As we saw at the Democratic presidential debates last week, we can put to bed the notion that the Democratic Party isn’t radically left — almost to the point of being anti-American. They spent the two debates figuratively spitting on the Constitution by proposing radically socialist plans that they would intend to implement: From abolishing private health insurance in favor of a single-payer health insurance system, to confiscating guns from law-abiding owners, to decriminalizing illegal immigration and giving illegal aliens free health care on the back of the American taxpayer, to eliminating student debt by taxing and spending us into oblivion.
These are just a few examples. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Left has spent years running on these platitudes and others — such as abolishing ICE, abortion on-demand up until the point of birth, and indifference at best to anti-Semitism within its own ranks. The Left has embraced destroying the electoral college and much of the Bill of Rights.
The list of radical ideas can go on and on, but the common denominator is that the Left despises this country and its Founding-era creed. To them, our Founders were racist slaveholders. To them, we’ve colonized countries around the world. To them, our Constitution embraced the notion that women and minorities were second-class citizens at best, and embraced an institutionally racist electoral college in order to go around the popular will in electing the president.
As conservatives, we often laugh at the Left for constantly repeating these ridiculous ideas. We know that most of the United States, outside of certain metropolitan areas, doesn’t think this way. Most Americans are still patriotic and love this country. So we might be inclined to think that a Democratic Party positioning itself as hard as it can to the far left might be a gift to the Republican Party and the conservative cause. Presumably, we can be more confident that the Left will lose more elections by doing this.
But we shouldn’t be happy about this, even if it does help us in the short-term.
Why? Because eventually, as sad as it is, a Democrat may get elected president. The Democrats may take back the entire federal government, at some point. And because this party has purged anyone who considers himself not radically to the left, with even old-time classical liberals or fiscally responsible “Blue Dogs” now firmly relegated to the past, the idea of this political entity winning any elections is frightening, to say the least.
As a result, we ought to always have the mindset that every election is the most important in our lifetimes. We always have to be scared of the notion of a Democrat winning. Why? Because in this paradigm, we always have to be on defense from our country being, in the words of then-candidate Barack Obama, “fundamentally transformed.” And no matter who the Republicans pick as their nominee for any race, we almost always have to choose them. The binary choice dynamic of the presidential ballot box is increasingly all too real.
And it’s truly sad. As the Democratic Party keeps moving leftward with no signs of stopping, we will keep having this binary choice. We should not be happy that a leftist like Joe Biden looks like a moderate compared to the rest of the Democratic candidates.
However, at least the bright side is that we can still be confident that most of America will flat-out reject the Democratic Party until they understand that the country at-large dismisses their ideas. I don’t think Democrats will receive that message anytime soon, so at least we can hope to continue winning elections.