Friends, my latest article discusses in stark terms just how close America came to forsaking pluralistic, multiparty democracy in 2020-22. It isn't because of the inveterate "fascism" of Donald Trump, either. It's because of the electoral success of Democrats, and the determination of Democrats to refashion the ground rules of democracy to their (permanent) advantage. The recently defeated election takeover bills were just one arrow in their quiver. So, yes, we've held the barbarians at the gates. That's the good news. The bad news is that they're still swarming the ramparts, and sooner or later they may well get the chance to wreck our democracy once and for all. Beating them decisively in 2022 and 2024 gives us our best, and possibly our only, hope of avoiding that miserable fate.
Read all about it at World Net Daily!
A Narrow Escape
Conservatives are celebrating the defeat of the Democrats' “voting rights” bills on Capitol Hill. They ought to, since these bills were a brazen attempt to federalize election administration, in clear violation of the Constitution, which gives power over elections to the states, and they would have watered down election integrity safeguards to a level that most genuine democracies would find laughable – or alarming. We can thank our lucky stars that Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin stood up to a storm of abuse from members of their own party and did what they felt was right for our nation. As a result, the filibuster, and our electoral norms, live on, even if both grow more shopworn by the day.
Our celebration of this victory, however, should be tempered by a realization of how close we came to a mammoth defeat. Sinema and Manchin's votes were only determinative of the outcome because the Democrats failed to win an outright majority in the Senate in 2020. Instead, Democrats and Republicans both have 50 votes in the chamber.
Imagine instead that Democrats had “won” in 2020 by the sort of margins that they and pollsters expected. Imagine that the Democratic majority in the House had grown instead of shrinking to next to nothing. Imagine that the Democrats could command 53, or 54, or 55 votes in the Senate. These are not unreasonable suppositions, after all. As recently as 2009, the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate!
Had the Democrats won more robust majorities in both houses, it's a foregone conclusion that their election takeover bills would have passed – and, in fact, Democrats probably would have been emboldened to make them more ambitious, which is to say more imperious and dismissive of state authority. Only the Supreme Court would have stood between one political party and its complete domination of the rules of the game of American politics. We know that the Democrats would have rewritten those rules to make the detection and deterrence/punishment of election fraud and election law infractions virtually impossible – since, from their perspective, it's a racist myth that violations of election laws occur in the first place. Democrats would have ensured that everyone was registered to vote, and that every voter received a ballot in the mail regardless of whether they wanted one or not. And, undoubtedly, most of that veritable mountain of ballots would have found its way back to counting rooms in boards of election across the country, regardless of who filled them out, making it difficult, if not exactly impossible, for Democrats ever to lose an election again.
Had the Democrats possessed the safe majorities in the House and Senate that we talked about above, though, the transformative changes to our government would only have begun with election law reforms. Democrats want to add additional states to the Union – all of them, needless to say, reliably blue – giving them permanent, guaranteed control of the Senate. Democrats want to ramp up federal gun control laws, imperiling our Second Amendment rights. Democrats want to expand government intervention in health care to the point where the distinction between a public and private system – between socialized medicine and free market medical care – becomes largely academic. Democrats want to use the FCC, woke social media companies, and speech codes on college campuses to censor and silence conservatives. Democrats want to unseat members of the opposition party in the House and Senate and exclude them from running ever again in federal elections. Worst of all, Democrats in increasing numbers favor packing the Supreme Court to ensure that a majority of Justices will blindly support whatever further authoritarian measures progressives deem expedient. That would eliminate any check on the ability of Democrats and liberals to impose their will on the American people.
All of these horrors, which, in sum, really would amount to the extinguishing of American democracy, could easily have come to pass – if only Democrats had been a little more successful in the 2020 elections than they were. In other words, in 2020, we survived the effective end of competitive, multiparty, pluralistic democracy by the slimmest of margins...but not for the reason that the partisan January 6th Committee claims.
Conservatives should celebrate our historic victory over Democratic schemes to manipulate our elections, therefore. But we should also be thoroughly chastened and downright horrified by the fact that the opposing party has warmly embraced two very dangerous ideas: one, that the GOP has lost all legitimacy and is a racist, sexist, fascist cabal, “a dagger at the throat of America”; and, two, that the overturning of virtually any past democratic norm and/or constitutional principle is justified in order to prevent Republicans from retaking power.
It doesn't take a genius to intuit where such views can lead: to tyranny and oppression. And they will lead us there, and in record time, unless the Democratic Party is defeated in 2022 and 2024. With any luck, those defeats would force Democrats to rethink their extremism and their betrayal of American and Western political traditions, and to return to some version of democratic normalcy.
