First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights was no mere abstraction. It took the form of a concrete legislative agenda.
Democrats tried to create official federal and state government control over political speech for the first time in history via the Udall Amendment, which would have weakened the treasured First Amendment of Bill of Rights. Every single Democratic senator voted for this abomination before voters took away their Senate majority.
Increasingly and aggressively, Democrats have worked to undermine rights of conscience based on religious practice, rights not to participate in abortion, for example, leading to several confrontations in the Supreme Court, which so far they have lost. Just a few years ago, their party had a few reasonable voices, holding them back from such a course, but no longer.
Democrats now campaign for office on a platform of citizens of constitutional rights based on mere suspicion, and the placing of their names on secret government lists, calling it by the catchy phrase, “no-fly-no-buy.”
Is this what a courageous resistance looks like? No. This this is a movement of partisans who have been temporarily deprived of office, and plot their path back to power with theatrical flair?
It is important to hold the powerful accountable. This will be no more and no less true when Trump takes office than it was when Obama was president and Democrats were pushing every lever to weaken the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For those whose political interests have only now led them back to this realization, we offer John McClane’s greeting: “Welcome to the party, pal.”
