Bruce Gilley, Portland State University Professor of Political Science and New College of Florida Presidential Scholar in Residence, asked an important question in his Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed:
What Do Democrats Mean by “Democracy?”
Then he answered his question:
What Democrats and leftist activists mean by a “transition to democracy” is a transition to permanent Democratic Party rule.
He’s right, except for one misconception: the Democratic Party no longer exists; it has been replaced by the Progressive-Democratic Party, whose adherents subscribe lock, stock, and barrel to the basic tenets of the founders of the modern Progressive movement. Those tenets are, first, the nationalization of our economy, from Teddy Roosevelt’s effort to nationalize one-sixth of our then national economy, our railroads, through Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to seize all of our factories east of the Mississippi to force them to produce what he wanted produced in the amounts and at the prices he wanted, to Harry Truman’s attempt to seize our iron industry because he didn’t like the way a strike was going, to Barack Obama’s successful nationalization of one-sixth of today’s economy, our health care provision and health care coverage industries.
The second Progressive tenet is the utter racism of the movement, from Wilson’s rank consideration of blacks to be intrinsically inferior and thus needing the “protections” of segregation, Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to integrate our military, through to today’s Party and Leftist supporters demand for special treatment of blacks and women, ostensibly to make up for past wrongs inflicted on them, but really an acting out of Party’s and Leftists’ belief that blacks and women are intrinsically incapable of competing in our economy without special treatment, and through also, to Party’s and Leftists’ identity politics which is overtly racist and sexist.
The third tenet is Party’s utter contempt for us average Americans, from Herb Croly’s bland statement that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat, to Progressive-Democrat politicians dismissing the Tea Party movement as Astroturfers and as just bitter Bible-toting and gun-clinging denizens of flyover country to be disregarded, to a Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate dismissing millions of us as irredeemable and deplorable, to a Progressive-Democratic Party President averring that 15% of us are just no good.
Thus: what the Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians mean by democracy is, indeed, straightforward: “We win elections and run the country our way.” This is empirically demonstrated over the last few years by Party routinely shutting down our government every time its politicians can’t get their way through elections or otherwise politically while being the minority party in the Senate.
Party politicians’ promise—not threat—to eliminate the Senate’s filibuster ranks right up there as concrete demonstration of their definition. They know full well, that eliminating the filibuster will destroy the republican democracy structure of our government and replace it with the tyranny of popular democracy, with them in charge. That destruction is not a bug in their ideology; it’s the end game.
