What Is The Left Waiting For?

Antifa, BLM, Black Bloc, and other professional protestors on the Left were fairly quite this election year. There were signs that Antifa or similar groups were preparing to make an appearance at Democrat convention this summer, but it seemed that the protests were small and insignificant. Surprisingly, we didn't see protests over the election results, although both Biden and Harris had repeatedly referred to  Trump as a fascist and akin to Hitler and warned that his election would mean the end of "our democracy".

    So what's up? Instapundit linked to an article entitled "A Whimper, Not a Bang: Where Was Antifa After Trump's Victory?" by David Reaboi that attempts to answer this question. 

    Reaboi notes that "[t]he surface explanation, of course, is that the Democrats didn’t really believe any of it; all that rhetorical venom was merely cynical election year politics at the final crunch of a close election." But, he asserts, "Harris’s scurrilous rhetoric about Trump’s alleged fondness for Hitler, however, wasn’t aimed at bringing Antifa’s violent shock troops into the streets, but at radicalizing the far larger cohort of mainstream Democrats." Instead, Reaboi goes on to explain, Antifa is being used more strategically.

Unlike in Europe, significant Left-wing violent riots in America don’t appear spontaneously in response to lost elections; they exist in the context of more sweeping political mobilizations that can plausibly be described by allied media as “largely peaceful.” As with Nixon and the anti-war movement, the media is the essential element in creating conditions for justifying the cause of unrest and ignoring or contextualizing violent excesses.

Thus, "we didn’t see post-election violence or mass protests because the scale of Trump’s victory meant that such rioting would appear — at least temporarily — as the angry self-indulgence of a minority that had been legitimately beaten at the ballot box."

    Reaboi instead believes that we will see the media set the conditions for riots when the Trump administration starts to round up and deport illegal aliens. "The coming mass mobilization in response to Trump’s promises on immigration and deportation will be an obvious inciting event, and law enforcement needs to be prepared, especially in blue states." 

    Although Reaboi hints at collusion, he does not come out and state so in this article. But the fact that there were no riots or widespread protests is, itself, evidence of collusion. It is like the Sherlock Holmes mystery ("The Adventure of Silver Blaze") where the dog didn't bark at an intruder because the intruder was not a stranger. That is, the lack of barking was itself a clue as to the identity of the intruder. Here, the fact that there were no riots and the media did not even try to set the stage for any is evidence that there was some higher direction. 

    If you think in terms of revolutionary power structures, it makes sense. Stripped to its bones, a revolutionary movement will have some governing body or council--generally secret--under which you will find three or four broad groups of organizations: a legitimate (that is, legal) political party, legitimate sources of operating funds, propaganda arms which may or may not be openly linked to other parts of the organization, and then the foot soldiers (ranging from protestors to guerilla or terrorist groups) that are walled off from the legitimate arms of the movement in order to provide plausible deniability.  These foot soldiers can then be used to create an illusion of wide-spread support for the party, or to intimidate the public or leaders.

    But this structure needn't be limited to revolutionary movements. I would posit that any person or group wishing to gain and keep control of a government, without being the government itself, will necessarily need a similar structure. It is just that in the case of a ruling elite, their power structure can also include parts of the government, media organizations, banking and financial institutions, academia, and more.

    With this in mind, it would be incorrect to view the current political and economic conflict as Leftist elites against normal Americans. It is, rather, between one group of elites (who control and use the Left) and another group of elites and putative elites that I will call the counter-elites. The counter-elites are those that aren't really part of the existing power structure--they are either marginalized or complete outsiders--but want to be in charge. What Trump appears to have done is form a coalition of counter-elites and that is what makes him dangerous to the entrenched elites. The benefit for the common person comes from this challenge to the entrenched elites which might produce reforms actually beneficial to the public at large.

    You can see hints of this coalition in news reports of Trump's somewhat eclectic picks for cabinet and other government positions, as well as the appearance of billionaires such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in Trump's inner circle. Rather than the will of the people being carried out, it is more realistic to view current events in the U.S. as a struggle between the entrenched elites and the counter-elites. The entrenched elites will roll out their foot soldiers when it is expeditious. And while the deportation of illegals will probably be the casus belli, make no mistake that the primary intent will be to protect the size and power of the administrative state and, thereby, the power of the entrenched elites.