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The only people who weren’t happy were the decent citizens of Birmingham, pro-integrationists in the Kennedy administration, and civil rights lawyers. As businessman Gaston put it, King was “messing things up just when we were getting a new start.”45

Thurgood Marshall had always disdained King’s methods, calling him an “opportunist” and “first-rate rabble-rouser.”46 Indeed, when asked about King’s suggestion that street protests could help advance desegregation, Marshall replied that school desegregation was men’s work and should not be entrusted to children. King, he said, was “a boy on a man’s errand.”47

But it was too late. Americans had capitulated to the idea of the “good mob,” and that opened the door to near-constant riots and protests for every group of citizens upset about a hangnail. The civil rights movement had made mobs respectable, to the great misfortune of the nation. In no time, liberals began engaging in what I believe Gandhi called “active resistance” every time they didn’t get their way through legitimate legal processes.

Democrats have made out like bandits—this is their moment! They are skilled manipulators of the mob. It was Democrats who kowtowed to Southern racists, blocking the schoolhouse door and campaigning on “segregation forever!” It was Democrats who responded to the Black Power movement by demanding racial quotas and Kwanzaa celebrations in the public schools. (The Democratic Party has consistently favored racial discrimination, it just switched which race should be discriminated against.) It is Democrats who have adopted every crackpot “share the wealth” program from Huey Long to Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama. It was Democrats who instantly transformed themselves into the antiwar party in response to protests during the Vietnam War. It was Democrats who embraced the wacko Marxist cult leader Jim Jones, who got nine hundred of his followers to commit “revolutionary suicide” by drinking cyanide-laced grape Flavor Aid at the cult’s “Jonestown” settlement in Guyana. It was the Democratic Party that welcomed former leaders of the SDS and the Weather Underground into their party. It was Democrats who turned themselves into the abortion-on-demand party to grab the feminist vote—with the Reverend Jesse Jackson going to sleep one night against abortion and waking up the next morning in favor of abortion and a viable Democratic Party candidate. It was Democrats who co-opted the labor union movement and then invented the absurdity of government “unions” providing them with a new guaranteed voting bloc.

By now, mob action has become so integral to the Left that it permeates every aspect of their political behavior. Don’t like Bush? Burn him in effigy. Upset the Kyoto treaty wasn’t signed by the United States? Throw rocks at cops. Don’t like the international monetary system? Smash a Starbucks window. A stripper claims she’s been raped by rich frat boys? Bang pots and pans outside the athletes’ home.

Republicans are baffled by mobs, opposed to disorder, but paralyzed with indecision about what to do. Meanwhile, Democrats are hurling bricks from the barricades. If Democrats knew who he was, they would admire Robespierrre. Liberals’ history is not this country’s history—theirs is the history of the mob.

PART III:

THE VIOLENT

TENDENCIES

OF THE

LIBERAL

NINE

THE SIXTIES:

THE MOB GOES TO

COLLEGE

The closest this country has been to the violent mobs of the French Revolution was the upheaval of the anti-war protests and race riots of the late sixties—all led by liberals.

The beginning of the student insanity of the sixties is commonly marked by the June 1962 Port Huron Statement issued by the Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Michigan. Among the vaporous idiocies of this proclamation was the demand that work “should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated, encouraging independence; a respect for others,