It had to happen sooner or later. The elements of the Grand Leftist Coalition could not stay together forever. They had only their hatred of the good, and sense of powerlessness, to unite them. Now that they have taken over most cultural institutions in America, they have started to eat each other. What can they possibly expect from conservatives, except that we look on in Schadenfreude? Especially as all must now witness our vindication.

What is Schadenfreude?

Schadenfreude means taking pleasure in another’s distress. Under most circumstances, Schadenfreude dishonors him who feels or expresses it. Unless the other person has relentlessly attacked you, for no better reason than that you are alive. Especially when the one attacking, does so because he knows you are right and he wrong. He (or she) would never admit that, of course. But what matters here is not what a person says, but what lies in a person’s heart.

Now consider a campaign of attacks, not from one person only, but from a gang. A gang that holds your devilment as its only reason for being, or at least reason for working together. Suppose every member of that gang holds as an article of faith a refusal to negotiate, even if you offer. Now suppose each member of the gang has a reason to resent the other members. (It doesn’t need to have any justice behind it; it need merely exist.) How long before the mutual resentments outweigh their resentment of you? Suppose they start to feel that at last they have the power they seek? Then they will start to jockey for position against one another. Soon, jockeying will give way to open warfare, without restraint.

When that happens, Schadenfreude becomes all you have left. They have left you with no moral defense in their eyes. So you don’t have to care what they think, of you or anyone else. All you need do is watch them kill each other.

Ladies and gentlemen, you can see that happening today.

Dissension in leftist ranks

This morning, Rachel Alexander, at Town Hall, gave us the news. She also explained why the coalition fell apart even though it had lost the key position of power, the Presidency. The Left, she observed, has now become less tolerant of disagreement than ever. And as its members refused to tolerate their common opponent, they then refused to tolerate their particular opponents.

She illustrates with several current examples. Black Lives Matter creates “spaces” for blacks only. They refuse admission even to white liberals. Those calling for totally open borders, clash with homosexual activists. (Take note of this last. Homosexuals must know at least one class of immigrants would as soon kill them as look at them.) But the most striking clash has now come between radical feminists and “transgender” people. The feminists, to put it mildly, don’t trust men who turn themselves into women. Well! Fathers of little girls now encountering men in the restrooms of Target stores don’t consider them real women, either. And then we come to the death of Seth Rich. Is he the victim of a tragic and insoluble robbery? Or did he get in the way of the Clintons? Bernie Sanders’ supporters want to know. Clintonistas, in contrast, have two words for them: pooh and pooh.

The most crushing indictment came in February from Professor Michael Rectenwald at New York University. He once was a member of that Coalition. And in this tweet, he quit. (Warning: he uses certain words that are as crude as they are harsh. Parents should exercise judgment and discretion.)

A commentary on last night's viral Twitter attack on me. Goodbye to the Left, goodbye. pic.twitter.com/OgpdRA9EAU

— MichaelRectenwald.com (@TheAntiWokeProf) February 22, 2017

Note his new username: The Anti-PC NYU Professor.

today’s “Left” is rife with the most obscene, abusive, nasty, spiritually ugly and utterly unethical, hypocritical and fanatically horrible people I’ve ever encountered in my 58 years on earth.

What took him so long to learn?

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Your editor could have told him that. For the record, your editor has been on this earth fifty-nine years—sixty as of the upcoming Thanksgiving season. Furthermore, your editor graduated from Yale College (Class of 1980). Leftists even then, at Yale and elsewhere, seemed to go out of their way to:

• Speak and act in an obscene manner,
• Abuse people personally,
• Speak and act in a nasty manner,
• Take a perverse pride in an ugly spirit,
• Embrace an “ethic” in which their “lofty” ends justified any means,
• Wear a mask of tolerance while, under the mask (what “hypocrite” means), refusing to tolerate the other person,
• As a corollary, demand that others pay a price they themselves refused to pay, and
• Set out to make people shudder to see their fanatical “devotion” to their causes.

Even then the Grand Leftist Coalition showed its first cracks. As Rachel Alexander notes today, feminists on campus accuse all men of having rapacious tendencies. They did this in the Seventies and Eighties, too. The problem: the Left adopted sexual “liberation” (read: license) as a cardinal principle. Perhaps, then, too many men on campus, both students and professors, did presume to demand sexual favors. Worse, some of them did refuse to take “No!” or even “NO!” for an answer. So the feminists over-generalized and accused all men, because men were men. But in the process they ran straight against the drive to overthrow traditional morality.

Today, of course, feminists have a worse problem. The Coalition admitted Muslims to its ranks. And Muslims often commit rape. Then they or other Muslims justify it (or worse: honor killing) as a matter of policy!

What makes Schadenfreude appropriate

Rachel Alexander tells us what makes Schadenfreude an appropriate response when Leftists start having each other for lunch. Have not those same Leftists, to paraphrase Alexander, “forced [us] to watch…this play out on the sidelines”? I go further. The typical conservative today, especially on campus, lies bleeding from multiple (figurative) stab wounds. And now suddenly his assailants, their knives still dripping with his blood, are plunging said knives into one another’s bellies! To paraphrase William Shakespeare: why should we not react with Schadenfreude? Do our opponents not deserve well?

But Schadenfreude need not be our only response. The Left already sees pointed defectors. Michael Rectenwald gives us only one example. Surely others will share his reasons. With such as these, conservatives can still reason. The more so, considering the wounds they have suffered—wounds they never prepared themselves to suffer, from a quarter where they least expected them.Hm-m-m-m. Has any army ever won a battle, in the sense of standing alone on the field, merely by sending in its medical corps? Maybe not. But never before has an army, on the cusp of conquest, dissolved in mutual mutiny, mayhem, and fratricide. (And sororicide.)

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