by Daniel Greenfield
The left’s endgame isn’t winning elections. It’s eliminating them.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
Democrats have lost the White House and Congress. Their statewide losses are catastrophic. But the institutional strength of the left has only grown stronger. Each Democrat defeat hollows out the party but increases the power and influence of the left to move the party in an undemocratic direction.
The defeats have elevated the roles of the left’s unelected power bases from the judiciary to the media to academia to the bureaucracy and the non-profit sector. These are the core of the “Resistance”. The mission of the “Resistance” is not to plan for a future democratic victory, but an undemocratic coup.
The Democrats had been radicalized into alienating their traditional working class constituencies. They had been seduced into believing that they could lose the heartland and still win elections. After pushing the party into a politically untenable extremism, the Democrats were convinced to abandon democracy.
Democratic elections had been the left’s greatest obstacle in its plot to take over the Democrat Party.
Elections meant moderation, triangulation and big tents. Those are all anathema to the left. As long as the Democrats had to compete in conservative districts, they wouldn’t be able to support terrorism, crime, total wealth redistribution, radical social policies and the rest of the left’s totalitarian program.
Losing the South was the best thing that ever happened to the left’s plans for the Democrat Party. And it has no intention of trying recapture it, or any other area, on any terms other than its own. It isn’t interested in winning elections. The left’s ideal political purity can only be achieved undemocratically. Politics is the art of compromise. Democracy requires listening to people. That’s not what the left does.
The less the Democrats listen to voters, the more influence the left has over their agenda, ideas and tactics. Instead of paying attention to democratic ‘market signals’ from the populace, they become an ideological echo chamber for the media, academia and the radical non-profits of the institutional left.
Fake polls and media spin is used to promise big wins. And when those wins don’t materialize, the left invents conspiracy theories that discredit the election and uses them as leverage to radicalize the Democrats even further by convincing them that they are entitled to overturn the election.
The left destroyed the Democrat Party. It tricked it into becoming unpopular, lied to it that it would win and then convinced it that it didn’t win because of foul play and should stage a presidential coup.
Each disastrous step seemed logical at the time. There was going to be a new majority. The Democrats had to get out front to create a new national reality. Reactionary voices in the party had to be ignored. The “youth” was where it was at. Immigrants were transforming America. All the polls were on their side. The only reason they could have possibly lost was the hackers and all the fake news.
And all the while the left was consciously making the Democrats untenable as a political party by cutting them off from their working class base and their geographic constituencies.
The Democrat Party is no longer a national party. It’s the political movement associated with small groups of elites out of a few dozen cities and associated suburbs. Its national presence outside these cities continues withering every year. Subtract the media, unions and billionaire backers and it’s just the Green Party with more of a history. If a radical leftist party were to gain more traction in the Bay Area, Chicago and New York, the Democrats could very easily vanish as thoroughly as the Federalists.
But the left’s endgame isn’t winning elections. It’s eliminating them.
Radicalization is the process by which everyone left of center comes around to realizing that the “system” with its multiple parties, compromises and votes allotted to everyone just doesn’t work.
The more elections the Democrats lose, the more they come around to that point of view.
After Hillary’s defeat, the media has abandoned the old liberal pretenses of objectivity and open dialogue. Instead it militantly advocates agendas. Its outlets openly abuse and insult opponents. The media shifted from bias to advocacy out of a conviction, occasionally stated in its own columns and editorials, that the public was too stupid to be influenced by mere bias. It had to have it spelled out for it that Trump is a liar. The media can no longer subtly influence. It must browbeat into compliance.
That is what a radicalized media looks like.
A radicalized media disregards truth, facts and objectivity. It only wants to win at any cost. It has no faith in the public. Instead it views the public with an anti-democratic contempt.
But the Democrats have adopted an anti-democratic tone that is suspicious of and hostile to the public. The various explanations for their defeat, big money, racism, fake news, coalesce around the general unfitness of the public. Even Obama’s old “messaging failure” explanation for his failures speaks to it.
