We're Better Than This...?

Seriously?

In the five days since the election, we've had protest marches in cities all over the country, rioters (possibly anarchist infiltrators) doing property damage in Portland, calls for changes in rules after-the-fact (as a veteran of Democratic Party rules committees in more than one state, this really doesn't surprise me), and a petition with over three million signatories calling for dozens of people to compromise their own integrity and stated preferences... all because we didn't get our way.  This is sore-loser-ism in the WORST way possible, and I want NO part of it.  We were aghast when the other side threatened protests and a refusal to accept the results when it looked like our side was going to win, and yet here we are drowning in a sea of our own hypocrisy four days after our candidate conceded.  What happened to Michelle Obama's admonition a few short months ago that, "We go high," in this instance?

A Profound Inability to Behave

In the last half-century, the left has been plagued by ill-behaved protests, from the SDS sit-ins in Berkeley and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, to the WTO riots here in Seattle (while a Clinton was President; see yesterday's post about how the inseparability of globalism from the Clinton brand probably did us in) and the Occupy tempests a few years ago.  Not that we have a monopoly on it, mind you, but rather it's the whole holier-than-thou mindset about that's troubling: I've been to both Sproul Hall and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and if you're looking for moral authority about which sit-in disrupted far fewer people, you probably aren't going to like the results.

Concentrate Energies Where They're Effective

Honestly, I've been to exactly one protest march, back in 2003 in Texas, and I found it a considerable waste of time.  There were plenty of people there trying to co-opt it for other causes -- the event was about gerrymandering, yet people were displaying peace stuff, and anti-nuclear-power stuff, and reproductive stuff, and just about everything else except having the backs of the state senators who'd fled Austin for Albuquerque.  The number of man-hours wasted in these protests is staggering; you'd get a lot more mileage out of having these people fund-raise to make media buys.  And that's part of the big takeaway: In a century where it's rare to see kids outside on tricycles, protest marches are more unnerving than persuasive anyway.