“Indivisible” groups across the U.S. take inspirations from the success of the previously-reviled “astroturf” Tea Party, from the militant ANTIFA Left wing who practice violence to preclude counter revolutionary messages from being heard, from the Occupy campers, and all of it underpinned by a love of Marxism, sympathy for communism, hatred of capitalism, and revulsion over the evil counter-revolutionary Republicans.
But that’s not the message they present to the rest of the world—the Dar al-Harb [House of War]—the U.S. became for them after the recent election.
In the new battle space, forget philosophy, argument, cases, constructs, reasoning, laws, precedent, decorum, and civil behavior. Enter the swarm—used to be called the mob. But where the mob was random and uncontrolled, the swarm is targeted and strategic.
The swarm intends to overwhelm, not through a Cloward-Piven system-saturation strategy, but through crowding out the head space, the message space of the public domain, from the opposition—the illegitimate non-communist counter revolutionaries currently holding public office.
With what content, one might ask, and here’s the new twist. It’s nothing. Or something. It does not matter! The message is irrelevant except as a temporary placeholder to crowd out the opposition message. Counter revolutionaries are so far beneath the Left’s contempt, they’re not even worth an argument.
Instead, they get short, shouted, repetitive, symbolic phrases, fitted to sound bites. No conversation, no debate, because no one wants to be seen talking to a counter revolutionary dhimmi.
The swarm intends to foreclose discussion and provoke suppression. If they get lucky, maybe create a few martyrs for the movement. They intend to exacerbate normal human relations by politicizing everything to foreclose peaceful constructive communications. Peace does not serve their interest in revolution.
Any form of engagement aggravates the swarm. Proximity or adjacency feeds it with targets to focus outrage upon.
So how should civil society, the descendants of our Western intellectual heritage, live alongside these extremely unpleasant, and sometimes outright destructive, swarming communist agents?
It seems prudent to keep a safe distance from them when they’re in outrage mode. Perhaps if enough people stop enabling them and leave them alone to burn through their tantrums among themselves, they’ll eventually burn themselves out and settle down.
There’s plenty of advice on the internet for dealing with tantrums in children, advice that might inform a rational approach to political tantrums by Leftist adults.
Meanwhile, the political adults in the room should carry on with the constructive chores that come with adulthood. To this end they should continue to publish their constructive ideas, present their solutions using reasonable persuasion, and most importantly, stop taking the Left’s tantrums as serious political statements.
To elevate the swarm’s messaging to the level of our core constitutional structures, besides being an absurd equivocation, seriously undervalues the work product from the Founders who built our republic, and we should never forget that hindsight.