Control

At PJ Media Andrew Klavan reminds us we are what we do.

A quick way to come to wisdom about yourself is to understand this: you are what you do. You’re not your good intentions. You’re not your noble feelings. Your deeds are what make you who you are. A man who beats his wife then cries in remorse is a wife-beater. That’s all he is. When he stops punching her — stops for good — then he has a chance to become something else. Then he can cry all he wants. Until then, his tears mean jack-diddly crap. He’s a wife beater. That’s all.

Our friends on the left should learn this truth. The “labor activists” who surrounded Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and her boyfriend in a movie theater, spit on her, taunted him, chased them away; the restaurant workers who refused service to White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders and then followed her family to another location to harass them; the protesters who surrounded Mitch McConnell outside a Kentucky restaurant, telling the 76-year-old Senate majority leader, “We know where you live…” — these people are punks; thugs. Their high purposes, their righteous philosophies, their political certainties — all these are worth exactly as much as a wife-beater’s tears: nothing. They are the bulliers of women and the menacers of old men.

Same goes for Anti-Fa, the gangsters who don masks to assault those who disagree with them. They can call themselves anti-fascists all they want. Doesn’t mean a damn thing. They are what they do: criminals, oppressors, fascists themselves.

Yes, yes. There are bad guys on the right; there are bad guys everywhere. But Barack Obama was the most corrupt and incompetent president of my lifetime. I despised him because of his disdain for American freedoms and the systems that preserve them. But in eight years of his Chicago-style machine administration, assaults on his staff and supporters never became a commonplace, whereas such thuggishness — and increasingly mainstream calls to violence and cruelty — is beginning to become the Democrat Party brand, its norm.

What turns people into wicked punks while they no doubt continue to believe themselves to be decent and good? Bad ideas, that’s what, ideas that give people license to answer words and policies with terror. What’s the bad idea on the left? Control. The notion that the left’s cause is so righteous it needs to pay no mind to liberty but simply deserves to win by any means necessary. Let five judges on the Supreme Court make law and damn the “outdated” Constitution. Give unelected bureaucracies like the EPA the power to regulate people’s lives without appeal or oversight. Give ignoble gnomes like Peter Strzok the wherewithal to criminalize the political opposition. And of course, bring on the socialism: a philosophy that declares a person’s work, his time, his life, his property belong not to him but to the state. Control.

The belief that you are so superior to others that you should be allowed to control them — it’s that that inevitably moves people to violence and cruelty. In movies about American slavery, filmmakers always try to impress you with the brutality of the institution by showing rapes and whippings. But that gives a mistaken impression. Slavery isn’t wrong because masters rape and whip their slaves. Masters rape and whip their slaves because slavery is wrong; because when you think yourself so superior to others that you no longer need their consent to govern them, you have created in your own mind the right to harass and hurt and bully them. You have turned yourself into a monster.

Or into a leftist.