modernheretic

How the Democrats’ War on Democracy Realigned the Nation

One aspect of the Democrats’ staggering losses in the 2024 election that has not been given enough attention is the Democrats’ actions in profoundly transforming many people’s relationship with government into an adversarial one. Younger generations had never experienced such directly adverse effects on their lives as a result of government interference until the Democrats’ actions this past decade. We did not live through wartime conscription, McCarthyism, internment camps, or state-sponsored segregation. Until recently, our relationship with the government was largely abstract and bureaucratic, limited mainly to voting, educational loans, licensing, and taxes. However, the Democrats’ actions over these last years revealed in a very concrete manner the harms inflicted by a heavy authoritarian hand, and this gave new urgency to the idea of limited government for younger generations.

The Democrats are trying to make sense of a country they believe is becoming more conservative, but the reality is that it is the Democratic party that has changed, not the voters. After the 2016 election, Democrats created a stifling and insular political environment in which people had to constantly self-censor to avoid accusations of ignorance, bigotry, conservatism, or, heaven forbid, Trump enthusiasm and to avoid being shunned as a wrongthinker. Many of us felt a Cultural Revolution was unfolding before our eyes, but we were powerless to stop it. The Democratic party became more autocratic and exclusionary, deriding and shunning anyone who did not fall in line and leaving its remaining supporters wallowing in a pool of increasingly deranged groupthink. The Democrats’ overt hostility toward dissension should have been the canary in the coalmine that the party was sliding into an anti-democratic, anti-pluralist autocracy.

Since 2016 progressive Silicon Valley demagogues have been censoring anyone on the wrong side of the Democratic orthodoxy, transforming our cultural landscape into an oppressively stifling atmosphere, the likes of which have not been observed since Joseph McCarthy’s persecutorial crusade. Suddenly Americans became intimately acquainted with the dangers of censorship as our daily lives became the battleground for the Democrats’ war on free speech. The politicians and content creators we follow were banned or censored. Showing complete disdain for the First Amendment, the Biden administration even publicly called for private citizens to be censored. We were restricted from sharing information that went against progressive viewpoints, and what information we could share was cloaked in politicized “fact check” warnings to scare people away from exploring dissentious opinions. Legitimate political expression was labeled as “hate speech,” which was then used as a pretext to censor expression progressives disagreed with. That censorship included banning disfavored affiliation groups and shutting down online commerce and crowdfunding campaigns. We learned to self-censor and speak in euphemistic codes to avoid censorship. Even when groups set up their own sites and apps to exercise their rights to free expression, the big tech companies used their threats of removal of website hosting and app store privileges to continue stifling dissent. News media companies like the New York Times followed suit, censoring quality comments from readers to give the false impression of a progressive majority on controversial issues. All the establishment digital media took on this mantle of censorship, leaving a vacuum filled with such ubiquitous and vacuous progressive sloganeering that one is left feeling like any genuine expression of thought will result in being carted off to a gulag.

The censorship trend bled offline, and beloved books and film were removed from media catalogues or bowdlerized to avoid offense to progressives while a burgeoning field of sensitivity readers emerged to ensure that future media would be homogeneously suitable for the progressive palate. Publishers and booksellers were pressured to refuse to sell supposedly hateful materials in an effort to stop consenting adults from accessing information that dissents from progressive views. Live events were also canceled or violently shut down by progressive protests, which these days are aimed at chilling the speech of private citizens rather than at objecting to government power. Students and faculty in academia were subjected to inquisitorial scrutiny and punishment for wrongthink, creating an academic culture in which, sadly, immense bravery is required to exercise independent thought. Scientists and doctors had to risk their careers to speak out against problematic progressive ideas. This overt censorship was supplemented by covert reinterpretations and revisions of civil rights laws that pushed employers and schools to enforce a progressive civility code on workers and students, making in-person interactions as sterile and inauthentic as online discourse as individuals were compelled to self-censor and adopt progressive communication norms.

Thus, the government, digital tech companies, news media organizations, and academic institutions formed a blue wall of censorship and propaganda that punitively discouraged questioning progressive ideology or sharing alternate perspectives. They turned our collective news media and academic journals into their personal soapboxes, ultimately sowing distrust in legacy media institutions as it became clear that progressives’ political agendas trumped objectivity and truth. They created a cultural smog of propaganda so thick and intractable that we no longer have universally trusted sources of information, and we lack a shared record of fact, which is a requisite for healthy political discourse in a democracy. Democrats’ actions in exercising tight control over speech and media narratives have severely impaired our ability to have a well-functioning democracy.

In short, organic and thoughtful speech was supplanted by heavy-handed, divisive, progressive propaganda meant to disorient us and convince us that the opposite of what we believe is true. In the Democrats’ insistence that human avoidance can be communal, it is anti-scientific to ask questions, the desire for freedom is selfish, men can literally become women, access to information and free thought are dangerous, populism is authoritarianism, democracy is fascism, and illiberalism is liberalism, one almost hears the Orwellian echoes of the slogans “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength.”

This societal slide toward 1984 has, unsurprisingly, not been a positive change in our lives. People are sick of the paternalistic worldview that suggests that progressives should get to decide for everyone else how we can express ourselves and what media we can consume. In engaging in rampant censorship for their own political gain, progressives made Americans’ daily lives toxic and unpleasant and converted our cultural landscape into a sterile, homogenous echo chamber. Yet, in all their post-election soul-searching, Democrats have yet to acknowledge Americans’ dissatisfaction with their censorial tendencies.

