Democrats and Democracy

Stress tends to bring people’s true colors out, a truism observed by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Great Britain’s recent vote to leave the EU seems to have pushed many already strained by the current American Presidential election season past the point of masquerade. New heights of hysteria and even more dire predictions of global doom have been peppering the news in the last few days. While that shouldn’t surprise us, what might surprise us is the amount of noise regarding ignoring the referendum’s outcome, or scheduling a do-over vote with tougher requirements, or blocking the will of the people through obscure legal means. Or, in short, ignoring the voters.

Then again, that shouldn’t surprises us either, given that it’s coming from people who purport to represent the will of the masses but who secretly despise that will and use every means in their power to ignore it. And, yes, I’m referring to the members of today’s Left and Democratic Party.

Lets flash back to May, 2010, when New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman opined:

I have fantasized – don’t get me wrong – but that what if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions…

Friedman was lamenting the sordid state of politics, and in the fuller quote we see how his wrath is directed at Congress, money in politics, “cable television” (by which I surmise he means the Fox News talking heads), and the “digital lynch mobs” of the Internet (aka free speech and freedom of association). This was at a time when the Democratic Party was rather firmly in charge of things, with 59 seats in the Senate and a 255-177 majority in the House. In case you were unaware, Friedman is a major opinion maker on the Left. A perusal of his Wikipedia page shows more of the same, including a “golden straitjacket” curtailing of national economic sovereignty in favor of, presumably, a bunch of unelected Best-and-Brightest managing things for our own good. He has also opined before in admiration of China’s one-party rule and how it’s good for getting things done.

Next, consider the President’s (and the Left’s) response to the three national-level elections since then. The voters handed the House to the Republican Party in a rout, with the GOP winning 63 seats (a magnitude of victory not seen since the Depression), capturing 6 formerly Democratic Senate seats, and making massive gains in state legislatures. In 2012, Obama was re-elected, and his coattails gave his party minor gains in Congress, but the power mix didn’t change. That happened in 2014, when the GOP made big gains in the House, won a majority in the Senate, and expanded its dominance at the state level.

Obama had [declared]7], just three days into his presidency that:

Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.

He, of course, didn’t heed that observation after the three subsequent elections, choosing adversarialness over cooperation with a Congress that the voters robustly handed to the opposition party. The will of the people apparently matters only when it moves things in his direction, and his supporters have stood in full concurrence.

Fast forward to current times. Hillary Clinton’s elevation to the Democratic nomination for the presidential election has been a foregone conclusion almost since Day 1, thanks to the decidedly undemocratic “super delegates” that she had in her pocket. Tack onto that the recent reports that the Democratic National Committee actively worked to favor Clinton in the primary process, further stacking the deck against her challengers.

I’ve recently shared some observations and recounted some interactions I’ve had with others regarding the Brexit, and I mentioned encountering an opinion that the EU, with its unelected Brussels bureaucrats running everything, was better for the UK (and for the continent, more on that in a moment) than its sovereign government, elected by the people that it governs. There is a dusty old document called the Declaration of Independence that includes the observation:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That, apparently, doesn’t seem to mean much to my liberal acquaintances, who believed that the Brexit vote should be ignored rather than heeded. One took the reasoning down a (deliciously ironic) reductio-ad-absurdum path, a path that I saw echoed in rebuttal by former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. The dissolution of the EU, my acquaintance warned, would lead to another Continental war. Part of the raison d’etre for the EU, we are told, is as a bulwark against the nationalist elements that led to two world wars. The irony is, of course, that the heavy-handed imposition of multiculturalism as embodied by the special treatment of muslims and muslim immigrants has led to the rise of the sort of nationalism that the Left feels is the source of Europe’s past wars. In other words, they are inducing the very attitudes they claim they built the EU to dampen and circumvent. They’re also embracing the autocracy, authoritarianism and broad statism that gave us those wars.

Consider, next, another political hot topic of the day: gun control. The Left, eager to make political hay of the Orlando shooting, is demanding further restrictions on gun rights, and claiming that the majority of Americans stand in favor of more gun control. In other words, they’re claiming that it’s the will of the people. Funny thing to hear from folks who don’t give a flying patootie about that will when it works against them.

There’s one other tidbit regarding that last example: that America is not a democracy. She is a constitutional republic, where the will of the majority is tempered by limits on what that will is permitted to do and by protections for the minority. Thus, the principle of enumerated powers (i.e. here is what the government is allowed and supposed to do, it’s not allowed or supposed to what’s not listed). Thus, the [Bill of Rights], which not only enumerates rights that the government is debarred from infringing, but also reserves rights that weren’t enumerated and declares that the federal government is debarred from exercising powers not delegated to it.

Such condescending dismissal of the will of the voters is nothing new in politics, nor is it only the province of one party. Politicians throughout history make promises they don’t keep and act in ways that run contrary to the will of those who elected them. It is most evident, though, among those who lean statist, who believe that that government is best which governs most. The irony of members of the Democratic Party eschewing autocratic ignoring of the will of the people should not be overlooked.