Americans are too stupid, gullible, bigoted and ignorant to be able to vote.
As class warfare has given way to identity politics, popular representation had to make way for identity representation. The Democrats may no longer represent the South or the West, but they instead represent a plurality of racial and sexual identities. Their coalition of illegal alien gay Muslims has more democratic legitimacy than all the white voters who backed Trump.
That’s the underlying theme of the “Resistance”. Political legitimacy doesn’t come from elections, but from diversity. Diversity has failed to win elections, the way that it was supposed to. But it can always end them. Why bother representing people based around random geographical borders or whether they happen to have citizenship, when you can represent a plurality of identities?
And once you represent a plurality of oppressed peoples, why bother with elections? Elections only get in the way of achieving true representation through equality.
This is where the left always ends up sooner or later.
The Democrats have become just another totalitarian leftist cult. The trouble is that they’re not a handful of angry radicals in a Chicago basement. Delusional behavior like this might be amusing from a revolutionary cell of a handful of extremists who all teach sociology for a living. It’s a national crackup when a major political party descends into the same sort of dangerous lunacy on a national scale.
Overturning the results of a presidential election is only a start on the way to much worse things. The left is once again approaching Lenin’s old revolutionary formula of government as “a democracy for the exploited and a means of suppressing the exploiters” along with the “exclusion from democracy” of the exploiters. And, like every disastrous preceding step, it is beginning to seem logical to the Dems.
The Democrats have replaced real constituencies with ideological ones. The party heavily depends on bloc voting in areas where democracy is meaningless and political choice is non-existent. Every form of meritocracy has been replaced with quotas and affirmative action. If candidates qualify by quota, why not voters? That is the dangerous next step. It begins with “rebalancing” representation to favor the emerging new constituencies and ends by eliminating representation as anything more than a formality.
The left has led the donkey party to this poisonous swamp. The question is will the donkey drink?
Democrats have lost the White House and Congress. Their statewide losses are catastrophic. But the institutional strength of the left has only grown stronger. Each Democrat defeat hollows out the party but increases the power and influence of the left to move the party in an undemocratic direction.
The defeats have elevated the roles of the left’s unelected power bases from the judiciary to the media to academia to the bureaucracy and the non-profit sector. These are the core of the “Resistance”. The mission of the “Resistance” is not to plan for a future democratic victory, but an undemocratic coup.
The Democrats had been radicalized into alienating their traditional working class constituencies. They had been seduced into believing that they could lose the heartland and still win elections. After pushing the party into a politically untenable extremism, the Democrats were convinced to abandon democracy.
Democratic elections had been the left’s greatest obstacle in its plot to take over the Democrat Party.
Elections meant moderation, triangulation and big tents. Those are all anathema to the left. As long as the Democrats had to compete in conservative districts, they wouldn’t be able to support terrorism, crime, total wealth redistribution, radical social policies and the rest of the left’s totalitarian program.
Losing the South was the best thing that ever happened to the left’s plans for the Democrat Party. And it has no intention of trying recapture it, or any other area, on any terms other than its own. It isn’t interested in winning elections. The left’s ideal political purity can only be achieved undemocratically. Politics is the art of compromise. Democracy requires listening to people. That’s not what the left does.
The less the Democrats listen to voters, the more influence the left has over their agenda, ideas and tactics. Instead of paying attention to democratic ‘market signals’ from the populace, they become an ideological echo chamber for the media, academia and the radical non-profits of the institutional left.
Fake polls and media spin is used to promise big wins. And when those wins don’t materialize, the left invents conspiracy theories that discredit the election and uses them as leverage to radicalize the Democrats even further by convincing them that they are entitled to overturn the election.
The left destroyed the Democrat Party. It tricked it into becoming unpopular, lied to it that it would win and then convinced it that it didn’t win because of foul play and should stage a presidential coup.
