Liberals Who Claim History’s on Their Side Got a Cold Wake-Up Call
21st November 2016
Rich Lowry lays out some inconvenient truth.
President Obama won’t explicitly say Donald Trump is on the wrong side of history, but surely it’s what he believes.
I rather suspect he’s been explicit about it, it just hasn’t been reported by the DemLegHump Media.
The president basically thinks anyone who gets in his way is transgressing the larger forces of history with a capital H. During the 2008 campaign, he declared Sen. John McCain “on the wrong side of history right now” (the “right now” was a generous touch — allowing for the possibility McCain might get right with History at some future, undetermined date).
Which McCain has shown a distressing tendency to do.
Obama is given to quoting Martin Luther King for the proposition that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Whoever is deemed to be on “the wrong side of history” by progressives is always loosely associated with the opprobrium directed toward the Southern Fire-Eaters and the defenders of Jim Crow.
That’s because they think that everyone who doesn’t agree 100% with them must therefore disagree 100% with them and is therefore ipso facto a racist/sexist/bigot/homophobe/younameit.
For the left, History isn’t a vast, unpredictable, untameable force, but just like someone who might be standing in line next to you at Whole Foods. History is a board member of Planned Parenthood. It reads the Huffington Post and Vox, and follows Lena Dunham on Twitter.
It really cares whether transgender people are allowed to use the appropriate bathroom. History was probably hanging out at the Javits Center on election night and collapsed into a puddle of tears right around the time Wisconsin was called.
The political dangers of this point of view should be obvious.