The Mantra of Due Process
While progressives run around yelling for due process for criminal immigrants and cartoonish judges, there are less glamorous though far more serious issues of due process being contested every day.
Is it just me, or is just about everything that issues from the mouths of progressives these days a bunch of psychological projection?
Something tells me it’s not just me. Like a serial killer who constantly kills because he thinks everybody else is out to get him, progressives swear they must slay the republic in order to save it.
The shapeshifting sophistry this requires is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the progressive mind to sustain its culturally manifest disorders. Psychological displacement, the inversion of reality that comes with social disconnection, is another. So is self-loathing: To hate oneself is to also hate humanity, and it unlocks the box of terrors progressive souls see when they look into the mirror.
Displacement and self-hatred together allow the mind to distort the world, to shift blame for their sadness to the world around them, and that is what they see every morning in the reflective glass. In the mirror, progressives see only their oppressors and victimizers. In the mirror, they see no need to analyze or debate, only to assign blame to all those they see coming to hurt them. In the mirror, they need only their subjective experience, and its absolute authority.
To free themselves, they must lock the box of terrors and keep it locked. They must cover the mirror and never look into it. They must rule the oppressors with an iron fist, and they can only do so by transposing their own sins of tyranny onto those who actually oppose tyranny.
In the old days—you can call it pre-Trump but more accurately it’s pre-George W. Bush—the left could and did look inside and discover reasonable, actionable responses to the ills they saw around them. From the minimum wage to the death penalty, from pay equity to child care, liberals could see beyond their own misery—though it seems personal misery always lurked in the shadows of progressivism, waiting for its time—and make the case for a better tomorrow.
These days such debate has given way to sloganeering, the evidence of argument surrendering to the emptiness of victimization. Save Democracy! Abolish ICE! Tax the Millionaires and Billionaires! Gun violence is a public health emergency! Everything is a public health emergency! Except autism and the chemical poisoning of the environment!
Way back when, progressives used slogans like “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” It might not have been true, but it was a binary call to action rooted in the real world. It spoke to real people. It gave them a choice.
Not so with slogans like “Stop Trans Genocide.” Not binary. Not rooted in reality. Not so much a call to action as a call to dark fantasy. Same for “The future IS trans.” That’s not a choice; it’s a threat.
You get the idea: Democrats never learn and so this past week we have the latest flavor of the month, coming soon to a George Soros-printed protest sign near you: Due Process Now! …
Read more at The MacIver Institute …