(2020-08-04) Guinn The Mountain And The Molehill

Rusty Guinn: The Mountain and the Molehill.

The best thing about 2020 is that if you don’t know where your close friends, family and colleagues stand on something, now you do. The worst thing about 2020 is that if you don’t know where your close friends, family and colleagues stand on something, now you do.

Fellow conservatives, I suspect we don’t agree on as much as we usually do right now. For instance, I think that the militarization of police goes beyond a race-related problem to an issue for all freedom-loving peoples who would see the government fear them and not the reverse. I think that racism is absolutely embedded in some of our institutions, even if I cringe as much as you every time I hear it described in the postmodern terms invented on university campuses to create further division. I think protests are energizing and fiercely American, and that would-be anarchists trying to take over their agenda doesn’t make the authentic expressions of resistance less valuable or important.

*I know why the “defund police” message sits very badly with you, and turns you off completely to anything else that person has to say. It is because you cherish a belief in the rule of law.

I know why you believe that the protests are being driven by – or at the very least have been co-opted by – organizers whose goal is to subvert capitalism. It is because you believe that capitalism works. That without it the American Dream doesn’t work.

And I think you are right. On both counts. But I know something else, too. I know that whatever threat these divisive elements co-opting an important social movement pose to our cherished values, at a national level it is a molehill.

I implore you: Pay attention to what is happening right now at the intersection of political power, financial markets and corporate power. Because this, friends, THIS is a mountain. We needn’t be hyperbolic. Capitalism will survive this. So will the rule of law. But if there is a threat to either, you won’t find it on the streets of Seattle or Portland. You will find it here:

Donald Trump Says U.S. Should Get Slice of TikTok Sale Price, Wall Street Journal (8/3/2020)

Let us recap: The President of the United States threatened the use of executive power to unilaterally ban a foreign company from the distribution of a product in the United States. He then met with the CEO of one of the two biggest US-based public companies to negotiate permission to acquire the company distributing that product. He then demanded a payment to the US government to facilitate the approval of such a transaction.

That US corporations must now consider their actions based on how they believe they will align with the person and preferences of the president in order to conduct business is a basic betrayal of the rule of law.

The Microsoft / TikTok affair is a betrayal of both the rule of law and the capitalist system on a scale that dwarfs anything being done by the cosplayers in the Pacific Northwest that dominate the conservative news cycle right now.