It is literally impossible to find any unbiased discussion of the so-called “Moral Monday” protests that have been ongoing since April here in North Carolina. An Internet search will produce countless hits, almost all originating from the usual “progressive” suspects, and all long on rhetoric but short on logic.
Some things, however, appear certain:
- While it would be technically incorrect to call the protests a pro-Democratic movement, it is safe to say that they are very definitely anti-Republican. The impetus for the protest has almost everything to do with the fact that the Republicans own the Governor’s Mansion and both legislative houses for the first time since Reconstruction.
- The cast of characters driving the protests are clearly more socialist than liberal (especially in the classical sense of the word). As such, their agenda focuses exclusively on protesting the rollback of their century-old program of government entitlement programs. from education to subsidies to labor.
- There was not so much as a hint of the outrage expressed by the protesters under a Democratic governor or state legislature, regardless of the actual legislation advanced and enacted.
- It is difficult to assess the value of these protests, though it is certainly unfair for their proponents to drape themselves in the mantle of the civil rights movement. Their trespasses to provoke arrest pale in comparison to the outrages inflicted on those activists of decades ago. Of course the Republicans have done nothing to dispel that comparison, acting like the reactionary buffoons we have come to know and love from the Grand Old Potty.
I wish I could find something positive to say about one side or the other in this manufactured political conflict. But to me, it’s just more of the same old tired “left v right” false dichotomy. It is no more than political theater on each side of the imaginary aisle, wherein one party seeks to thwart the statist efforts of the other to replace them with their own.
If we have no better positions to advance in political discourse than those represented by these two, then there seems little point in discussing things further. We should, I suppose, all just invoke “The Thumperian Principle“, and get on with our individual lives.