By Daniel Henninger

May 23, 2018 6:25 p.m. ET

525 COMMENTS

Starbucks has jumped the shark. To put that more precisely, American liberalism has jumped the shark.

In April two black men walked into a Starbucks in Philadelphia. They were there to use the bathroom, not to order anything Starbucks sold. They said they were on business. The manager said they wouldn’t leave.

The manager called the cops, someone posted a video of the two guys being arrested, and, needless to say, Starbucks instantaneously announced it would close its more than 8,000 U.S. stores May 29 so all of its employees could undergo sensitivity training.

With any luck, someone will post a video of that, too. We always thought Starbucks’ baristas were the coolest, most up-to-the-moment workers in America, but who knew?

There’s more, but we need to take a breather to get a grip on what’s happening here.

Howard Schultz wasn’t the founder of Starbucks. But he was the inventor of Starbucks.

A native New Yorker who migrated to Seattle in the 1980s, Howard Schultz saw earlier than most that liberal politics were moving away from their lunch-pail roots and becoming a lifestyle.

Liberalism was black coffee in a white ceramic mug. Progressivism would be drinking coffee through white foam in recyclable cardboard cups.

Mr. Schultz turned “latte” into a household word, at least in some circles. He made it possible for guys to say out loud, “I’d like a grande latte,” without getting beaten up by their pals.

Starbucks was so far ahead of the curve that at one point, in a stab at solving the national racial crisis that Black Lives Matter had elevated, it told its baristas to write “Race Together” on the sides of cups as they handed over customers’ morning injection of caffeine.

Then Philadelphia happened. Restaurants all over the U.S. now have signs on their doors: “Restrooms for patrons only.” But going into a Starbucks is, unavoidably, a kind of liberalish-prog exercise in political bonding.

Your $5 Caramel Cocoa Cluster Frappuccino is helping support the Sustainable Coffee Challenge to ensure ethically sourced coffee and fight climate change.

Well, as the saying goes: In for a nickel, in for a dime.

In the wake of the Philadelphia arrest video, Starbucks headquarters announced last weekend that anyone could use its restrooms without making a purchase.

Anyone?

Starbucks’s customers, not yet totally oblivious to the reality of daily life, tweeted instantly that this would turn many of the stores into homeless shelters and drug dens.

By Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Starbucks had issued a revision of its revision of the company’s barista-customer interface:

“Under the procedures for handling disruptive guests,” the Journal reported, “Starbucks said Monday, managers and baristas should first ask a fellow employee to verify that a certain behavior is disruptive and if it is, respectfully request that the customer stop. Other examples of disruptive behavior include talking too loudly, playing loud music and viewing inappropriate content. The company provided employees with examples of when they should call 911, which includes when a customer is using or selling drugs.”

Starbucks had arrived at the inevitable endpoint of its politicized retailing. On instinct, Starbucks decided it could also be a homeless shelter. But then the social-media monitors vetoed that. What the Starbucks crucible makes clear is . . . you can’t win.

No matter what you do to try to appease the progressive zeitgeist, it will always be wrong.

Progressive liberalism has become a political Bermuda Triangle, threatening to suck into oblivion anything that comes near it.

Ask any university president. The recently retired head of the University of Texas, William McRaven —the former Navy SEAL commander who planned the final assault on Osama bin Laden in Pakistan—calls being a university president “the toughest job in the nation.”

Ask Google, where employees at its California headquarters have subdivided themselves into political message groups such as “Militia at Google,” “Googlers for Animals” and “Sex Positive at Google.”

This week New York City’s uber-progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio, said the police should issue summonses rather than arrest people for smoking marijuana in public, which—hard to believe—is still illegal in the state. The city’s police, now in the same boat as the Starbucks baristas, say this would put them in the middle of a political morass.

This all sounds familiar. In 1993, New Yorkers thought their city had descended into social anarchy, and elected Rudy Giuliani mayor. Many of the New Yorkers who voted for Rudy cannot believe anyone in the U.S. voted for Donald Trump. They should re-examine their politics.

Since about the time Starbucks was born, progressives have been moralizing and politicizing everything—race, sex, gender, football, coffee. The result is chaos. And it isn’t popular. A Washington Post-Kaiser poll this week revealed that about 50% of people think today’s protesters are more extreme and violent than 50 years ago, in 1968.

Back then, in an iconic Jefferson Airplane song called “White Rabbit,” Grace Slick sang that “logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead.”

And when that happens, there are going to be political consequences.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3985359&forum_id=2#36118844)