Further, the Democrats knowingly inflicted significant economic harm on millions of Americans with their myopic and callous lockdown policies, and to date they have not been held accountable for the damage they caused, including robbing us of the income needed to pay for food, shelter, and all the other expenses of living; disproportionately burdening working class families; the destruction of small, local businesses; rampant inflation; and increased evictions and foreclosures. The Democrats were dismissive of concerns about these harms, calling the people’s financial concerns selfish and refusing to consider less destructive policy alternatives. Democrats cavalierly proposed that the government could subsidize a large portion of the artificially stalled economy, showing their complete and utter disregard for fiscal responsibility and, therefore, for the economic realities of the working classes. We are now paying in perpetuity for the Democrats’ reckless lockdown policies in the form of inflated prices, declining purchasing power, and deflated savings, which make our lives more of a struggle.

Further, the Democrats’ hostile posture toward civil liberties profoundly tarnished the Democrats’ image for many of us who had been loyal voters. We are still traumatized by the nightmare treatment we endured from Democratic politicians. Overnight we were subjected to totalitarian regimes in which our freedom of movement, bodily autonomy, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, property rights, religious freedom, Due Process, democratic representation, and essential human rights were heavily curtailed or eliminated. We were subjected to an onslaught of daily, fearmongering propaganda from the Democratic establishment, much of which disseminated inaccurate information intended to keep people fearful and divided. When objections were raised about their policies, Democrats ridiculed the desire for “freedumbs.”

Though both Republican and Democratic governments instituted lockdown policies, Democrats did so in a manner that exhibited a bewildering hostility to people’s rights. They forced individuals to take an ineffective, experimental medical product against their will, and tried to destroy the lives of those of us who resisted by robbing us of income and segregating us from society. They exercised the kind of power over the minute details of our lives that we only associate with dictatorships and dystopian novels. They sneered at our assertions of medical and religious freedom. We were characterized as anti-science, right-wing conspiracy theorists, and we were constantly assailed by politicians, journalists, and our associates as dangerous enemies who deserved to die. We became the Emmanuel Goldsteins of Democrats’ new totalitarian social order. Their actions forced us into an antagonistic relationship with the government, their party, and the communities we lived in. Many of us fled as political refugees to friendlier Republican-led states. Democrats like to boast about being on the “right side of history,” but no government on the right side of history persecutes its citizens and forces them to flee in order to preserve their fundamental rights.

And throughout it all, we the people were effectively left without representation or recourse as our constitutional rights were stripped from us by political executives acting outside the scope of the legislative process. For years we suffered under dictatorial rule in Democratic-governed jurisdictions as emergency powers were abused. Not only did we have no representation under the emergency rule-making powers, but the Democrats colluded with their digital tech allies to stop us from organizing against their policies in violation of our First Amendment rights. Neither Democratic politicians nor the legacy media will question the Democrats’ abuses of emergency powers and violations of civil liberties during the lockdown years. The Democrats’ supporters and media lackeys consistently turn a blind eye to the numerous anti-democratic transgressions committed by the Democratic party. Yet Democrats have the audacity to claim that democracy is under threat by the legitimate election of our next president. It is democracy itself that Democrats seem to find troubling.

You can dismiss us, as Democrats routinely do, as a negligible minority. But the Democrats apply this same arrogant, domineering posture universally to numerous groups: rural Americans, white men, radical feminists, Americans without college degrees, free speech advocates, women who do not want to be housed with violent males in prisons, libertarians, parents who do not want their children to be irreversibly mutilated by medical professionals, citizens who have concerns about uncontrolled immigration, parents who want to express themselves at local school board meetings without being accused of domestic terrorism, Hasidic Jews who want to live their values, blacks who do not trust the medical establishment, gun rights advocates, scientists who are sick of seeing science abused and who are tired of being censored and punished for asking questions, black conservatives and independents who are sick of Democrats shaming them for their political independence, Israel supporters, health freedom advocates, Christians and Muslims who do not want their children to be indoctrinated into Democrats’ sexual ideology, military veterans who hold dear the freedoms they fought for, people who want to preserve female sport, individuals whose support of bodily autonomy is not limited to abortion, Amish dairy farmers, female students who do not want to share intimate spaces with male classmates, anyone who believes in material reality and who does not appreciate being told they have to sacrifice reality to avoid giving offense; women who are tired of their necessary safeguarding instincts against sexual predation and violence being dismissed and vilified as bigotry; and the list goes on.

When you start adding up all the negligible minority groups whose interests the Democrats routinely trample upon, you have a wide coalition of voters united by their sense of persecution by the Democrats. From this perspective, it is not such a mystery why the Democrats lost so starkly; they spent the past decade alienating everyone who disagrees with them in the slightest.

Democrats cannot seem to comprehend that the populace does not want to replace our pluralistic, democratic republic with a uniform totalitarian state governed by the Democrats. Given the Democrats’ demonstrated hostility to democracy, economic freedom, free speech, freedom of association, parental rights, religious freedom, and bodily autonomy, it is not clear what rights, if any, the Democrats think we citizens should be permitted to have aside from the right to abortion. Whatever flaws Trump exhibited as president, he never tried to exercise totalitarian control over our lives, rob us of our livelihoods, censor us, or impose his ideologies on us. But the Democrats’ actions this past decade have turned our lives into dystopian nightmares. Democrats wielded the power of government to inflict financial distress on citizens, accelerate inflation, strip away our businesses and jobs, censor speech, abridge religious liberty, intrude on private medical rights, infringe on civil liberties, and otherwise make our lives harder and more unpleasant. And when we objected to these actions, they disparaged us as stupid, hateful, and selfish.

In the aftermath of their recent governance, calls to shrink government and “drain the swamp” are infinitely more attractive because, for all Democrats’ talk about using government to lift people up, their actions demonstrated just how eager they are to use government power to tear people down.