Why Didn’t They Riot?

Perhaps the only disappointment for those of us elated with the outcome of this month’s presidential election was the muted, downcast response from the Left at Donald Trump’s massive victory. We’d expected angry riots from purple-haired Antifa goons; emotive demonstrations of impotent and self-righteous defiance by Handmaid’s Tale cosplayers; and, maybe best of all, delicious cable news highlight reels reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat in 2016. The quiet sobbing we got instead came as somewhat of a surprise.

For the Left, it all seemed to end, as it did at Kamala Harris’s victory party at Howard University, with a whimper. There was no defiant or fiery speech that night; in fact, the candidate wasn’t seen at all, unwilling to face even the dedicated supporters who had worked hardest for her candidacy. Over the next few days, while there was some hissing and a few entertaining misfiring synapses at MSNBC and CNN — including some angry denunciations of elements of the Democrat coalition — the emotion seemed forced and perfunctory.

For many, though, the downbeat response to Trump’s victory seemed out of place, given the feverish severity of how Democrats had articulated the stakes of this election. In her final month, Harris’s campaign dispensed with messaging on any issues, leaning hard into explicit comparisons of Trump with Adolf Hitler, and of MAGA politics with fascism and Nazism, evoking the specter of American death camps in the event of the ex-president’s victory.

Using a strategically-timed news hook from former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly, Harris stared gravely into the camera outside her residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, warning that her opponent was no longer simply a “threat to democracy” but, as a Hitlerian-Nazi-Fascist, was openly dedicated to its destruction. The setting, too, was significant: rather than simply reaching down into the rhetorical gutter at a campaign stop, she used the trappings of her role as vice president to make an official pronouncement on a rival domestic political leader, using language typically reserved for foreign enemies with whom we are at war. The bloody result of a Trump victory, Harris and her media surrogates assured us, was certain.

While some in the press had never been shy of slandering Donald Trump as a “fascist,” the message coming from the candidate herself marked a serious escalation.

After all, when faced with an enemy that would extinguish all freedom in America and usher in a holocaust, procedural resistance in courtrooms or acts of civil disobedience are plainly inadequate. With the evil of a Hitler, there is no negotiation, comity, civility, or ordinary politics; only violent resistance is commensurate with the threat.

Some on the Left received the message clearly, as intended. Even before Harris herself began referring to him as a “fascist,” Trump had already been the attempted victim of two failed assassinations. Immediately following the first shooter’s very near miss, the New Republic all but endorsed this violent, final solution to the Trumpian problem, revealing a menacing, monochrome drawing of the former president on its cover complete with Hitler mustache. And below the image — subtle, in the color of dried blood — was the headline, “American Fascism: What It Would Look Like” in faux-Germanic typeface. Scandalously, law enforcement disappeared any information about the would-be assassins’ motives, saving the Democrats from having to address the fact that their manifestos dovetailed too closely with the party’s messaging.

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