Think of it this way: just a few years ago, Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the courts, including the Supreme Court. Despite possessing that kind of sweeping power, they never seriously considered radically transforming the ground rules of our democracy. They supported the filibuster, even though it inconvenienced them, and they bowed respectfully to the edicts of the Supreme Court. They accepted, in short, that even a seeming monopoly over the levers of federal power does not convey unlimited authority or permanent dominion.
Now, a few years later, the Democrats show no such restraint. They are a party bent on entrenching itself in power and eliminating the opposing party as an effective political force.
That is why they must be beaten at all costs.
Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480/106.9.
https://www.wnd.com/2022/01/narrow-escape-senate-time/
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In other news, Virginia's new Governor is attempting to redefine "diversity, equity, and inclusion", and among the changes he hopes to make is deemphasizing race and replacing "equity" with "opportunity". This is a welcome change in tone, but one has to wonder whether any of the "diversity" professionals out there will take any notice.
New York City is turning its back on Teddy Roosevelt. No surprise there. The only question is when Franklin Delano will bite the dust too!
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/20/1074394869/roosevelt-statue-removed-natural-history-museum
Our old friend Robert Reich is in hot water because of his fierce rhetoric targeting Senator Kyrsten Sinema. Poor Bobby. I just hate to see such a nice guy besmirched...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/ex-labor-secretary-reich-sinema-filibuster
The lasest Trafalgar poll contains oodles of bad news for the Dems, including an almost 14-point deficit in terms of the generic ballot question. Ouch! Do I believe that margin will hold? Not a chance. Do I believe the Dems are in big, big trouble in 2022? You better believe it!
Finally, natural immunity against COVID has been deprecated by Democratic politicians and the scientific/medical experts alike, because, as you may have heard, nothing matters but those precious vaccinations. Well, now it appears that natural immunity is arguably superior to vaccination when it comes to battling the delta strain of COVID. My guess would be that omicron is even more vaccine-resistent. That doesn't make vaccines useless, of course, but it does limit their usefulness, and it makes our discrimination against COVID "survivors" positively absurd.
You keep referring to the opposition as "Democrats". Why? There might be a few real Democrats left, such as Manchin, but otherwise that party should really be called something else, with some profane suggestions which I will leave alone. What used to be the Democrats are now an assortment of Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists, ably assisted by a bunch of moral degenerates. That transition has been in progress now for 30 years, beginning with the Clinton presidency. If JFK or even LBJ returned today, they would not recognize the "Democrats" at all.
ReplyDeleteRay and Dr.Waddy from Jack: I agree that Democrat is a completely disingenuous name for a party the plainly demonstrated convictions and intentions of which are totalitarian. What then? The Boomers? After its the ingratitude and stupidity of too many in my generation which worked this appalling degradation on the Dems. How about the UnAmericans? Accurate! How about the Correct Party or the Justice Party? The counterintuitiveness of either might tickle the fancy of this party of dissemblers, prevaricators and would be dictators. My vote is for The Elect Party. That would confirm for the credulous their "devotion" to fair elections,and would emphasize their vision of themselves as a transcendent elite guaranteed by history to prevail and rule without opposition.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: This is a fine essay by you capturing the appalling truth of our close call with the totalitarians almost summiting the tipping point at which their imminent complete domination would be guaranteed! We may well receive exceedingly important decisions by a now lawful Scotus, on 2nd Amendment Rights and on the Rights of fetuses to enjoy life itself, which would give us so very much more motivation to follow up on our presently apparent advantage. We may have been presented with fortuitous circumstances, perhaps never to be repeated, to drive the totalitarian American far left into the fetid margins from which it emerged in the '60s!
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy from Jack: What an amusing contretemps is presented NYC by any anachronistic discreditation of TR it might venture! Why imagine legions of tree huggers, three inch fish defenders (at the cost, irrelevant to them, of thousands of politically disapproved jobs in logging etc.) advocates of depopulating NY's Adirondack Mountains (the nation's biggest park) in order to "preserve it" etc, etc, the foundation of the Environmental Totalitarian movement which would have us first, ritually apologize to surely benevolent Mother Nature by turning our living standard back to say, 700 AD ; imagine them streaming across the GW Bridge in vengeful defense of he who established so many national parks. I mean they are clothed in similarly leftist totalitarian cloth, yes, these environmental thugs and NYC. Oh the horrors of civil war!
