From Kevin Williams at National Review, Resist?

The Democrats strive mightily to invent a crisis surrounding Trump — Russia, his travel habits, the emoluments clause, etc. — but the only real crisis for them is that they lost the 2016 election. They may lose the next one, too: Senator Warren should keep in mind that her party already has proven itself entirely capable of losing to Trump by nominating an elderly white woman with an undistinguished Senate career, bad ideas, and the soul of a hall monitor.

But suppose for a moment that Republicans were to take seriously the notion of “resistance.” Might they have a case?

The Democrats, after all, have shown themselves to be thoroughgoing authoritarians. Many of our progressive friends spent the Obama years lecturing us that opposition to the president and his agenda was tantamount to sedition or treason. They tell us now that failing to knuckle under to their political agenda is treason. Democratic prosecutors have been conducting investigations of companies and political activists for having the wrong opinions on global warming; Democrats in California have just declared the National Rifle Association a terrorist organization because it opposes them politically, and Democrats threaten companies doing business with the NRA with governmental retaliation; Democrats have proposed to gut the First Amendment; Democrats propose to put people in prison for showing films with political content without government permission; Democrats have resurrected 19th-century Know-Nothingism in their bigoted and unconstitutional campaign to keep Catholics off of federal courts; Democrats have illegally and unethically abused the powers of the IRS and other government agencies to harass and punish political rivals. It isn’t Republicans who want to censor political speech. It isn’t Republicans employing violence against college students and visitors at Mizzou or firebombing buildings at Berkeley.

And now Robert Francis O’Rourke has finally decided to confess what everybody already knows by openly declaring his intention to seize Americans’ firearms in direct violation of the Bill of Rights — a proposal that other leading Democrats already have endorsed.

Or perhaps we should back off from the Third Reich analogies and the “resist” nonsense and begin to take our duties as citizens at least halfway seriously. That begins with an understanding, among other things, that the Bill of Rights is not up for renegotiation, that perverting regulatory and counterterrorism powers for narrow political ends is a dereliction of duty and a misuse of power that should result in the offending party’s removal from office, that abusing one’s political office to bully individuals and businesses simply for having political preferences at odds with your own (talking at you, Joaquin Castro) is dishonorable and destructive, and that losing a presidential election does not render the government illegitimate or invite overturning the constitutional order.

Political stability requires, in the long term, consensus and cooperation, and these are impossible to achieve if you act like it’s the invasion of Poland every time an election doesn’t go your way.

HKO

Half of Trump’s supporters like his in your face, hit back twice as hard, refusal to be intimidated, trolling, protocol style.  The other half fear the poorly thought, lunatic, illiberal, and authoritarian ideas and behavior of the Democrats much more than the ego and unpredictability of Trump.  The Kavanaugh hearing was a live rehearsal of how they handle power, like a self righteous mob.

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