You have failed to identify that "Left" that festers in your noggin, or to document whoever it might be expressing disbelief in democracy.
On the other hand, Trump goons attacking Congress in an attempt to deny the democratic will as expressed in an election certified by all fifty states is undeniable.
Here is your position: 'the Left' are national elected Democratic politicians.
They do not openly endorse violent rioting or violence. Therefore,
the Left does not support rioting or violence.
Or, in formal logic: A is B. Therefore, C is B.
But A is just a sub-set of C. What about the rest of C?
My position: yes, elected national Democratic politicians are not electorally-suicidal or brain-dead. When necessary to put down openly anti-police Democrats in the primaries, they do so. (Or the great majority do. In public. Watch out for that AOC, though.) Thus the new Democratic Mayor of New York City, a former policeman.
And, no doubt the great majority of people who traditionally vote Democratic, or at least sometimes vote Democratic, feel the same way. That's why they vote to recall Leftist District Attorneys who want to turn hordes of criminal looters onto the nice upmarket shops in toney liberal neighborhoods.
But those groups do not exhaust what the word 'Left' can reasonably be expected to apply to.
We need to look more closely at elected local Democrats, who are far more subject to the pressure of their activist base. We need to look at the City Council of Seattle, of Portland, of New York. (Where the good liberals have honored a spy for the Soviet Union, showing what at least some liberals
really mean when they denounce conservative 'treason' and crow about their 'patriotism'. Jesus, the irony couldn't be greater!)
We need to look at
AntiFa -- not an organization with membership cards and dues, but a fairly widespread, fairly popular way for young leftists to identify themselves. They are quite openly committed to violence -- notionally, against 'fascists', but by that word, they mean any conservative, any Republican. And they put words into deeds, as when one of them shot dead one of ours, in completely cold blood, Aaron Danielson, and the others laughed and cheered when they heard the news.
Then we have to look at the very important layer of 'progressive' (and worse) intelligentsia: the teachers, professors, journalists ... who lean heavily left and many of whom are sympathetic to AntiFa.
They may not themselves go out and shoot us or throw Molotov cocktails, but at least some of them are quite supportive of AntiFa. "Violence against fascists is justified" (and we conservatives are, in their eyes, fascists. That's the crucial sleight-of-hand these people use: Republican = Fascist. And violence against Fascists is justified.)
You can find more than a few people on the Left right here on this Board hoping that mass executions will be carried out against us, or justifying the riots, following AOC (an elected Democrat who is not subject to the don't-sa-it-out-loud rule).
Times are changing. This is not the Nixon vs JFK debate.
Here's
Teen Vogue, taking a break from teaching its teenage readers about the joys of anal sex (think I'm kidding?), conducting an interview about AntiFa with its most prominent academic apologist, Professor Mark Bray. (So we get a two-fer here, journalist and professor, apologists for violence against the Right.)
Teen Vogue:
[
Here's What Antifa is REALLY Trying to Do ]
Now
Teen Vogue isn't exactly a political journal. If we turn to Leftwing political journals, we find more of the same.
The Nation magazine:
[
What Is Anti-Fascism? ]
The New Republic:
[
“Antifa Isn’t A Hobby Or A Fad”: A Q&A With Mark Bray ]
I get the impression you're not very familiar with the Left, which may explain your response, but
The Nation and T
he New Republic are the two major left-of-center print journals -- we're not talking about
Revolutionary Worker here.
Now, what about the mainstream media? Same thing:
AntiFa is presented as idealistic militant young people, out to prevent fascists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, or -- that wonderfully broad and meaningless term --the 'far Right' -- from being able to organize. Maybe a bit too militant for PR purposes occasionally, but very definitely good people.
Here's the
New York Times and the
Washington Post, carressing AntiFa in interviews with their academic apologists:
The
New York Times:
[
What Is Antifa, the Movement Trump Wants to Declare a Terror Group? ]
[
‘Antifa’ Grows as Left-Wing Faction Set to, Literally, Fight the Far Right (Published 2017) ]
The
Washington Post:
[
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...11/527071ac-f37b-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story ]
And it's the same story on college campuses. Not as the rare, occasional isolated incident, but more and more common, from Stanford to Cornell: mobs howl down conservative speakers. No Free Speech here! (Do you want more links?)
Now look. All you have to say is, "Well, I'm a traditional liberal, and, like Peter Beinart writing in
The Atlantic, I utterly condemn such violence." [
A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury ]
That's an honorable position, and I'll happily join with you in applying the same criteria to my side: if liberals -- or any Leftists -- want to hold a public meeting, a march, a rally -- they must be allowed to do so, without interference. You can protest it, picket peacefully, leaflet -- go to the meeting and take part in the question-and-answer session after the speaker has spoken ... but no violence no disruption.
Deal?
Now, how about invading a seat of government and trying to shut it down? People who did this and engaged in violence did the wrong thing and will have to pay the penalty, whatever their motivations. We're playing by Big Boys Rules now.
But what if my guys had been peaceful? Suppose they had just 'occupied' Congress? Bringing in their sleeping bags and packed luches and iPhones, and settling down indefinitely? What would you say to that? (And for all the bloodthirsty far Lefties here, saying they should all be shot... would you favor shooting peaceful occupiers of government legislatures?
If not, what would you want done to them?