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The Democratic Party is undergoing a frightening evolution. It has been years in the making but opponents of the party and impartial observers alike have not failed to notice it. Though they would never say it aloud, much of the party’s old guard must also be watching it unfold with more than a little trepidation. The process accelerated during the Obama years and now, in the nascent Trump era, it is nearing completion. It is, of course, the evolution from liberal and social democrat to full progressive-socialist. It is both the ugly death throes of a party without direction and the birth of an extreme leftist movement that tolerates no alternative world-view.
Conservatives and libertarians have known for a long time that Democrats have been moving in this direction. The old party, supported by liberals who were actually liberal, has been slowly consumed by the progressive movement for several decades. In the aftermath of the 2016 general election, however, the extremists taking the reigns of the Democratic Party have thrown off any pretense of moderation, willingness to engage in rational debate or ability to accept constitutional law and individual rights.
The Obama Doctrine of Controlling Opinion
The Antifa marches and college campus protests were the first signs that the American left had decided the time had come to show their true colors. Both featured open resistance to the concept – and First Amendment right – of free speech.
Former President Barack Obama was known for his dislike of the Constitution. Years before he reached the White House, he spoke candidly about the flaws he believed the document contained. In 2001, he discussed his views during an interview with Chicago Public Radio. He called the Constitution “a charter of negative liberties.” His view was that government should not be restrained by such a document. “[The Constitution] says what the states can’t do to you (and) what the federal government can’t do to you,” he said, “but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
Addressing an audience at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology recently, Obama made remarks in line with the left’s now open hostility to individual freedom. The speech was not for public consumption. In fact, M.I.T. expressly forbade attendees to record Obama’s remarks. A recording was, however, obtained by the libertarian site reason.com.
Discussing social media, the former president bemoaned the idea that “we now have entirely different realities that are being created with not just different opinions, but now different facts.” In translation, the problem is that the left’s reality, opinion and ‘facts’ are being challenged:
“And this isn’t just by the way Russian inspired bots and fake news. This is Fox News vs. The New York Times editorial page. If you look at these different sources of information, they do not describe the same thing. In some cases, they don’t even talk about the same thing. And so it is very difficult to figure out how democracy works over the long term in those circumstances.”
This, though, is what free speech is all about. Diversity of thought leads, inevitably, to polar opposite views of how society is and how it should be. Most media organizations, whether left- or right-leaning, will present the facts in a way that affirms their ideology and, at times, will distort or selectively edit those facts. The real problem is that too many people simply accept the versions of reality that align with their own beliefs, rather than studying diverse sources and searching out the original intelligence upon which those sources base their reports.
True Intentions Revealed
The rhetoric on social media has also hardened.Conservative Facebook and Twitter users face a daily barrage of threats and abuse for expressing any view that does not align with the now openly anti-white, anti-heterosexual, anti-liberty platform of the extreme left.
The most obvious indicationof this new gloves-off strategy adopted by the left came after the recent mass-casualty shooting at a Florida school. There was a time where most left-wingers would temper their anti-Second Amendment rhetoric with assurances that nobody wanted to take away everyone’s guns. They respected the Second Amendment, they would insist; they were simply calling for an ‘honest’ debate on the gun-culture that has been a part of life in America since the founding of the country. They were, they claimed, simply asking for “common sense” gun reform – preferring the word “reform” to “control,” because they understand that language is everything.
Since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the tone has changed. Far more voices on the left are openly voicing support for a ban on all firearms. In the social media world, many have even demanded confiscation of guns. They seem unable to understand that such a thing would be impossible to undertake since there is no-one willing to actually do the confiscating. Moreover, they seem not to care that any attempt to take privately owned guns by force would lead to massive bloodshed.
Democrats recently introduced a bill in the House of Representatives which they promoted as a ban on so-called ‘assault weapons.’ In reality, it would have effectively rendered the Second Amendment meaningless. The bill prohibits the sale, transfer, production, and importation of most firearms commonly sold today, including semi-automatic handguns.
The old Democratic Party is now on life support. Even respected stalwart Dianne Feinstein was unable to win the endorsement of California State Democrats. The left’s new platform is no longer being sugar-coated; it is open rage against American values, white Christians, almost anyone who identifies as a specific sex and, most certainly, anyone who wants to freely exercise their constitutional rights.
Will this extremist ideology, now openly flaunted, survive and grow to produce the horrific final result that every other extreme left-wing regime in the history of human civilization has produced? Sane people should hope that it will founder on the rocks of freedom and more traditional American values.
