when the shoe is on the other foot

The divisions on the left have left some people feeling smug and self-satisfied.

Here’s Mark Steyn:

Randi Rhodes agrees with Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro on everything - abortion, health care, climate change, you name it. Yet the first is “a f***ing whore” and the second is “David Duke in drag” merely because they disagree on which Democratic senator would make the best president. …

There’s something rather heartening about this for those of us on the right who’ve been on the receiving end of the left’s vehemence: Apparently there really is nothing personal about it. You can be a chickenhawk warmonger racist homophobe mysogynist Bush shill or a pro-feminist pro-gay pro-black icon of progressive politics for a generation, but, if you cross the likes of Randi Rhodes, you’re all the same and you merit the same four-letter words and KKK slurs.

I can see why Steyn would be comforted to know that his critics are irrational by definition and not just mad at him. But that doesn’t help us, as a country and as a society, deal with the dime-store demagoguery that now characterizes our public “discourse.”

Demagogues of all stripes should be discouraged, marginalized, de-fanged, deligitimized, and brought down. They’re dangerous in any society, because they stir up mob sentiment.