Sound And Fury Signifying Nothing - Protest Marches As Self-Gratifying, Happy Jamborees

There seems to be a march every weekend in Washington; and the Women’s March, the March for Science, the Climate March are just a few. This weekend (4/5/25) was no different.  Marchers gathered on the National Mall to protest Donald Trump.  It was a delighted, happy crowd.  The placards, banners, and signs were effusive in their attacks on an imbalanced, insurrectionist, enemy of the people.  

The crowd cheered every speaker, raised their fists in defiance and solidarity, whooped and hollered until hoarse, and headed home satisfied, content, and extremely happy with themselves. 

The real purpose of the march was to create a sense of solidarity and a camaraderie of like-minded people, progressives who refuse to capitulate to the retrograde, destructionist, bullying of Donald Trump.  It was hatred of the man that ironically fueled the joy of the event.  The bilious, hysterical, incontinent rage felt good to express - to yell and scream finally after so many months of tamped down, frustrated, and inchoate anger.  

The joy at these marches and demonstrations is palpable. Those marches that concern women have an additional note of bonding, communal love, and belonging. Demonstrators are not angry but happy, for they are shouting in unison with their sisters, hugging and kissing in exuberant displays of female solidarity.  Their soprano voices, loud and choral, might never be heard by the men that decide, but that is of no consequence.  It was femininity, femaleness, feminism expressed joyously and with abandon. 

It all comes down social collectivity – an expression of concern for a common cause which unites thousands into a community of ideas – an identity community with markers, banners, logos, doctrines, and liturgies.  Belonging feels good, feels important, feels useful, and most importantly reflects one’s own goodness.

The marches all have a stated purpose – demand for women’s rights, more objectivity and less politics in scientific research, and immediate action on climate change – and while they may be well intentioned, their objectives are far too vague and diffuse to have any impact on policy; and this march of protest against Donald Trump was perhaps the most centripetal, airy, and breezy of them all.  

The President had done nothing wrong, at least not like Richard Nixon's dirty tricks, Watergate, and break-ins to the offices of Daniel Ellsberg; or LBJ who prosecuted the War in Vietnam despite unclear objectives and goals, causing the death of thousands.  

No, this was a magical premise of pre-crime, a Julius Caesar moment when Cassius and his Roman cohorts plan to kill Caesar for the crimes he might commit.  Caesar has hardly even intimated a desire for imperial rule, only been adamant about principles of governance and national sovereignty. 

The marchers on the Mall saw Elon Musk, the man tapped with the responsibility of identifying waste, fraud, and inefficiency and charged with the dismantling and closing of bureaucracies which were hemorrhaging taxpayer dollars with nothing to show, as a villain, a usurper, a Genghis Khan.  Yet Musk was only out to save taxpayer money, reduce or eliminate non-essential, wasteful government interventions in individual lives, and return governance to the foundational principles of the Constitution. 

Closing the borders was a necessary, long overdue, national right and priority; and Trump was unequivocal about it. Drastic, uncompromising measures would be taken to repatriate foreign nationals here illegally.  Such removal would benefit Americans - without cheap, undocumented labor, wages for American citizens would rise, a modicum of social integrity would be restored.  

The war in Ukraine, increasingly unpopular in the United States - a war with only the feeble premise of 'Saving Democracy' and resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, the ruin of a country, and little opposition to Russia - would be ended. 

The ridiculousness of woke would be ended - no gender spectrum, no transgender kindergarten teachers, no outrageous redefinitions.  Affirmative action and DEI - intrusive, objectional attempts to value identity over talent, intelligence, ability, and performance - would have to go, making the marketplace much more fair, equitable, and just. 

So, what was the point of the march?  The marchers on the Mall had been so badly infected with the fabulist concoctions of the progressive Left - that Trump was a homophobic, racist, misogynist and oppressor of the weak and disadvantaged - that hatred had become endemic and ingrained. 

This was not a protest with one clear, definable, achievable objective - to pass a Civil Rights Bill, to remove Johnson from office, to stop the war in Vietnam, or to force Richard Nixon to resign - but one with only inchoate, hysterical 'feelings'. 

The ‘68 March on Washington had one and only one purpose – civil rights.  It was the most defining, momentous, and significant event of the movement which had begun with Rosa Parks, sit-ins, and the signing of the Civil Rights Act.  No one could ignore the plight of black Americans after Martin Luther King spoke at the Lincoln Memorial.



Anti-Vietnam War protesters brought the war to Washington, and Nixon was bedeviled.  Although he stubbornly hardened his stance, dismissed the protesters as renegade, anti-Americans, he paid attention; and most observers have concluded that the demonstrations, marches, and protests helped to end the war if only indirectly.

