Democrats Are Not Going To Relinquish Power Peacefully

by JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

A political party convinced the country faces an existential crisis if its opponents win at the ballot box is a threat to democracy.
 
The 2022 election results aren’t that hard to predict. Republicans will win and they’ll win big. The only questions on that front are how large will GOP majorities be in the House and Senate, and how many governor’s mansions will the GOP control? Will the red wave be a tsunami or just a massive breaker?
 
Beyond the numbers game, the larger question looming over this midterm cycle is why, at a time when inflation and the economy are top concerns for the vast majority of Americans, did Democrats choose to run mostly on abortion extremism and hysterical fearmongering about “threats to democracy” — issues that appeal to a rather narrow, left-wing slice of the American electorate that already reliably votes Democratic?
 
Why didn’t Democrats at least pretend to care about ordinary things like the rising cost of groceries and gas, worsening crime in major cities, and a looming economic recession? It’s one thing for President Biden and Democratic Party leaders in Congress to refuse to address these things as a matter of policy. But it’s quite another thing to refuse even to acknowledge that these are real concerns for most Americans right now.
 
One would think that simply on the basis of crude self-interest — say, clinging to their razor-thin majority — they would muster the will to pretend to care and at least pledge to tackle these issues, even if they’re lying. But they could not even do that. Why?
 
The answer doesn’t bode well for the country. Yes, Republicans will carry the day, retire Nancy Pelosi, and shatter the career aspirations of an entire cohort of middle-aged Democrat politicians like Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams. But that’s only half the story, and maybe not the most important half.
 
Democrats’ inability to moderate even a little bit, their unwillingness to snap awake to reality and respond to voters with some measure of empathy, however small, is of course a consequence of the party’s capture by its radical left-wing base. (Henry Olsen had a good line related to this in The Washington Post recently: “[T]oday’s Democratic Party increasingly looks like the Depression-era Republican Party, which consisted of powerful elites who lost touch with the working-class majority.”)
 
The danger comes when Democrats refuse to accept that they have no mandate from the people to remain in power, and inevitably seek some other justification for clinging to it. For all their talk of “threats to democracy” from Republican “election deniers” — one of the most asinine political epithets of our era, by the way — it’s Democrats who pose the real threat. This cycle has made it clear that they are not trying to forge a majority coalition. Their appeal is exclusive to left-leaning, college-educated voters and the woke institutions and corporations these people now control. That might be a minority coalition, but it’s such a powerful one that it opens new possibilities to scheming Democrats: that there are other ways than winning elections to gain and retain power.
 
The mumblings of President Biden about “ending coal” and fossil fuels, saving democracy from insurrectionist election deniers, affirming the radical agenda of the transgender lobby, and championing abortion extremism are no accident, however confused the president might otherwise be about where he is and what’s going on. They are, in effect, signals to the elite power base in American society, and they are meant to convey reassurance: we’ve got your back, ordinary Americans be damned.
 
In the face of a massive electoral loss, then, do you really think a political party that has aligned itself with elite interests and woke morality, that controls the White House and the administrative bureaucracy, that is supported by corporate media and Big Tech (with the recent exception of Elon Musk’s Twitter) is going to simply relinquish that power? Hand it over to the very people it has been decrying as the destroyers of our democracy? Allow someone like Donald Trump ever to get near the White House again?
 
No, of course not. What Democrats did in the six months leading up to the 2020 election — not just the rioting and looting, but the rigging or “fortifying” of the election through lawsuits and coordinated online censorship — should be understood as a dry run. The Democrats will use every executive branch agency, every tool of law enforcement, every malign demonstration of force at their disposal to remain in power, or at least to deprive real power from Republicans.
 
Even before Trump won the 2016 election, we know the FBI began crafting an “insurance policy,” the Russia collusion hoax, in case he won. Recall, too, how every major Democrat denounced Trump as “illegitimate” after he won, how left-wing street thugs rioted in major cities, how elected Democrats managed to hobble Trump’s presidency through endless investigations and a frivolous impeachment. And above all, we saw how they were determined not to let the same thing happen in 2020. And it didn’t.
 
Keep that in mind as the midterm results roll in this week (and next). There’s a reason Democrats and the corporate media have been pushing hard the message that we won’t know the results of key races for days, maybe weeks.

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