Each disastrous step seemed logical at the time. There was going to be a new majority. The Democrats had to get out front to create a new national reality. Reactionary voices in the party had to be ignored. The “youth” was where it was at. Immigrants were transforming America. All the polls were on their side. The only reason they could have possibly lost was the hackers and all the fake news.
And all the while the left was consciously making the Democrats untenable as a political party by cutting them off from their working class base and their geographic constituencies.
The Democrat Party is no longer a national party. It’s the political movement associated with small groups of elites out of a few dozen cities and associated suburbs. Its national presence outside these cities continues withering every year. Subtract the media, unions and billionaire backers and it’s just the Green Party with more of a history. If a radical leftist party were to gain more traction in the Bay Area, Chicago and New York, the Democrats could very easily vanish as thoroughly as the Federalists.
But the left’s endgame isn’t winning elections. It’s eliminating them.
Radicalization is the process by which everyone left of center comes around to realizing that the “system” with its multiple parties, compromises and votes allotted to everyone just doesn’t work.
The more elections the Democrats lose, the more they come around to that point of view.
After Hillary’s defeat, the media has abandoned the old liberal pretenses of objectivity and open dialogue. Instead it militantly advocates agendas. Its outlets openly abuse and insult opponents. The media shifted from bias to advocacy out of a conviction, occasionally stated in its own columns and editorials, that the public was too stupid to be influenced by mere bias. It had to have it spelled out for it that Trump is a liar. The media can no longer subtly influence. It must browbeat into compliance.
That is what a radicalized media looks like.
A radicalized media disregards truth, facts and objectivity. It only wants to win at any cost. It has no faith in the public. Instead it views the public with an anti-democratic contempt.
But the Democrats have adopted an anti-democratic tone that is suspicious of and hostile to the public. The various explanations for their defeat, big money, racism, fake news, coalesce around the general unfitness of the public. Even Obama’s old “messaging failure” explanation for his failures speaks to it.
Americans are too stupid, gullible, bigoted and ignorant to be able to vote.
As class warfare has given way to identity politics, popular representation had to make way for identity representation. The Democrats may no longer represent the South or the West, but they instead represent a plurality of racial and sexual identities. Their coalition of illegal alien gay Muslims has more democratic legitimacy than all the white voters who backed Trump.
That’s the underlying theme of the “Resistance”. Political legitimacy doesn’t come from elections, but from diversity. Diversity has failed to win elections, the way that it was supposed to. But it can always end them. Why bother representing people based around random geographical borders or whether they happen to have citizenship, when you can represent a plurality of identities?
And once you represent a plurality of oppressed peoples, why bother with elections? Elections only get in the way of achieving true representation through equality.
This is where the left always ends up sooner or later.
The Democrats have become just another totalitarian leftist cult. The trouble is that they’re not a handful of angry radicals in a Chicago basement. Delusional behavior like this might be amusing from a revolutionary cell of a handful of extremists who all teach sociology for a living. It’s a national crackup when a major political party descends into the same sort of dangerous lunacy on a national scale.
Overturning the results of a presidential election is only a start on the way to much worse things. The left is once again approaching Lenin’s old revolutionary formula of government as “a democracy for the exploited and a means of suppressing the exploiters” along with the “exclusion from democracy” of the exploiters. And, like every disastrous preceding step, it is beginning to seem logical to the Dems.
The Democrats have replaced real constituencies with ideological ones. The party heavily depends on bloc voting in areas where democracy is meaningless and political choice is non-existent. Every form of meritocracy has been replaced with quotas and affirmative action. If candidates qualify by quota, why not voters? That is the dangerous next step. It begins with “rebalancing” representation to favor the emerging new constituencies and ends by eliminating representation as anything more than a formality.
The left has led the donkey party to this poisonous swamp. The question is will the donkey drink?
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267116/lefts-un-democratic-seduction-democrats-daniel-greenfield
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