What’s Left?

Sure, many in the media helped fuel Trump’s chances during the Republican primaries, handing him billions’ worth in air time and transparently soft coverage. The smirking confidence would dissipate into dread as Democrats grappled with the reality of Trump demolishing eight years of Democratic Party gains that had been built on executive fiat and little more.

There’s little doubt, as many commentators would warn, that Trump’s rise would forever transform the Republican Party. I argued the very same. Yet, in the end, no institution would be changed by Trump’s victory quite like the Democratic Party. From Day One of his administration, whether or not Trump was acting particularly Trumpy or merely advocating for conventional conservative policies such as tax cuts and border security, every response would be marked by hypermoralistic, hysterical, and apocalyptic rhetoric. Democrats would start conflating their anti-Trump policy preferences with the rule of law, with “democracy,” with decency, and with patriotism. Even more consequentially, they would usher in an unprecedented radicalizing of the Left.

Bonjour, everyone!

The first order of business, and liberals weren’t exactly tilling new ground here, was trying to delegitimize the president. Now, Democrats never really lose elections, do they? If it’s not gerrymandering, it’s “voter suppression”; if it’s not the faulty ballots, it’s the weather. This time, they went full scorched-earth.

During the final raucous presidential debate in October 2016, a defiant Trump warned he wouldn’t accept the results of the election if he felt it was “rigged” against him. Even hinting that elections could be manipulated, commentators had correctly noted, might erode public trust in the fairness and veracity of the system. The New York Times alleged that Trump had “cast doubt on American democracy” itself. Clinton snapped that she found it “horrifying” and “denigrating” to the system. Trump was “talking down our democracy.” An entire panic-stricken news cycle focused on the disarray America would fall into if the losing candidate wouldn’t accept the peaceful transfer of power.

The warnings weren’t wrong, exactly. But it turned out to be the Left who would make the case that the election had been manipulated. Many once-serious people convinced themselves that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s second-rate, flailing former superpower could hijack American democracy through hacked Democratic National Committee emails and a few hundred thousand dollars of social media ads.

“Did the combination of Russian and FBI intervention swing the election?” asked Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. “Yes,” as a matter of fact, they did, was the answer from nearly every liberal pundit. The self-proclaimed sentinels of democracy, who had by now dropped their veneer of impartiality, would buttress these theories by churning out spine-tingling fan fiction for the #Resistance. It shouldn’t have been surprising, then, that a YouGov poll found that 67 percent of Democrats believed it is “definitely true” or “probably true” that “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected.” Despite the perpetual stream of pieces about troll farms, master spies, and Twitter bots, there was exactly zero evidence a single voter changed their mind because of a social media interaction, much less had their vote changed for them by a foreign power.

Yet, even more damaging than the Russia scare were the cynical attacks on the American institutions Democrats told us they were trying to rescue.

Even though, for instance, Trump had won the presidential election in the exact same way every other president in the history of the United States had won their elections, it soon became a matter of faith among liberals that the system itself was prejudiced. Long-held ideals about diffused power and individual rights had been deemed an archaic infringement on “democracy.” The nonexistent “popular vote” would become the paragon of fairness, incessantly mentioned by political observers.

Now, in some sense, Democrats were correct. The founders had indeed rigged the election to stop hyperdemocratic candidates that primarily appealed to large population areas from holding centralized power and then lording over smaller communities. The problem was that the Electoral College had worked, impelling presidential candidates to consider all Americans in their campaigns. Even, if you can believe it, those who lived in Wisconsin.

This time, though, those slack-jawed yokels with their boondock values had gone too far. Like any institution that happened to help Trump, the Electoral College was soon deemed an “instrument of white supremacy — and sexism,” as one Slate writer put it. And why not? A New York Times op-ed declared the Electoral College to be not merely antiquated, but “the greatest threat to our democracy.” Eric Holder, once the nation’s top law enforcement officer, pledged to work toward a “real democracy.”

Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College in the House, but since altering the founding document was a (deliberately) exhausting process, progressive activists had to come up with a better way. States would instead join a compact and award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, circumventing the constitution to, in effect, allow New York and California to run the country — because, apparently, those states were doing a bang-up job at home.

It’s doubtful the founders had ever imagined small states would voluntarily surrender their proportional representation. And if they wanted to, there was a process in place to achieve this goal. But Trump’s victory had driven partisans like Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to chose cynical political consideration over the Constitution.

From now on, the legitimacy of any legal procedure would be solely dependent on outcomes rather than the neutral principles that had girded 200-plus years of political life. The same Democrats who wanted to “fix” the Electoral College wanted to “fix” the Senate and “fix” the Supreme Court. The existence of states had become superfluous now that majoritarianism would produce better results.

Why, for example, should Wyoming, with a piddling population of fewer than 600,000, have the same number of senators as California, with a population of more than 38 million enlightened people? This wasn’t a question posed by kids attending their seventh grade civics class, but by progressive writers across the Internet. “The Senate is undemocratic and it matters,” explained Vox, a publication that has yet to meet a constitutional norm that didn’t need renovating. “Senators for Kavanaugh Represented 44 Percent of U.S.,” the Atlantic complained during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

“Small states,” a CNN piece pointed out, “are getting a much bigger say in who gets on Supreme Court.” Of course, this was plainly untrue. Small states got the same exact say as large states. That was the point. When these duly elected senators began confirming Trump’s originalist justices — justices that would almost surely inhibit abuses of the executive branch, by the way — liberal thinkers became gripped by the supposed “legitimacy crisis” at the Supreme Court. Intellectuals concocted ways to dilute the court. Harvard’s Ian Samuels, for example, proposed that the next Democrat president promise to add six justices to neutralize the power of originalists and create a progressive court. The idea quickly gained popularity. Although the Constitution doesn’t stipulate the number of justices needed, adding more Democrats could create a progressive court — and, if not, they would spark an arms race with Republicans. Both would render the Supreme Court irrelevant.

And the Constitution, which Trump had more or less followed as well as his predecessors, had become quite the irritation. A flood of new, aggressive anti-Trumpers would march with resistance straight into Washington. And with them came a raft of half-baked, collegiate Marxist notions. A national party that once moderated its positions on markets, guns, abortion, and a slew of other social and economic issues to appeal to the American heartland had been freed by the Trump presidency to normalize every quasisocialist hobbyhorse they could find. From failed policies such as rent control to confiscatory taxes to nationalization of entire sectors of the economy to demonizing entire classes of people, there was something for every aggrieved victim.

Democrats would support nationalizing everything from universal paid family leave to the job-killing $15 minimum wage, which the National Federation of Independent Business warns would cost 119,000 jobs and $89 billion in lost economic output. They would promise “free” college tuition and college debt forgiveness for around 44 million borrowers. Some, such as Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, would support reparations to the descendants of slaves.

Democrats promised “free” healthcare through Medicare For All. A party that not long ago assured voters that their insurance plans were safe now openly campaigned on the promise of ending private insurance and throwing everyone into a centralized government bureaucracy. “Let’s eliminate all of that,” Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “Let’s move on.”

Warren’s confiscatory “wealth tax,” could necessitate Americans being forced to liquidate assets since it’s based on accumulated wealth, was cheered by the Left. As was the 70 percent top income tax bracket for the wealthy.

Now, it would be unfair to accuse Democrats of wanting to control the means of production. At this point they’ve only proposed that the state run the healthcare, energy, and education sectors. The Green New Deal, a brainchild of #Resistance favorite Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, would not only be the biggest effective tax hike ever instituted in the history of the world, but ridding America of 90 percent of its affordable, efficient, and predominant energy sources would necessitate a giant, coercive government project that would bring unprecedented intrusions into everyday life. Nearly every Democratic Party presidential hopeful supported the aims of that plan.

