Democrats Have Become the Party of Authoritarianism. They Only Understand Power
BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | SEPTEMBER 27, 2023
Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/27/democrats-have-become-the-party-of-authoritarianism-they-only-understand-power/
JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON
VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON
Perhaps you saw the news last week that two women in their 70s, Jean Marshall and Joan Bell, are each facing up to 11 years in federal prison for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic in 2020. Federal prosecutors charged the pair for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which Biden’s Justice Department has been aggressively enforcing against pro-life activists, convicting 26 people last year alone.
You might have also seen, a few weeks earlier, that a 42-year-old North Dakota man who ran over and killed an 18-year-old kid for being a Republican was sentenced to just five years in prison on a manslaughter charge, and with credit for time already served on house arrest, will spend only about four years behind bars.
Seeing these two things, maybe you wondered how it could be that two grandmothers might well spend twice as many years in prison for the nonviolent offence of sitting in front of an abortion clinic as a man who intentionally killed another man for his political beliefs. Maybe you thought, as @politicalmath put it on X (formerly Twitter), that the left needs “to start looking at this situation and admitting that this is not justice. They need to shake themselves awake and realize that their team is utilizing the justice system for political punishment and that this is destabilizing our entire culture.”
You might have thought the same thing recently about the Trump indictments. The hypocrisy is after all outrageous. Questioning an election is okay if Hillary Clinton and Democrats do it (as they did in 2016, 2004, and 2000) but it’s a “criminal conspiracy” if Trump and Republicans do it.
Or consider the draconian prison sentences for Jan. 6 rioters (22 years in one case) compared to the leniency shown to Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters, one of whom was sentenced to just 10 years despite setting a deadly fire in a Minneapolis pawn shop during the 2020 George Floyd riots — and this only after federal prosecutors invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and asked the judge to show leniency.
Or again consider the role of Biden’s Justice Department and FBI in protecting Hunter Biden and the president from congressional investigations that are, as of this writing, still uncovering damning evidence of corruption connected to Hunter’s overseas business schemes. Just this week we learned that two payments totaling more than a quarter-million dollars were wired to Hunter Biden from China, and the beneficiary address listed on the wires was Joe Biden’s home address in Delaware. (At the time the wires were sent, Hunter was living in California.)
Surely, you might be thinking, not even the most rabid partisans on the left can think that this is justice, or that this will end well for the country. Surely they see the danger of supporting a politicized federal law enforcement bureaucracy that criminalizes the opposition and uses the justice system as a weapon. Even if they don’t denounce it publicly, certainly they’re talking amongst themselves about how terrible this is and how to stop it. Right?
Wrong. To think this way is to misunderstand Democrats and the left completely. No, they’re not worried about any of this. No, they don’t want it to stop, they want it to continue and intensify. They don’t want justice, they want power.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Increasingly, Democrats will readily admit as much. For example, nearly half of them don’t believe in freedom of speech. A recent RealClear Opinion Research poll found that while solid majorities of Republicans (74 percent) and Independents (61 percent) believe speech should be legal “under any circumstances,” only 55 percent of Democrats agreed.
The same survey found that a third of Democrats think Americans “have too much freedom,” and a majority of them “approve of the government censoring social media content under the rubric of protecting national security.” Worse, about three-quarters of surveyed Democrats think the government has a responsibility to limit “hateful” posts on social media, and they are far more likely than Republicans or Independents to support censorship of political views.
That’s just one survey of course, but it captures a growing trend of authoritarianism on the left. We see it in polls, on college campuses and corporate boardrooms, on social media, and in how the left wields the power of the institutions it has captured, like the FBI and DOJ.
When you see these glaring disparities in how opponents of the Biden regime are treated by the Justice Department and the courts, when you see how corporate media cover the Trump indictments versus how they refuse to cover the Biden corruption scandal, when you see them calling for government censorship of “misinformation” on social media, understand that they are never going to take a step back and consider whether all of this is justice or injustice.
Despite the outdated moniker of “social justice warrior,” leftist Democrats aren’t interested in real justice. They’re interested in gaining and using power. Once they have it, they’ll use it against their enemies. Appealing to their desire for civil comity is futile. They have no use for comity so long as they have power.
This is to say, they won’t stop this until what they are doing to their enemies is in turn done to them. You don’t like left-wing district attorneys indicting the Republican frontrunner ahead of election season? Better find some GOP state attorneys general to indict Hunter and Joe Biden.
You don’t like Attorney General Merrick Garland using the Justice Department to protect a corrupt Biden administration? Better impeach him along with Biden. Don’t like a woke U.S. military funding abortions and gender surgeries on the defense secretary’s say-so? Better do as Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has done and use all available leverage to stop them.
Power is the only language the left understands. So, if Americans on the right want to be anything more than a managed opposition — and let’s be honest, plenty of elected Republicans are happy to be exactly that — they had better figure out how to wield the limited power they do have. And they had better hurry.
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