It’s like watching a horror movie, really. Admittedly, one where you’re not really emotionally invested in who lives and who dies, but there’s still that sense of Yeah, don’t go into the cellar.  Yup, you went into the cellar. Fine, let’s get this over with. Here we go:

The next move after expressing anger in the street is often the hard part for new civil rights groups. Do they seek changes in the law? Push to elect sympathetic candidates? Focus on winning over those who aren’t yet on their side? Or pull back from the moment and get radical, pressing for wholesale social change?

In Ferguson, many of the more than a dozen organizations that formed in the tear-gas clouds of August fragmented over the course of the fall. Conflicts flared over organizers who spent much of their time honing their profile on Twitter and attending an endless series of conferences on activism. Members of some new groups grumbled about leaders who seemed more interested in scoring airtime with Don Lemon on CNN or winning donations from wealthy celebrities than about recruiting poor people to their cause.

So… business as usual, then, for Left-protest groups? The next step is where those in the leadership who display the right combination of ambition and bootlicking get to join the establishment (and burnish their fifteen minutes of streetcred for the rest of their lives), while the husks of the movements all get taken over by the blackshirts and used to advocate a permanent, violent Marxist ideology. So it has always been done, and so it will always be done to the Left. Establishment Democrats and the blackshirts are, in fact, pretty good at this entire symbiotic predator/scavenger relationship: and, of course, killing and gutting new Leftist protest groups as they appear are a great way to keep them from doing something truly subversive, like successfully primary Establishment Democrats and win elections.

Which is, by the way, a measure for success that many in the Activist Left hates. Mostly because they just can’t seem to, you know, succeed at it*. Hopefully, they won’t figure out why for a good, long time.

(via @gabrielmalor)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*I dunno. Go ask [mc_name name=’Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’C001046′ ] whether the Tea Party movement still has any teeth.  …And while I wrote that out kind of facetiously, the truth of it is that Cantor went from being maybe the next Speaker of the House to an embryonic lobbyist in a single night. That’s the kind of power that Lefty street-level operatives crave. And that’s precisely the kind of power that their masters – word choice deliberate – in the Democratic party so carefully deny them.