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy from Jack: I might add: TR pioneered National Parks from a point of view far more tolerant and understanding of opposing interests than is that of today's environmental gang. Yes, he was the object of harrowing discreditation but unlike any of his denigrators , he had VERY FIRST hand experience, both of nature's wrath in the unforgiving West and of the nature of free enterprise and the well being it can generate. You are right, Doc Waddy, this counterintuitive attack on him may extend to his not radical enough for NYC, cousin. Let them further confirm their city as a silly oasis of leftist presumptuousness!
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy from Jack: I should have said instead of ". . . nature's wrath ,. . . nature's terrible beauty. . ." .
ReplyDeleteRay, I take your point. The Democratic Party is poorly named! We could have a competition to decide on their new name? I vote for "Asshat Party". "The Elect Party" isn't bad, Jack, but it smacks of religion, which every leftist hates. To make it more accurate, it would have to be "The Self-Elect Party". Self-election would also, of course, describe the party's philosophy on "voting rights"!
ReplyDeleteJack, it's sad, but unsurprising, that the father of our national parks should be spurned by the new-fangled, maniacally intolerant "progressives". They will get to a point when everyone who lived before the year 2000 will be automatically consigned to the dustbin of history. I mean, only the most modish of mindsets could possibly pass their smell test. Everyone else is...CANCELLED!!!
Dr. Waddy from Jack: I canot but believe the far left is loath to give up its beachhead in Va just yet. An historical analogy: the Continental Army drove the redcoats out of Boston, a remarkable feat! But they were confronted in the Spring of '76 with some several hundred British sail in NY harbor (what a harrowing sight that must of been)why, the courage of those willing to stand against the many thousands of redcoats that fleet bore! And the travails of the subsequent campaign? Indescribably trying! I think Gov. Youngkin should anticipate a vicious far leftist onslaught on his intentions and even his tenure. And it will be, perhaps, a decisive battle. The far left thinks it can "job" the real America. Here is a real test. Gov. Youngkin may value support from without his state. Why not? He is fighting our fight, on a perhaps definitive field. If the far left could capture the most loyal section of our country, the South ,(together with the mountain West), they would prevail nationally and God help us if they did. I'm confident Gov. Youngkin u understands this!
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy from Jack: What I am suggesting, then, to all: write to Gov.Youngkin! Handwritten letters are best but Email if you wish. His addresses are readily available on line. He is fighting our fight, after a courageous electoral campaign against presumptuous leftist invaders in his state. Kudos to him for his support of the real Va! He faces a certain leftist onslaught on him and his state for opposing the sanctimonious leftist intruders from NY, Md, DC, even Pa who sought to capture his proud state. They think if they did it once they can do it again. And so this takes on national importance. Let Gov. Youngkin exemplify a national thumb in the eye to the presumptuous, anti American, far leftist rump!
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: Because, after all, Va isn't the only place to have been arrogantly intruded upon by far leftists eager to take over. Oh I know Colorado has been grievously wounded thereby. These "touchy feelies" have few misgivings about their righteousness and no hesitance about forcing it on those who dare to question them. And I understand they have swarmed to almost every reach of the West except perhaps North Dakota. Its fine time to STAND against them, in every setting: in school boards, in town and city councils, on library boards (I am a retired librarian and I know my spineless profession is captured by the far left) and certainly in all local and state elections( why that nice Dem you know, will go state conventionsand support Pelosi and Schumer, thru your "representatives").
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: Imagine being a survivor of Mao's "Great Leap Forward" which starved many many millions in the late '50s. Ok now its the mid '60s and Chairman Mao's latest impulse, the Cultural Revolution, a fulfillment of Mao's unchallengeable wisdom, holding this time that permanent revolution is a salubrious thing for a country ( providing HE is sheltered from unforeseen consequences). What are you to do?. You have tried your best to go along but it is for nothing! Isthis lesson to gou unheeded by those of us yet free but facing the real prospect of domination by those for whom Mao is an exemplar!? Support those who know that such intentions and beliefs really do exist in our country and that they have every intention of taking over. Va. Gov. Youngkin is a soldier in our fight against this threat and we MUST back him!
ReplyDeleteQuite right: Youngkin can expect a full frontal assault on his governorship and himself in the years ahead!
ReplyDeleteExcellent point that we need to write letters of support and encouragement, just as much as we need to write letters of anger and outrage. Probably more so!
Jack, it may interest you to know that the theme of an American "Cultural Revolution" came up several times during last night's RT meeting!