This isn’t the image that most Americans have of our society. In states where teaching about racial oppression hasn’t yet been banned, children still learn in school about the arrest of Rosa Parks, a civil rights heroine, in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Of course, many civil rights activists were brutally beaten and some even lost their lives, but in this widely taught and iconic incident, Parks spent a couple hours in jail and paid a fine of $14. Parks is honored with a statue in the U.S. Capitol, a symbol of how highly protesters are esteemed and venerated. Today, if a few billionaires didn’t approve of her protest, things would undoubtedly have played out quite differently.
Democrats have, over the past year—OK, admittedly eight years—nattered on ad nauseam about “saving our democracy” from Donald Trump. But Rozendaal is facing this punishment in New York, a blue city in a blue state. And most of the elite college campuses where protesters were arrested this past year are run by liberals, as any right-wing news outlet will be happy to tell you. Democrats’ “Save our democracy” pitch might resonate more if liberals weren’t helping to turn our society into a dictatorship dedicated to protecting the delicate sensibilities of the ruling class. Maybe it’s good that Democrats have pivoted in their campaign pitch to “The other guys are weird.” That, at least, is indisputable.
