The murderous violence that occurred in Charlottesville two weeks ago which killed one woman when a white supremacist rammed counter-protesters with his car has brought forth an outpouring of emotion. Among the most worrisome on the left is that which condones “punching Nazis,” and general use of violence against those on the far right.

I am somebody of a generally right-libertarian political bent who abhors any sort of political violence. I believe that the fundamental cornerstone of civil society is civilized debate, and that in promoting violence against their enemies, elements of the left have therefore given up on the notion of persuading the American people that their cause is the right one; the believe that force must be used to impose their will.

This reeks to me of a fundamentally authoritarian and indeed aristocratic mentality among these portions of the left. I cannot help but notice that a lot of these leftists are upper class suburbanites or urbanites who had, up until the election of Donald Trump, had never known an America where their ideological sect was not in power (the Bush II years would have been their childhood and as such they do not remember them well). Having spent the Obama years demonizing the right and making no effort to reach out to them, they are now lashing out, demanding the privilege of political dominance that they had during the previous administration. They do not see the need to persuade the American people; they believe they deserve to rule because they deserve to rule, and that it is not their job to ‘educate’ the people, not unlike the Divine Right of Kings centuries ago in Europe.

Now, they call for violence. Why? Because, fundamentally, they are trying to find a way to retain power whilst not having to think about the startling and terrifying fact that they do not have a mandate among the American people. In doing so, they adopt the banner of violence as well as that of a failed leftist militant movement in the Weimar Republic.

A good portion of my political beliefs were influenced by my mother’s experience as an immigrant to the United States; she is from the Philippines. She told me of how proud her home country is to have had what she claims to be the world’s first peaceful revolution, the People Power Revolution of 1986, in which the combined masses of the Philippines deposed the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. To top that off, they did it again in 2001, against the notoriously corrupt Joseph Estrada. Hence, when I see these upper class left wingers calling for violence against the far right, I can’t help but scoff at how much they have at their disposal. The People Power Revolution was in the eighties, without social media in a country without the mass media even of the extent of the US in that era. The Philippines is a poor country, with large parts of it lacking running water. And the notion that these people could overthrow a dictator without violence, and yet American leftists cannot counter a president without it, is to me ludicrous.

(Let it be known here that the gun confiscation during the Marcos regime also made me very pro-gun, and that I have no issue with defending oneself from right-wing violence should they strike first)

And then I look to the Autumn of Nations, the great revolutionary wave of 1989 that ended up bringing down Communism as a force on the world stage. There were only a few cases in Europe where the situation went violent, the worst being in Romania. It never ceases to awe me that the fall of one of the largest empires the world has ever seen, and a nuclear power at that, was deposed with minimal violence. It too was done without social media or indeed many of the accoutrements of the United States in the 2010s.

Therefore, as a second-generation immigrant from a third world country the calls to violence from segments of the left fall on deaf ears. They are upper-class ideologues trying to forcefully impose their will on the country at large, a country that does not want them in their current state. They have so many examples to go off of in different parts of the world, befitting their professed dedication to diversity, and yet they heed none of them. The leftist militants of the 1970s in both the United States and in Europe both failed miserably in affecting any sort of real change, and something similar nowadays it will do little better.