Those who lamented the rise of populism were busy racking up trillions of dollars in promised goodies. And when you live in a socialist fantasyland where “moral truths” trump facts, as Ocasio-Cortez argues, money was never an object. A low-ball estimate for “free” healthcare would cost taxpayers around $32 trillion over the first 10 years. “Free” college was estimated to come in around $75 billion per year, without taking into account the accelerating cost of tuition. As it stands, college loan forgiveness would cost around $1.5 trillion. The price tag on universal family leave would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Slavery reparation would cost Americans, even those whose ancestors never owned slaves or fought and died freeing them, around $10 trillion. The Green New Deal is estimated to cost in the vicinity of infinity.

A back-of-the-napkin cost estimate of the Democratic Party’s agenda equals Venezuela.

It wasn’t only economics. Democrats used their anti-Trumpism as a cover to adopt an array of once-unfathomable positions. Trump wants to take away your right to choose? Well, then Democrats will support the legalization of third-trimester abortions for virtually any reason until the moment of birth (and, if New York, Virginia, Vermont, Rhode Island, etc. get their way, even after birth). Every Democratic presidential hopeful opposed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which does precisely what its name suggests, and protects infants. What was once a procedure Democrats argued should be “safe, legal, and rare” had become “whenever, for whatever reason, and Trump is evil!”

While abortion remained a sacred constitutional right, all the others were up for debate. After the Democrats took back the House in 2018, resistance hero Rep. Eric Swalwell, allegedly in D.C. to stop Trump’s abuse of power, promised that the “new Congress is putting your right to be safe over any other rights.” Democrats took increasingly maximalist positions on the Second Amendment, creating neologisms like “assault weapons” to target, as it were, any gun they pleased. Crowds of anti-gun activists at CNN “town halls” cheered the idea of confiscating semi-automatic weapons, of which there are hundreds of millions in the United States.

Trump wants a border wall? Well, Democrats won’t just oppose his wall, they’ll oppose a border. The same walls that Democrats had voted for in the past, the same walls that divided most of California’s border with Mexico, were no longer merely expensive or unneeded, but “immoral,” according to Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California. Prospective 2020 candidate Beto O’Rourke says he would tear down the ones that already exist. Democratic New York Rep. Yvette Clarke stood in front of Department of Homeland Security headquarters and likened Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to the “Gestapo.”

Some Democrats were more charitable, but abolishing ICE would become a touchstone of Democratic Party politics. “Jesus Christ,” explained Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, “had to flee for his life with Mary and Joseph; thank God there wasn’t a wall that stopped him from seeking refuge in Egypt.”

Trump had allowed many on the Left to embrace an unhealthy moral superiority that was surely going to bleed into the real world. The president, we were told, was a threat to civil society. So the Left, which had always been prone to public protest, started publicly harassing politicians and their families. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (and his wife) would all be targets of this effort.

“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” California Rep. Maxine Waters, a fan favorite, instructed. “And if you see anybody from [Trump’s] Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” No one put up much of a fuss. Had conservatives been the ones chasing families of Democratic Party officials out of diners, one imagines the nation would have been plunged into national discussion on civility. As it was, when Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono was asked about the trend, she explained that this was the sort of things that happened when you embraced “white supremacy.”

Ah, “white supremacy.” The media would send hundreds of reporters to cover “alt-right” conventions with dozens of participants to create the impression that the German American Bund was back in town, carefully surveying the political landscape for any dog whistles. While reporters were deftly sniffing out dangerous factions such as Catholic teenagers, a contingent of bigots were gaining a foothold in the Democratic Party and in the Women’s March, a movement allegedly hatched to stop Trumpian bigotry. It’s true that the media didn’t ignore them for long. Anti-Semites like Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar would soon find themselves lionized on the covers of political, fashion, and music magazines.

Though Trump will one day leave Washington, the process-busting precedents Democrats have used to fight his presidency, the un-American concepts they adopted to regain power, and the radicals they’ve normalized to appease their activist wing will be with us for a long time. America needs to worry, because everything is not bon.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at the Federalist.