When Democrats locked in control of both the White House and Congress by a razor-thin margin, attentive voters might have reasonably assumed that the party would govern safely. That is to say, in favor of the clear majority. But in Washington and major cities across the country, Democrats have trended toward doing the opposite, catering to a sliver of the population, frequently at the expense of the rest.
Look no further than the “defund the police” Democrats who, with alarming zeal, call for the reduction or elimination of law enforcement. Following the police shooting death of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, in early April, leading Democrats again called for not just reforms but the abolition of police.
“No more policing, incarceration, and militarization,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan said in a tweet. “It can’t be reformed.”
Her colleague Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said of the police, “From slave patrols to traffic stops. We can’t reform this.”
Even President Joe Biden flirted with this message during the campaign: Instead of out-and-out eliminating funding for local police departments, his proposal withheld federal money from them unless they met certain objectives, such as the requirement that police forces “mirror the racial diversity of the community they serve.” What if there aren’t enough black applicants for policing positions in black-majority neighborhoods? Under Biden’s plan, that department would then not receive the funding.
City councils across the United States have voted to cut millions of dollars from their police departments, even as the vast majority of the public does not support reducing funding for law enforcement. An Ipsos/USA TODAY survey published in March found that less than 20% of respondents supported the movement to “defund the police.” Among just Democrats, a minority of 34% supported the movement. Critically, black support for the movement was less than 30%.
But the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the activist class is the one making noise. It’s a distortion of representative government that Democrats are betting won’t cost them.
It’s the same bet they’re making elsewhere. Transgenderism, for example. Well below 1% of the U.S. population identifies as transgender, and yet the “Equality Act” passed by the Democratic-controlled House in March would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, thus giving transgender people the right to choose what gender-specific public and private facilities and services to use. Trans people are not currently denied access to these facilities and services, but they are generally required to use the ones that correspond to their biological sex. That includes restrooms, fitting rooms, locker rooms, and sports leagues.
The last of those is the most contentious. Congressional Republicans and conservatives say the Equality Act is a threat to women’s athletics. Most women seem to agree. The public is split on whether transgender people should be legally entitled to use the public restrooms of their choosing. When it comes to sports, however, the public is more opposed to allowing transgender athletes to choose whether to compete as women or men. Among women, one survey showed that only 36% agreed that biological males should be allowed to compete in women’s events.
But Biden’s administration shows no sense of proportion or restraint in the face of majority opposition. It is issuing orders that require doctors who accept Medicaid and Medicare to perform sex reassignment surgeries and prescribe hormone replacement drugs, even when the doctors object to those procedures on religious grounds.
Just days after his inauguration, Biden overturned an order from the previous administration that required men and women in the military to serve with other members of the same biological sex. Biden also ordered the Pentagon to pay for hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgeries for service members.
It’s not just at the federal level. Under Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, California enacted a law this year mandating that prisons house inmates according to their gender identities, meaning men who “identify” as female are entitled to be placed with women. The result has been a predictable disaster. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, there have been nearly 300 transfer requests from inmates claiming to be transgender. All but six of them have been from biological men wanting to move to facilities for women.
The women of those prisons were told by staff to expect sexual violence from the newcomers. One female inmate recalled being told by a member of the staff “that if we think it’s bad now, be prepared for the worst.”
Democrats governing against the interests and expressed wishes of the majority was also on glaring display during the pandemic. Through 2020, big-city liberal mayors and Democratic prosecutors across America took what might be reasonable action to conserve resources by relaxing enforcement against nonviolent crime, such as traffic violations and loitering. But the pendulum swung dramatically further, with some declining to prosecute property damage and theft from Black Lives Matter rioters during the summer and fall.
Chicago top prosecutor Kim Foxx lowered penalties for shoplifting and theft, even as her city was devastated for weeks by mass protests that often spiraled into widespread vandalism and destruction. Who are these policies for? Vandals make up a tiny minority of any city population, but Democrats grant them special status, under the apparent belief that they were actually victims. They treated criminals as the oppressed rather than what, in truth, they were — oppressors.
