Bewildered onlookers keep asking what the anti-Trump rioters and flag-burners hope to achieve. Their behavior has succeeded only in making many of the president-elect’s opponents — including this one — less hostile to the man.
But to ask what their aim is misses the point. The protesters aren’t really interested in Trump, they’re interested in themselves. Their self-absorption — and this is saying something — matches that of the man they detest.
When demonstrators in New York chant, “Donald Trump go away!” they don’t actually imagine that he’ll go away. They are indulging in a kind of conspicuous consumption, letting everyone see that their attitudes are impeccably liberal.
Virtue signaling is competitive. When all your friends are anti-Trump, you have to go further. Shouting “go away” won’t quite do, so you have to find a Trump voter on your campus and scream abuse at her. Once that behavior, too, becomes widespread, you need to up the ante further.
How about throwing something at the police? Or, if you want to let everyone see that you are in the inner sanctum of political correctness, how about going on a general rampage? That’ll show all those Republicans in, er, Portland, Ore.
Student protests are nothing new, of course. Some youngsters have always chosen to flaunt their piety by ostentatiously loathing the right things. Sure, it’s funny to see these self-righteous youths complain about Trump being “intolerant” or “a hater,” but irony has never been the hard Left’s strong suit.
There is, though, something else at work here, something quite unprecedented, namely the inability of an entire generation to handle disagreement.
A few months ago, I mused in this column about how our snowflake students would deal with the real world. A generation that demanded “trigger-warnings” and “safe spaces,” I wrote, was ill-prepared for the inevitable setbacks of off-campus life. If you have been taught that asking a Hispanic student where his family is from is a form of “microaggression,” how are you going to cope with the Donald’s speeches about Mexican rapists?
We saw the answer in the streets of Portland. When a spoiled toddler is told, for the first time, that he is not allowed to do something, he will throw himself on the floor, drum his heals and screech. But what if he was never checked as a toddler? What if he was indulged all the way through school and college?
What if the first time he fails to get his way is when a candidate he dislikes wins the presidency? Will he not have that delayed tantrum, hurling abuse in all directions, going on interminably about how he doesn’t recognize his country and feels violated and wants to emigrate (because, of course, it’s all about him)?
Think of how childhood has changed over the past generation. Walking or cycling to school has become the exception rather than the rule. Play areas have become soft and safe. Dodgeball is banned, on grounds that it’s too aggressive.
Listen to the way kids use the word “bullying” these days. “Turn that screen off, young man!” “Mom, stop bullying me!” From the moment they start school, children are taught that unpleasant words are a form of violence. By the time they leave college, they are convinced that the correct response to an opinion they find hurtful is to seek to silence the person expressing it.
We can argue about why it started. My pet theory is that one of the driving factors is the rise of single parenthood. The next time you’re in a playground, watch the difference between mothers and fathers.
The moms, by and large, are hovering, ready to catch the kids if they slip. The dads, by contrast, are on their iPads, occasionally muttering “be careful” as their kids climb the frames. If kids are never allowed to fall, even in playgrounds, they will struggle to learn self-reliance.
I stand by the many criticisms I have made of Trump in these pages. Like the snowflake students, he is thin-skinned, able to give it out but not to take it. He wouldn’t have had my vote. But he won fair and square, for Heaven’s sake. Any friend to America ought now to wish him success and hope to be pleasantly surprised.
The hysterical reaction of parts of the Left over the past two weeks has served to remind us of why he won in the first place. Not that the Leftists care. Because for these angry young people, it’s not him, it’s them. It always is.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
