ROGER KIMBALL: As Trump Builds, the Resistance Shouts ‘Destroy!’

It did not take long to destroy Venezuela. It will take many years, much heartache and suffering, and enormous resources to put it back together.

There is a lesson here for the loud and unseemly American Leftists and their unlikely brethren, the soi-disant “conservative” Never Trumpers, who are trampling on civility, rejecting the processes of democratic governance, and encouraging violence. “There’s a deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith observed to a disconsolate Brit during the American Revolution, especially a nation as prosperous and stable as the United States.

I think they’re living by Rhett Butler’s insight that there’s as much money to be made in tearing down a civilization as in building one up. Plus:

This article in the Daily Beast, like so many anti-Trump fusillades, cloaks itself in the mantle of “democracy.” But the dirty little secret of The Resistance is that what it is “resisting” are the results of a free, open, and democratic election. Donald Trump won in 2016. Hillary Clinton lost. That is the painful, indigestible, intolerable reality. The Resistance is therefore on the side of the enemies of democracy, and its never-ending cascade of calumnies about how Donald Trump is “dismantling democracy” is just a blind, what Freudians would call “projection” and Marxists “increasing the contradictions.” A more commonplace phrase is “arrant nonsense.” They don’t like the results of the election. That does nothing to invalidate it. They don’t like Trump’s pro-American, pro-growth policies: most people do.

My larger point, however, has to do with the baleful effects of the antinomian antics of the anti-Trump “Resistance.” Their histrionics take place against the background of, and with the tacit license of, a stable and forgiving social structure. But should the Resistance actually achieve the ends it pretends to want, that stability and largesse would vanish like dew off a morning rose.

The resistance is a tantrum of spoiled people and small minds.