The Norma Desmond Revolutionaries

There is something patently ridiculous about watching people (many highly privileged) in the freest, most prosperous, most tolerant country in the world wrap themselves in the ragged costumes of revolutionaries.

I happen to believe that most, if not all, self-identified and so-called “revolutionary” movements in America today are fraudulent. In an age and a country where everybody can afford to hold luxury beliefs, the people leading or people close to the people leading these movements are actually privileged dilettantes cosplaying revolutionary characters.

The recent wave of ridiculousness started with a certain Justice Democrat bartending lassie from Westchester surrounded by her gaggle of supporters from the Island of Misfit Toys. Now these “democratic socialists” have added more comedic value to the show.

America has no shortage of self-described dissidents, resisters, radicals, abolitionists, insurgents, and movement leaders who speak as if they spend their days dodging secret police and composing manifestos by candlelight in some damp cellar. They borrow the vocabulary of people who opposed absolute monarchies, communist dictatorships, military juntas, and theocracies as they invoke the moral authority of men and women who faced prison, torture, exile, and death merely for saying aloud what everyone around them knew to be true.

The problem is that most American revolutionaries face no such danger. In truth, many of them are wealthy in their own right, are children of privilege, or from a “protected class” that has been funded and/or supported by the very society and systems they oppose.

They organize publicly, raise money, and give interviews. They sell books, teach university courses, operate nonprofit organizations, collect speaking fees, post revolutionary slogans on social media, and in an absolute denial of irony, appear on cable television to explain, at length, how thoroughly they have been completely silenced.

They may advocate the abolition of capitalism, the destruction of the constitutional order, the elimination of police departments, or the dismantling of any institution they find offensive and the government does not arrest them for their opinions. Quite the opposite: the constitutional system they despise protects their right to condemn it.

This does not mean that political dissent in America carries no cost. People can lose friends, jobs, reputations, or professional opportunities. They may be mocked, opposed, criticized, or subjected to threats from private individuals.

None of that is trivial, but it is not the same thing as state persecution, and pretending otherwise cheapens the sacrifice of people who have lived under governments where dissent itself was a crime.

A Soviet dissident could be sent to a labor camp for circulating forbidden literature. An Iranian protester may be beaten, imprisoned, or killed for defying the religious state. Opponents of totalitarian regimes have disappeared into prisons because they challenged the legitimacy of those in power. The American activist, by comparison, is often arrested only after blocking a roadway, occupying private property, assaulting someone, destroying property, resisting a lawful order, or violating some other law that applies to everyone else—and as is typical, are on MSNOW or CNN fifteen minutes later crying about being silenced.

Being punished for speaking against the government is political repression. Being punished for breaking a generally applicable law while protesting is not automatically political repression and yet American activists routinely erase the difference because the confusion is useful.

And when the supply of oppression is running low, they just invent more. An arrest for trespassing becomes proof that dissent has been criminalized, prosecution for vandalism becomes evidence of fascism.

The rhetoric is carefully constructed to transfer moral authority from genuine victims of tyranny to people who are often suffering little more than the consequences of their own behavior.

This is where revolutionary politics in America begins to resemble cosplay. The clothing, slogans, raised fists, chants, and heroic self-descriptions are borrowed from movements whose members paid terrible personal prices. When merch for sale hits their website it shows the danger they face is largely theatrical. Many of these revolutionaries know that after the march they will return home, post photographs of themselves online, solicit donations, and complain that the system which protected their protest is somehow equivalent to a dictatorship.

Some undoubtedly drink their own moonshine and fraud does not always require conscious deception. People can become so immersed in ideological theater that they mistake inconvenience for persecution and disagreement for oppression. Instead of playing a character, they become Norma Desmond (Sunset Boulevard – look it up).

Sincerity is not the same thing as truth, but it sometimes looks like it – and that is what makes these cosplayers dangerous. They can, and undoubtedly will, win elections. Democrats are waking up to this now – Van Jones, a radical progressive Democrat, basically just said, “All this stuff we used to talk about, don’t these DSA morons know we were just talking shit? They actually believe we meant it! What the hell are we gonna do now?”

America is certainly not beyond criticism, and no government should be trusted merely because it calls itself constitutional. Abuse of authority can occur here, and citizens should remain alert to it, but preserving that vigilance requires intellectual honesty. If every arrest is repression, every opponent is a fascist, and every political disappointment is tyranny, then those words eventually mean nothing.

A genuine dissident risks punishment for telling the truth. An American “revolutionary” often risks applause, a book contract, perhaps a brief stay in a holding cell after refusing to leave someone else’s property, or some harsher punishment like being disappeared to the gulag of a weekend show on MSNOW.

Wake up, folks. Don’t be fooled. You don’t want to go where they are going.

It’s all a con.