Any student of the 20th Century will see this as a 'bad thing.'

William McGurn writes:

The president is by no means alone. The mayor of Oakland, Calif., Jean Quan, issued words of support for the Occupy movement that sprang up outside her City Hall, claiming that sometimes "democracy is messy." Indeed it is: According to the San Francisco Chronicle, eyewitnesses claim her husband was among those who helped close the port down last week.


Ditto for Mayor Vincent Gray in the District of Columbia. On Friday a mob from Occupy DC attacked the Washington Convention Center where a conservative group was holding its meeting. The police did not protect them, and some who called for help claim 911 operators hung up. Earlier in the month, the D.C. government issued a press release boasting that "a fired-up Mayor Gray" had spoken in a freedom march that had "merged with separate demonstrations in support of DC voting rights and the Occupy Wall Street movement."

In short, instead of seeing "broken windows," too many of our urban leaders have persuaded themselves that the drugs, sexual assault and vandalism that have accompanied the Occupy movement are all "isolated incidents." In New York, Mayor Bloomberg says that he won't tolerate the kind of violence they had in Oakland. Of course, this is the same mayor who complains that the protesters have no right to erect tents when the whole of Zuccotti Park is blanketed with them.

Using mobs to attack other political parties is redolent of the tactics that destabilized Weimar Germany in the 1920s.