All the armies of all the world couldn’t conquer this country but Rep. Maxine Waters can ruin brunch, and it’s more serious than spilled mimosas, mushy avocado toast, and missed reservations. It’s an existential threat to this democracy.
The California Democrat is embracing lawlessness, condoning harassment of political opponents, and in the process, trying to revive the old idea mob justice.
To change the policies of the Trump administration, Waters lectured her Los Angeles constituents over the weekend, the #Resistance ought to get up close and personal. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station,” she shouted, “you get out and you cause a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome — anymore, anywhere — we’ve got to get the children connected to their parents, the children are suffering.”
Protesters cheered and pumped their fists to show that they got the message. Don’t bother with the cliched letters to the editor, peaceful protests, or even elections. The system doesn’t work. Real change comes from publicly mobbing the people in power.
Some are already ahead of the curve. A dozen protesters aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America crashed a Washington, D.C., diner and cornered Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. She managed to flee with Secret Service in tow. She couldn’t flee days later when more protesters showed up outside her Alexandria, Va., home early one morning and blared audio of detained illegal immigrants crying. “No justice,” they chanted during the lulls, “no sleep.”
Liberals will defend that conduct and will insist that Waters wants a peaceful mob as if such a thing exists. But this is not, as they like to chant, what democracy looks like. This is the first of many steps toward tyranny.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter that Nielsen lost some sleep or that she may have had to get drive-through. And even if the mob had grown violent — and inevitably, some will — the immediate effect may be minor. The real danger comes not just from normalizing hate and revenge. The real danger comes from the backlash.
Water appeals to the baser nature of the individual, encouraging those lawless in spirit to become lawless in practice. The system isn’t enough to check Trump and clearly the crowds themselves won’t be. Eventually then the peaceful protester resorts to violence. It only takes a second to drop a sign and pick up a rock after all, and already, according to a Brookings Institute Poll, nearly 20 percent of college students say violence is acceptable to stop speech they dislike.
Of course, it takes a special temperament to shove professors and chuck rocks at cops. There are relatively few people willing to risk the consequences that come from that behavior. But again, they aren’t the real risk. It’s the other 80 percent.
While the little crowd that Waters gathered eventually scattered without incident, her remarks have gone viral and it is the reaction that will be dangerous. Eventually enough protesters, too enlightened to accept the patriarchal notion of “civility,” will rebel against the system with violence. Soon, the people watching the protesters will lose faith in the system. Then they will turn to a real, true-to-life tyrant to restore order and keep things peaceful.
This is why Waters is the greatest threat to brunch and the perpetuation of our political institutions.
