Tectonic plates are shifting in the American polity. A new dynamic is emerging, and a big part of that new dynamic is a Democratic Party and a political left that is no longer concerned with persuasion or negotiation, no longer willing to chase after popular legitimacy or win over public opinion, but is so convinced in the righteousness and urgency of its cause that it believes it must resort to force.
I’m not just referring to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or the two assassination attempts against President Trump, or the weaponization of the federal government under Biden, or the ongoing Antifa riots in Portland, or the violent rhetoric embraced by the mainstream Democrats who still support Jay Jones for attorney general in Virginia even after he fantasized about killing Republican Todd Gilbert.
I don’t just mean that left-wing influencers like Hasan Piker and Destiny regularly call for violence against the right, or that media darlings like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein publicly muse about whether it would be better to negotiate with conservatives, lie to them, or force policies on them against their will.
And I’m not merely thinking of rogue federal judges, like the one who gave Nicholas Roske — who now identifies as a trans woman named “Sophie” — a light sentence for attempting to assassinate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, or the parade of liberal judges who have tried to shut down the Trump administration’s agenda through a deluge of nationwide injunctions and temporary restraining orders, many of which have been overturned by higher courts.
It’s all of these things, but it’s also the recent pattern of behavior by the Democratic Party establishment, which seems totally uninterested in winning anyone over or engaging in democratic politics at all.
Consider the government shutdown, now nearly two weeks old. Unless you consume some form of increasingly irrelevant corporate news product, where the shutdown is being covered merely as a means of attacking President Trump, you might not even know about it. In an earlier time — before Covid, before mass immigration, before the normalization of political assassinations and violent political rhetoric — a government shutdown would have dominated the news cycle and the broader discourse.
But they’ll keep on calling it “our democracy.”
As if they own the concept by co-opting the word.