OP-ED: Will We The People Step Up?

✪ Ever since ancient Athens, every election in states where all citizens have the right to vote is a referendum on the question whether or not the masses have the capacity to govern themselves. Indeed, as one historian argued, political philosophy was invented 2400 years ago to demonstrate that the answer is “no.” 

Ordinary people without wealth, education, or “the splendor in the blood,” as Pindar called nobility, by nature are incapable of managing the state, which requires, to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson, the “hundred who are wise” to rule over the “thousands who are foolish.”

The upcoming midterm elections will similarly be a test of this ancient question, perhaps the most consequential since World War II. For at stake may be the survival of our Constitutional order and its protection of our unalienable rights and political freedom, which have been under assault for a century now.

The stakes of this election have been raised by the excesses of the wide leftward swing of the Democrats away from the Constitution’s divided powers, jeopardizing the autonomy of civil society, individual rights, fiscal sanity, and reality itself. Indeed, so egregious and just plain lunatic are some of the policies and ideas promoted by the Dems, that their party should not just lose control of Congress, but see its leftward drift definitively repudiated.

Most of us can catalogue the manifest failures of this administration and Congress. Trillions of dollars in fiat money––like this summer’s $740 billion so-called Inflation Reduction Act, part of the $4 trillion Biden has blown in just two years––are the accelerant of the current inflation bonfire, the worst in 40 years.

This damage, moreover, is the result of transparently stupid policies. One key indicator of economic health is cheap energy, but it has skyrocketed in large part because of the suicidal war against domestic oil and natural gas production that just two years ago had made the U.S. a net exporter of energy.

Now the administration is driving investment money away from fossil-fuel development to expensive, unreliable “green energy,” a classic example of feckless big-government interference wreaking fiscal havoc in the market. As a result, the president has humiliated our country by unsuccessfully begging the Saudis to increase oil production, to which they responded by reducing it by two million barrels a day.

We’ve had problems with high oil prices in the past, but they were the result of global events mostly beyond our control, like the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo, which doubled, and then quadrupled the price of a barrel of oil. Today’s crisis, however, is owned by the Biden Administration, blue-state “green” zealots, and a Democrat Congress chasing “green energy” unicorns while lining the pockets of “green” political clients and donors. Given the vital role of energy costs in every sector of the economy, it’s no surprise that Bloomberg Economics has forecast a 100% chance of a recession in the coming year.

The next willful failure is the rise in violent crime, which has skyrocketed in nearly every category, particularly in Democrat-run cities and states. We’ve seen in the past even higher rates of crime, especially murder, during the Death Wish and Taxi Driver years in New York City.

What makes the current carnage politically more toxic is that it follows incredibly irrational Democrat policies like eliminating cash bail, following catch-and-release protocols, emptying prisons of violent felons, hiring politicized prosecutors who refuse to prosecute, and defunding police departments––all while January 6 protestors, most charged with a misdemeanor, have been incarcerated nearly two years, and heavily armed FBI agents are arresting pro-life activists  while ignoring the fire-bombing of pro-life counseling centers.

Those crazy anti-police policies, however, serve a partisan leftist purpose: to legitimize for Dems a dangerous assault on police officers, leading to low morale, early retirements, understaffed police departments, and an understandable reluctance to risk their careers and lives by doing their jobs, which could lead to criminal prosecution. This is what happens when, as Kipling said, you keep “makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep.”

Common sense tells us that if you have fewer police on the streets, you get more crime. But today’s criminals are displaying a level of psychopathic sadism and random mayhem I don’t think we’ve seen before in such numbers––sucker-punching elderly people, flash-mobs brazenly looting and vandalizing stores, psychos pushing innocent subway riders onto the tracks in front of on-coming trains, and thugs randomly shooting innocent strangers.

Another perennial issue that is troubling voters is the security of our southern border, and our broken immigration policies. Illegal entries have reached 2.9 million in just two years of the Biden administration (not counting the unknown number who crossed undetected), tripling the number during Trump’s last year.

The fallout from this deluge has gotten so bad that Democrats who once incessantly virtue-signaled about their “sanctuary” cities, are scrambling to accommodate and remove illegal aliens who’ve been shipped to their communities––all the while whining about the cost and disorder that citizens in our southern border-towns and cities have been living with for years because of open-border policies these same blue-state mayors and governors have supported for decades. And let’s not forget that among these unvetted, illegal border-crossers is an unknown number of terrorists, drug dealers, and human traffickers.

What makes this failure particularly dangerous is that it happened during the Covid pandemic. Very few of these millions were tested for the disease before they were packed off to cities and towns around the country––at the same time that citizens not at risk of serious sickness from the virus were compelled to get vaccines, practice social-distancing and self-quarantining, and wear useless masks if they were allowed to go to work and school, attend church, celebrate weddings, or just go out for dinner.

All these failures are particularly toxic for Dems because they are the consequences of reversing Donald Trump’s successful policies on the economy, energy, and border security. Perhaps this explains why all that Dems have to run on is mendacious “orange man bad” and “Ultra-Maga” clichés, along with the January 6 fabricated “insurrection” and ginned-up Republican “election denial” charge ––one that Kari Lake, candidate for governor in Arizona, lethally rebutted by reading off a list of serial Democrat election deniers that includes Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams.

Moreover, this election will take place during one of the most surreal and tyrannical leftist culture-wars since the Sixties. The recent Dobbs decision that overturned Roe and Casey and returned the issue of abortion policy to the states, has been hysterically distorted and demonized, as well as politically exploited to distract voters from the Dems’ manifest failures. But what’s uniquely creepy about this reaction is the brazen bragging of “pro-choice” activists about removing any time-limits on abortions, in effect legalizing infanticide. Ancient civilizations sacrificed their children to placate the gods; our modern “pro-choice” shamans are sacrificing them for the sake of convenience and political leverage.

And given all the serious problems voters are worried about, it’s another sign of the leftist Dems myopia that Biden’s handlers think caterwauling over Dobbs is the key to victory in November. Indeed, Biden has named abortion his top priority: “The first bill that I will send to the Congress will be to codify Roe v. Wade.” Recent polling of voters’ priorities  suggests it’s more likely that most would prefer controlling inflation and energy prices over legalizing infanticide.

Or they’re more concerned about stopping transgenderism zealots from poisoning and mutilating healthy children. The marketing and practice of sex-change treatments for normal boys and girls, even without their parents’ consent, is perhaps the most surreal and unscientific policy since “scientific” racists were forcibly sterilizing women for being abettors of “race suicide.” What makes transgenderism worse is the silly uproar over using “non-binary” pronouns, or the more dangerous school curricula exposing children to sex-identity issues that parents should handle at home.  But these nutty ideas are much less willfully destructive than subjecting prepubescent children to drag-queen extravaganzas and tutorials explaining various sex-acts––a patently illegal case of pedophilic sexual abuse.

What this election is about, then, is whether enough Americans still have the common sense and practical wisdom to hold the leftist Democrats accountable for these destructive and irrational policies, promulgated by our arrogant cognitive elites who scorn ordinary voters as “deplorables, smelly Wal-Mart shoppers, bitter clingers,” and “semi-fascists.”

So will we the people step up and throw these bums out? The upcoming midterm elections will be a test of this ancient – and vital – question. ✪