The leaders of both the civil rights and anti-war protests understood their power.  They had specific objectives – both direct and indirect – in mind, and never wavered from them.

However recent marches have been hodge-podges, potpourris of grievances.  The Women’s March a number of years ago was a stew of progressive demands.  Every issue from equal pay to abortion rights, to sexual abuse, male patriarchy, transgender acceptance, and the capitalist system which is fundamentally oligarchic and oppressive to women was represented on the Mall. 

Real activism requires both political and philosophical commitment and savvy lobbying.  In the case of environmentalism, the desks of Congressional Representatives are piled high with requests and demands from hundreds of cause-specific groups.  Environmental fatigue sets in, and the pile is simply moved.

Current causes have no immediacy.  There are no thousands of coffins of dead American soldiers arriving at Andrews Air Force Base.  No black people being beaten or attacked by dogs.  Global warming is remote, distant, and by no means the Armageddon envisaged by some.  For the time being, it means less brutal winters in Minnesota, a longer growing season and lower farm prices, and easy sailing through the Arctic Passage.



Women have never been more successful, now outnumbering men in law and medical school, increasing in numbers in media, academia, and industry.  Although feminists still insist on protecting women from the depredation of men, most women are strong, confident, and quite able to take care of themselves.

The election of Donald Trump has given common cause to progressives – perhaps the unifying enemy they have hoped for. In the electoral campaign they vilified him as homophobic, misogynist, racist, and xenophobic – all vague, passionately-felt, impossible to validate, but too melodramatic for any real resonance.  

A woman who was an organizer of the anti-Trump march when asked what he hoped to accomplish, said, “Media coverage”.  The more the public is exposed to progressive principles, the greater the chance for progressive reform.

Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth.  Progressives who see televised images of Washington marchers will feel even more solidarity and commitment.  Conservatives, on the other hand, will only be hardened in their opposition to what they see as liberal cant and interventionism.  The images of marchers, random signs, and violent encounters will only drive them further from the causes marchers intend to promote.

So, what’s the point? Why march? Why bother?

The answer is in collective progressive solidarity.  It matters little whether protests and marches will have any impact.  The point is sharing in a common, philosophical, universal movement.

This all accords marchers a certain generosity.  They are serious about their causes if undirected and vague.  Other observers have characterized marches as purely psycho-social phenomenon, feel-good enterprises of community, belonging, and personal purpose.

Whatever the motivation, marches have an unintended consequence – march fatigue.  Few members of Congress, let alone the White House or the rest of us, pay any attention to the doings on the Mall.  We are simply tired – let alone sick and tired – of the same old, same old. 

Everybody marches in America – Bay-to-Breakers, St. Patrick’s and Columbus Day, Fourth of July, and every possible combination and permutation of protest, patriotism, and pure fun.  This is a good thing.

Just don’t take them seriously.

The Brilliant Side Of Bad - Why Evil Is So Compelling And Good Is So Insufferably Boring

Hannah Arendt was famous for her work on 'the banality of evil', how ordinary people do unspeakable things; and she used Adolph Eichmann as a prime example - a man of literature and good taste, cultured, and knowledgeable, but capable of the most horrendous crimes imaginable. 

David Brooks a number of years ago wrote an interesting article about human nature.  “Why”, we ask, “Do good people do bad?”.  Brooks wondered why this doesn’t happen more often since we are programmed from birth and down the millennia of human existence to be self-protective and aggressive and to expand our perimeters and secure our interests.

John Calvin believed that babies come out depraved (he was sort of right; the most violent stage of life is age). G. K. Chesterton wrote that the doctrine of original sin is the only part of Christian theology that can be proved. This worldview held that people are a problem to themselves. The inner world is a battlefield between light and dark, and life is a struggle against the destructive forces inside.

This worldview was both darker and brighter than the one prevailing today. It held, as C. S. Lewis put it, that there is no such thing as an ordinary person. Each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism.

 

Frank Bales, the topical subject of Brooks’ article is the young soldier who massacred 16 people in Afghanistan.

Friends and teachers describe him as caring, gregarious and self-confident before he — in the vague metaphor of common usage — apparently “snapped.” As one childhood friend told The Times “That’s not our Bobby. Something horrible, horrible had to happen to him.”

This is a normal reaction, affirms Brooks:

According to [the worldview that prevails in our culture], most people are naturally good, because nature is good. The monstrosities of the world are caused by the few people (like Hitler or Idi Amin) who are fundamentally warped and evil.  This worldview gives us an easy conscience, because we don’t have to contemplate the evil in ourselves.

