According to various media reports, an estimated 1 million protestors took to the streets Saturday across the country as an act of “resistance” against President Trump. The crowds ranged from peaceful to bizarre, but it’s fair to say most of those who participated were simply concerned, angry women (and some men) who desperately wanted to make their voices heard.
Mission accomplished.
The media spent the better part of Saturday showing highlight reels of the event, including passionate, albeit a bit unhinged, speeches from Madonna and Ashley Judd and videos and pictures of crowds that seemed to stretch on forever.
Unfortunately for those who felt passionately enough to travel across the country just to tell the world they’re not happy with Trump’s victory, most of their concerns have fallen on deaf ears. Protestors will soon head back to their normal lives, congressional Republicans got back to work on Monday in Congress, and, most importantly, Trump will still be president.
The reason these sorts of protests don’t mean much anymore is because the nation has become so utterly partisan, the entrenched on both sides have no interest in listening to one another. That may sound unfair and even unjust to liberals, but most conservatives won’t be shedding any tears or losing any sleep over their frustration. We’ve been down this road before.
We conservatives felt ignored when the newly-elected President Obama taunted congressional Republicans with a blunt, “I won,” after they expressed concern over some aspects of Obama’s 2009 stimulus package.
Conservatives felt insulted when candidate Obama called millions of us “bitter” rural folks who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Perhaps most relevant to recent events, we were completely ignored when hundreds of thousands of conservatives peacefully marched in Washington, D.C., (more than once) to make our voices heard. The same people demanding equality and justice today couldn’t have cared less about conservatives’ own calls for justice eight years ago, so for many on the right, it feels as though liberals are merely reaping what they’ve sown.
However, it would be a grave error for members of the pro-liberty movement to choose to ignore the fears and frustrations of millions of their fellow citizens. Rather than holding on to old grudges and hard feelings, however justifiable those feelings might be, a better course of action would be to use this historic moment to call attention to the root cause of the fear held by those who are so angry about Trump: a deep-seeded concern about what one person might do when given control of an all-powerful centralized government.
Most liberals, like most conservatives, want to make our country the best country in the world. The fundamental difference is that liberals have traditionally believed the best way to accomplish these goals is to vest the federal government with as much power as they can muster.
This isn’t a new idea. Since the dawn of human civilization, people have been handing a greater degree of their power over to a centralized authority in exchange for some alleged benefit, whether that be peace, security, prosperity, or unity. But Trump represents the fatal flaw of such a design. Inevitably, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, if you place too much power in the hands of a relatively small group of people, it’s only a matter of time before the tides shift and you find yourself at the mercy of those who you fundamentally disagree with on a great many issues. For liberals, Trump is that unavoidable consequence.
The truth is that the problem isn’t really with Trump at all: it’s with the system. If most policies were set at the state and local levels, as the Founding Fathers always intended, there wouldn’t be anything for liberals to fear, and we could all live together in much greater harmony and, perhaps ironically, as a more unified nation.
Liberals’ current anger, fear, and frustration is the perfect opportunity to teach this much-needed lesson about the importance of federalism, but that can only be accomplished with kindness, patience, compassion, and open discussion.
Justin Haskins is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an executive editor at The Heartland Institute. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
