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.
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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.
- Discussion
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The virtue signaling of the anti-Trump rioters https://t.co/bazgebsCPh
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) November 21, 2016
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