Josef Conrad in Heart of Darkness expressed it best in the words of Kurtz, 'The horror...the horror', the deathbed realization that not only were the cannibalistic savages he courted the very incarnation of human voracious paganism, but that all human beings shared the same trait. 

Yet there can be no denying the irresistible appeal of such pure, amoral, willful behavior.  Nietzsche observed that the only validation of the individual is the expression of pure will, the Übermensch riding over the herd, 'beyond good and evil' and the characters of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg and others have created characters of enviable, but terrifying will. 

There is something far more compelling about Richard III than Richard II, his predecessor, the one devilish and Machiavellian in his plots to secure his reign; the other given to fantastical poetic dreams, emotional weakness and a suicidal desire to die at the hand of his enemies. 

Goneril and Regan are unspeakable harridans, murderous sisters with no compassion or remorse who consign their father, King Lear, to madness and a solitary death; or Dionyza who without a scintilla of moral hesitation sends Pericles's daughter to her death; or the macabre, pure evil Iago who plots to destroy the noble Othello. 

  

Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Hilde Wangel, Ibsen's heroines are women of pure, unadulterated will, ambition, and personal desire.  Lovborg, Solness, and Rosmer are all sent to their death by these determined, brilliantly soulless women.  There are others.  Literature is filled with such villains and villainesses. 

While one rightly and justifiably condemns Hitler and Stalin for their murderous and genocidal actions, one cannot help but wonder at how humanity, God, or Natural Selection have created men of such power and unmitigated, unstoppable wrong; and as such are fascinated.  The horrors of the Holocaust, the millions humiliated and frozen to death in Soviet gulags, and the tens of millions destitute and dying because of Mao's enforced collectivism can only make us wonder.  Who are we, after all? 

After all is said and done, Americans pity Joe Biden, a weak, beholden, timorous idealist, a fantasist and prayerful aspirant to a better, more peaceful, more verdant world; and cheer the macho, unintimidated, uncorrected, and outrageous Donald Trump.  It is not only American Wild West individualism that is behind the cheering and adoring crowds.  It is because Americans, Europeans, Asians love, want, and adore the great, the unbowed, and the Supermen.  It is no surprise that after years of a wailing, penitent, clothes-rending and breast beating liberal idealism, the Right has emerged strong and defiant on every continent. 

Despite liberal democracy autocracy, African Big men, neo-emperors and czars are still in power.  As much as progressives would like to believe that Americans - all people - are inherently good, compassionate, considerate, and cooperative, history has shown that we are not.  Strong men - and increasingly women - are in power because of an innate human destiny - strength, dominance, supremacy and rule. 

 

More importantly and less openly expressed is the desire to be like such rulers.  We are all Nietzscheans, not obedient Christians at heart.  Jesus may help keep our willful desires in check, but our thoughts are with the mighty.  Genghis Khan, not Joe Biden is our hero. 

It is no surprise that Islam is so fast growing and seemingly unstoppable.  It is a militant, absolutely undeterred religion.  Muhammed was the original Muslim strong man, and ISIS, al-Shabab, the Taliban, and Hamas are his offspring. 

Donald Trump has been called by the Left an insurrectionist dictator, a strong man, an autocrat interested only in complete authoritarian power; but that is exactly why he appeals to America in this early era of the 21st Century, a country tired of lamentations, penance, and dutiful compassion.  We were never so, never in the days of colonization, Manifest Destiny and Westward expansion, the Wild West, or the unbounded era of Darwinian evolutionary supremacy in the age of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Morgan. 

Dostoevsky created a Devil in The Brothers Karamazov, and he tells Ivan that without him life would be a thumping bore, church on Sundays, fidelity, good works, and responsibility; but that we are not created to be such choirboys.  On the contrary we are programmed for irrefutable self interest, violent aggression and personal territorialism - all of which produce drama, tragi-comedy, and hilarious vaudeville to enjoyed not mourned. 

 

Liberal democracy notwithstanding, the desire for strength, unmitigated, unalloyed power is more a part of our nature than any compassionate, considerate, and inclusive Christianity.  We have been sold a bill of goods by Jesus, Ivan Karamazov claims, offering majesty, miracles, and authority embodied in the Church and giving it rise to institutional hegemony; but Ivan was wrong.  We love and want authority, the more unassailable the better. 

So do we want a Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot on American soil? Hardly, but at the same time there is no doubt that Americans prefer a strong, undaunted, undeterred macho like Donald Trump to his weak, feminized predecessor. 

Trump is not evil as he has been portrayed by the Left; and it is an injustice and demeaning insult to Holocaust survivors to suggest he is a Hitler.  His undiminished sense of legitimate power and righteous authority, and his absolute commitment to reestablish the foundational principles of the United States are not Hitlerian, but very American and very, very human.