This seems to be a guiding principle among today’s Democrats — an overriding concern for anyone living outside of the popular mainstream, while the wishes of the majority come a distant second.
Homelessness has long been an inner-city issue, but Democratic mayors have massively exacerbated the problem by reducing capacity at shelters, citing the pandemic as the reason. The result has been an explosion of sprawling tent towns in Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, New York City, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
Public parks are now filthy with human waste, garbage, and discarded drug paraphernalia. Many sidewalks are no longer accessible, having been overrun by new inhabitants and their belongings, which often include old lawn chairs, grills, and portable toilets.
Parents who had once let their children play in the parks or walk alone to school no longer do. “I have to go right now and call the police because I saw a sword back there,” Seattle resident Ryle Goodrich told an ABC affiliate in April, referring to a homeless encampment near his son’s elementary school. “After that, I have to go and calm my child and convince myself and him that it’s OK to go back to school tomorrow.”
It all works to the detriment of the majority, while Democrats ask everyone to have a heart.
Throughout 2020 and into 2021, public schools K-12 became a battle between the majority (students) and the minority (teachers unions and the Democrats whose campaigns are supported by them). Around 60% of the public supports at least partial reopening of schools for “in-person” learning. But while teachers in places such as San Diego and Chicago professed a burning desire to return to school, the teachers unions produced a seemingly endless list of reasons why their members must not be put through the trouble of going to work, even when accommodations were made, such as reducing class sizes and reorganizing rooms to allow for more “social distancing.” Despite data showing that having students attend school does not result in significant transmission of the virus, some union heads even said vaccinations would not be enough to bring teachers back to the classroom.
That’s happening in Washington, where members of the Seattle Education Association voted for teachers to continue “remote learning,” even after the governor had prioritized vaccinations for teachers.
Biden backed these recalcitrants, with his administration refusing to offer a return date for teachers, even an aspirational one.
But if he didn’t want to help the great majority of children by getting them back to school, he sure didn’t want the pandemic to hurt the educational prospects of illegal immigrants. He gave special attention to the needs of illegal alien minors apprehended at the southern border. Unaccompanied minors and families were swiftly taken into U.S. custody, which came with Biden’s promises to provide them with healthcare, legal services, and education. School teachers in solid blue San Diego offered to teach unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors in person at migrant detention camps in the southwest, even as 130,000 children in San Diego were kept out of schools.
With unprecedented numbers of migrants making their way from Mexico and Central America to the southern border, hoping for a more “humane” acceptance under Biden, the administration did its best to make their entry comfortable. While the U.S. economy remained shaky, with millions unemployed and restrictions on travel and commerce still in place, the administration was spending upward of $100 million putting illegal border crossers up in hotel rooms in Texas and Arizona.
Compassion for the few is laudable, but turning everyone else into an afterthought isn’t. Yet that’s often a selling point for many of the Democrats’ biggest policy plans and efforts.
Biden’s $2 trillion “American Jobs Plan” dedicates enormous attention to promoting union jobs, while less than 11% of the labor force is unionized. “A free and fair choice to join a union” is repeated seven times in a White House “fact sheet” on the proposal, even though some 9 out of 10 workers choose not to belong to a union.
Of the nearly 20 million people in New York, an estimated 5% are illegal immigrants. The Democratic-controlled state Legislature, however, created a $2.1 billion COVID relief fund for direct payments of $15,600 sent exclusively to illegal immigrants.
Ingrained in the country’s fabric is the spirit of fairness and protection for the minority while advancing the collective wishes of the majority. The modern Democratic Party has turned that notion on its head. The interests of the few are of the utmost urgency, while the rest are asked to adjust to their new reality. With Democrats in power, special interests now appear to be the government’s only interests.
Eddie Scarry is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner, focusing on politics and culture. He is also the author of Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People.
