The Democratic revolution delusion

“Research shows that something like 8%, and maybe as many as 12%, of the American people now say that Joe Biden was illegitimate and that violence is an appropriate tool to remove him and restore Donald Trump,” Heilemann continued. “That’s somewhere between 20 million and 30 million people. That’s a mass movement in America in favor of political violence.”

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt is similarly alarmed. He warns that we are “in the midst of a radical shift away from the democratic rules and traditions that have guided the country for a very long time.”

Speaking of a “radical shift away from democratic norms,” the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank argues that since “the country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian regime,” journalists should stop being objective and become “partisans” for the Democratic Party.

Don’t think for a second that any of these warnings are limited to former President Donald Trump. Harvard government professor Theda Skocpol tells The New York Times that while “Trump plays a crucial threatening role … things have now moved to the point that many Republican Party officials and elected officeholders are self-starters. If Trump disappears or steps back, other Trumpists will step up. Many are already in power.”

So it doesn’t actually matter if Trump runs again in 2024 or not. The liberal press have decided that the entire Republican Party is so evil that any vote for any Republican is a vote to end democracy in America.

What delusional nonsense.

The Jan. 6 riot should not be minimized, but it should not be exaggerated either. More than 125 law enforcement officers were injured fighting with rioters that day. And the federal government has forcefully and appropriately responded by arresting more than 700 people. They are now being prosecuted by the Department of Justice.

If there actually was some larger plot to overthrow the government, the FBI would have found it by now. But there wasn’t.

Some states have changed their election laws, with some changes wiser than others. Arizona, for example, put its attorney general, currently a Republican, in charge of responding to election lawsuits instead of its secretary of state, a Democrat. This may be a petty partisan effort to cut a Democrat out of election litigation in the state, but ultimately, any lawsuit will be heard and decided by judges.

That is not a threat to the Constitution or the republic.

Other changes, such as those made in Georgia, are far more reasonable. Democrats’ completely disingenuous and hyperbolic reaction aside, Georgia extended early voting hours, established the use of drop boxes by statute, added a voter identification requirement for mail-in ballots, and decreased the number of days voters have to request a mail-in ballot. All of these are common-sense reforms that will make counting votes easier, and the window Georgia voters have to request mail-in ballots is still longer than it is in many Democratic-controlled states.

Voting in Georgia in 2022 will be easier than it was in 2018. Again, a threat to the republic this is not.

Trump’s continued inability to admit he lost the 2020 election is bad for the country. His efforts to settle petty grievances at the ballot box, by encouraging and endorsing former-Sen. David Purdue to run for governor, are also unhelpful both to Republicans and the country as a whole.

But pretending that America is locked in some existential battle for the continued existence of democracy is just completely delusional. Voters in Virginia rejected these fever dreams last month. And Democrats are in for a world of pain at the ballot box in 2022 if they think they can persuade anyone with this nonsense.