Once–a half century and more ago–liberals adopted public protests as a favorite tool to achieve social change.

Martin Luther King deployed tens of thousands of protesters to put the bite on Jim Crow. Jesse Jackson parlayed just the threat of protests to spur equal employment opportunity. John Kerry fought in and then against the Vietnam War, joining public protests in which he threw away his medals. Civil rights activists led protests against Chicago’s de facto segregated schools.

Saul Alinsky‘s Rules for Radicals became the handbook for how aggravating and disruptive public protests can achieve progressive and radical goals. Catholic priests and nuns joined peace marchers to shut down Loop streets.

They were called radicals They were commended from the right for disrupting peace and order, for posing a threat to democracy and for destroying “our way of life.” The nuns were told to go back to their convents and pray. Anti-war protesters were described as traitors. King was called a communist.  Alinsky became a dirty word.

We liberals passionately and uniformly stood up for their right to assemble and to freely speak against the government, as guaranteed by the First Amendment. We argued that public protest was a necessary and effective way to right wrongs, redirect misguided government policy onto the right path and express moral outrage against injustice.

So what if it pissed off some people. Never mind that cities and states had to dip into taxpayers’ dough to protect the protesters’ rights. Too bad if some people complained that marching in the streets and holding up signs up threatened our way of life. The felony of breaking into selective service offices to destroy draft records was regarded in some quarters as a necessary step to end an immoral war.

That was then and this is now.

From liberal corners now come condemnations of Americans who have dared to stand, walk or drive outdoors to record their concerns that the coronavirus shutdown has gone on too long, driving them of work and mom and pop out of business. The left once honored protesters as “activists.”

Some”objective” media stories now have ridiculed the protesters, casting their actions as “furious sloganeering” and other loaded descriptions. That approached echoed how the biased-the-other-way media of the ’60s described protest3rs as “long-haired,” “disheveled” and “draft dodgers.”

Now, liberal commentators have sprung into action, denouncing the protests for allegedly endangering public health. The protesters clamoring to get their jobs back was called “self-serving.”  They were told to go back where they belong (not unlike the protesting priests and nuns)–insides their homes.

And this–something that has become the most powerful condemnation–for being “anti-science” and daring to challenge the given wisdom. As if mere citizens had no right or obligation to challenge something they see as misguided or dangerous public policy.

The demonstrations are small and most Americans disagree with them, we’re told, implying that lack of support is reason enough to not march, the same argument we heard in  the ’60s. Late night comics found something funny about Americans clamoring for work. 

Protesters now are  accused of  “politicizing” the pandemic, as if exercising their right to petition the government was something bad. By its nature, politics is not; it’s how self-government works. It’s bad when it is exercised corruptly, arrogantly or ignorantly.

Sure, you can argue that violating rules for wearing face masks and social distancing is risky, although the science describing the spread of viruses concludes that being outdoors can be safer than being  indoors. Besides, there is no exemption to the First Amendment if you are wrong.

Some of the criticism is just another thinly disguised expression of liberal disgust of  “deplorables.” The elites who don’t tolerate disagreement with their own world views. Who arrogantly consider themselves to be the chosen people, destined to guide the unwashed from self-destruction. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass expressed it best:

If [demonstrators] dare protest, if they demand to work and run their own lives, they’re condemned by mouthpieces of the left as a bunch of greedy fools Who Just Want People to Die.