Yes, you hate her, but give Sarah Huckabee Sanders credit — she served Trump well by tweeting out her experience at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va. Her job is to distract the media from whatever the current Trump horror might be, and she changed the subject masterfully. It happened last Friday and we’re still, sadly, talking about it five days later, mainly because liberals are still debating whether public confrontation of Trump officials is a justifiable or productive policy.
It certainly seem justifiable, because these people deserve such treatment if anyone does. Harvard prof Steven Levitsky, who co-authored “How Democracies Die,” says public shaming of Trump’s apparatchiks is important. “This is not the government taking action to bar people from restaurants. This is essentially society itself engaging in shaming of people who arguably ought to be shamed. This is not a normal situation, this is not normal politics descending into some type of illegitimate incivility.”
While confrontation can be cathartic for the perpetrator, it can be terrifying for the victim in a country with 330 million guns. Anger can quickly escalate these days to anonymous death threats from strangers all over the world. You don’t know which ones might be minutes away, so I understand perfectly well why Sanders is now going to receive Secret Service protection.
Ultimately, if you’re in favor of confrontation, you must acknowledge that it doesn’t play well in our video age. Consider what happened yesterday when a small group of protesters confronted Sen. Mitch McConnell as he left an event in Georgetown, D.C. They blasted audio of crying migrant children at them, prompting McConnell’s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, to demand, “You leave my husband alone!” Maybe if you already hate McConnell that video is satisfying, but you don’t have to agree with him to think it makes the protesters look like dicks.
Another thing liberals seeking public confrontation should consider is that many laws have been passed to limit it, mostly in the service of women seeking abortions who don’t want to run a gauntlet of abuse from forced-birthers. We run the risk of having such laws used to limit all public protest aimed at private businesses. Don’t scoff. It’s happening in France, where butchers want government protection from protesting vegans.
I would argue we have better ways of fighting back. Consider the story of a woman in San Francisco who earned herself the moniker of Permit Patty for calling the cops on an 8-year-old girl hawking water on the sidewalk outside her home. The woman’s complaint: The girl didn’t have a permit. The catch: The woman is white, the little girl black. The story went viral, and people soon learned the woman’s identity and that she ran a business selling — only T.C. Boyle could make this up — cannabis products for dogs. Or, rather, she did —stores are 86ing her merchandise left and right. She’ll probably be selling water on the sidewalk soon.
When she does, I don’t doubt Sarah Sanders will use Permit Patty’s tale of woe to try to distract us once again.