Red Hen’s act of resistance may have unintended effect

In almost every opinion on the restaurant that famously refused to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders, there is a too-neat congruence between the moral argument and the meta-political argument. If you think it’s right and just and admirable to deprive a Trump administration mouthpiece of an evening out in polite society, you probably also think that this sort of direct action is the vital spark that the left needs to mobilize and defeat Trumpism outright.

On the other hand, if you think that the restaurant owner committed an obnoxious breach of the basic bipartisan civility that prevents our empire from becoming 1990s Yugoslavia, you probably think that what she did was basically an in-kind donation to the Trump re-election effort as well.

It should be possible, though, to mix and match — to feel a certain sympathy or admiration for the restaurateur’s non serviam, but also to believe that its wider application by the Resistance wouldn’t do anti-Trump forces any good.

To be clear, I don’t particularly want to live in a world of conservative and liberal restaurants, where I’m frog-marched out of my local artisanal coffee shop because the owner hates my column. But I do want to live in a country where people feel comfortable exercising moral convictions in the way they run their businesses — whether they’re Christian bakers and florists or the Red Hen’s progressive proprietor. And if I were making a list of Trump administration officials who deserve to feel the sting of public censure, the office of the press secretary is a reasonable place to start.

That’s because Sanders, while no doubt a good mother and kind person in the private aspects of her life, occupies a job that is inseparable from the aspect of the Trump presidency that even people who agree with some of his policymaking should find deplorable — the communicative aspect, the rhetorical aspect, the aspect that deals with public truth and falsehood.

Human psychology being what is, the experience of being shamed is likely to only strengthen Sanders’ commitment to her job. One can find the individual decision not to cook a meal for a Trumpista defensible or even admirable, but a general surge of activist harassment of Trump officials at restaurants or wherever is likely to only harden the president’s support.

In the civil rights era, the sites of protest — lunch counters, city buses — were carefully chosen to make segregation look at once evil and ridiculous, and the protests were calibrated to make it plain that the police officers and vigilantes enforcing the institution were the bad guys. The images on American television screens featured Southern Christian Leadership Conference activists sitting peacefully in lunch counters or facing down attack dogs — rather than turning Lurleen Wallace out of her favorite restaurant.

What this example implies for anti-Trump activists is not that they should abandon protest politics, but that they should do everything possible to keep those protests focused directly on the places where the administration’s policies look worst — meaning at this moment, obviously, the separation of children from their families along the border.

These efforts are not likely to be helped by set pieces staged far from the border in which Trump officials come off looking like the victims.