Patriotism, The Last Refuge Of Scoundrels - The Left Howls As The Country Celebrates The Fourth

'Democracy First', a small but active progressive cabal was preparing for their Anti-Fourth protests against Donald Trump, his MAGA backwater legions, and the predatory capitalism which enabled the rise of autocratic, despotic rule. 

 

The group was unashamedly socialist in temperament, communist in expectation, and all refugees from the Sixties - old men who had never given up the heady idealism of that transformative era.  Bob Muzelle, who had earned his spurs on the Freedom Rides to Selma and Birmingham, was one of the first campus activists at Yale, and a devotee of the Reverend Blake Simmons Arthur who used his Woolsey Hall pulpit to urge the Nantucket-Vineyard crowd whose patrician, Cabot Lodge families had ruled the institution since the days of its founder, John Davenport. 

The Reverend Arthur was not shy about his admiration of the Soviet Union, the Revolutionary zeal of young Communists, the unitarian vision of Marx and Engels, and the promotion of the working class.  While at first, he wove these sentiments within a Biblical context, he later jettisoned the proposition and became a secular political radical. 

 

In the beginning his messages of anti-capitalism and progressive restructuring of America fell on deaf ears, and why shouldn't it, preached to the sons of the scions of capitalism - the industrialists, bankers, shipbuilders, and investors who had profited mightily from the system and provided wealth and security for generations?  The Cabots, Lodges, and Davenports of the university urged the Yale Board Of Trustees to summarily remove this seditious, insurrectionist pain in the ass. 

Yet the Reverend Arthur hammered away, banging and thumping, raising his fist to the sky, imploring, beseeching Yale men to do the right thing.  To give up their skiing trips to Gstaad, their summers in Rimini and St. Tropez, and to come with him to where life really mattered - the tarpaper shacks of the black South. 

The congregants at Arthur's Sunday service were few and far between.  Not only was his message counter-intuitive - their grandfathers had built America, and Arthur's demeaning attacks on the very nature of enterprise, ambition, and prosperity were scurrilous - but simply being seen anywhere near this socialist wing-nut was a taint on their families. 

Except for the likes of Bob Muzelle who sat through every last one of the the Reverend Arthur's harangues about the slave-owning South, Northern complicity (every early benefactor of Yale had been involved in the Three-Cornered slave trade one way or another), and the moral indifference of those who let it all happen. 

Bob loved the Reverend Arthur and followed him to Alabama and across the Pettis Bridge with Martin and Ralph.  They both came back bloodied and bruised, the Red Badges of Courage for their righteous commitment to the black man. 

'America has become a rotten sinkhole', Arthur told his young disciple. 'A nasty, ignorant, selfish, and incorrigibly vile place; and it is our job to...' Here Arthur hesitated, for even in the tolerant confines of the ivory tower, seditious sentiments might be called out.  He wanted to say that it was their job to bring the country down a la the Russian Revolution of 1917 but for this time and place, that would cross the line; so in his own inimitably pastoral way, he softened the message but made it clear that nothing less than total 'revision' would be necessary. 

 

Now, the today's Left has adamantly denied their socialist leanings, insisting that modern progressivism was a far cry from Lenin and Stalin's gulags; but their policies bely that demurral. Their calls for consolidation and strengthening of federal power and central authority, their redistributive economic policy, their historical revisionism, and their desire to mute, neuter, and remove the private sector were indeed more akin to Stalin and his Communist claques than anything Lafollette, Debs, or Brandeis could ever have envisaged. 

So Bob became the movement's inspirational emeritus.  Although he was now just a shadow of his former self, his hatred of capitalism and the white oppressive privilege it spawned was a clarion call for the young progressives who were all about race, gender, and ethnicity but lacked the commitment to remove the source of evil, capitalism.  

And so it was that in Washington, the Nation's Capital, the very seat of presumed democracy and liberal rule, the Anti-Fourth protests became nationally renowned.  It was one thing to hammer away at Donald Trump and his right-wing shills, another altogether to protest the endemic rot of the country itself. America had become the world leader in exploitation, oppression, neo-colonialism, and financial and economic greed - a shamefully arrogant bully with no moral center, an evil force which must be stopped. 

 

Now, in America communism still has a powerful resonance, and mention of it sends shivers down the spine of the most devoted liberal - but only because the dark forces of radical conservatism might come through the door, arrest, and incarcerate anyone who publicly admitted allegiance to it.  Yet the supporters of the Anti-Fourth movement were unbowed and adamant.  Protestors carrying upside-down American flags, dressed in hideously deformed Uncle Sam costumes, and singing the Internationale would not be denied. 

The DC police, under the authority of a municipal government and City Council, had been transformed from law enforcers to community activists, overt sympathizers of the street, the ethos of the ghetto, the rights of the disenfranchised and underprivileged.  They were told to give the Anti-Fourth protesters free rein, and to do nothing to limit their expression.  

Progressive leaders of both houses of Congress locked arms with the protesters and shouted, 'Down with America' loudly and in unison. 

'Fuck 'em', said the President. 'Up the ass' and turned to other business. 

Meanwhile, of course, most other Americans were having a great old time barbecuing, parading, setting off fireworks, flying flags, and cheering veterans who sat on top of tanks, waving.  Under Donald Trump patriotism was back, love of country unashamedly expressed, and a new commitment to the Republic was the meme of the day. 

Although the Anti-Fourth protestors deliberately picked July 4th to display their anti-Americanism and make a grand show of it - such sentiments were always embedded deep within the progressive movement, but this was the first time they were outed in such a demonstrative public display - but never counted on the innate patriotism of the nation. So much so that the protest was the last nail in the coffin of progressivism. 

Finally and at long last, the foundational belief of progressivism - an anti-capitalist anti-Americanism was out in the open for all to see.  No longer would the Left's demurrals, claims of patriotism, and defenders of democracy be listened to.  The toppling of statues of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Washington, and the blanket condemnation of America's history now made complete sense.  This revisionism was not simply a purging of the racist past as progressives claimed, but a profound hatred for the country itself. 

Nothing added Republican votes more than the Anti-Fourth protests. Democrats on the fence, hoping for a more centrist appeal, were outraged and switched party affiliation the next day.  Republicans more than ever rallied around Trump and voiced their appreciation of his militant America First agenda.  No longer would they have to hear him called a Hitler, a Nazi, a misogynist, homophobic dictator.  In one fell swoop, thanks to the protest and nationwide coverage of it, the progressive movement lost all credibility and was consigned to a footnote, a bit of political detritus, insignificance.