The People vs. the Democratic Leadership

Democratic congressmen, faced with mounting opposition from their constituents at the town hall meetings being held during the August recess, have taken to aping the tactics of the late Byzantine emperors by surrounding themselves with mercenaries, SEIU goons apparently being the bodyguards of choice. Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership has pulled out all of the stops in their campaign to ram socialized medicine down our throats, slandering the thousands of concerned citizens who are showing up at these meetings, comparing them to Nazis, calling them un-American, and attributing their numbers and their ire to astroturfing by “powerful special interests” (the whole time, engaging in relentless astroturfing of their own). One can easily imagine the outcry in the Press if George Bush, during his second term, had issued a call to members of veterans’ organizations to harass anti-war protestors at similar congressional town hall events (perhaps suggesting that they march, in military formation, into the meetings wearing full battle dress). The indifferent response in the MSM to the cowardly tactics of Democratic congressmen and the thuggishness of their union henchmen is, sadly, unsurprising.

But the thing that really does take my breath away – even more than the ham-fisted intimidation tactics which, after all, have been the mainstay of the Democratic tool-box for years – is the genuine, red-faced anger that the Democratic leadership is demonstrating toward ordinary citizens. I recall few, if any, instances in my lifetime in which the contempt of the Democratic oligarchs for the people has been so wantonly obvious, so carelessly displayed in all its polemical and ideological excess. The savagery of their verbal assaults upon anyone possessing the temerity to disagree with them has been a wonder to behold, and, perhaps ironically, gives the rest of us grounds for hope. The Democrats have made, I think, two fatal errors: they have come to believe their own mendacious propaganda, and they have grossly underestimated the intelligence, and the courage, of the American people.

And to those errors, I will add one more: in their zeal to impose legislation on the people in whirlwind fashion – thousand-page bills that no one person has read all the way through, amendments passed in the dead of night – the Democrats have effectively conceded the unpopularity of their vision of an even larger State, further empowered at the expense of individual liberty. This highly visible mockery of the deliberative process, in conjunction with an ideology that is, yes, un-American, reveals the desperation of leftist politicians in both houses of congress (and in the White House, too) as they sense their historical moment slipping away from them. They may still succeed in passing some watered-down version of a health care bill (and cap-and-trade, for that matter); however, I believe that the damage to the Democratic Party will be – already has been – substantial, and the erosion of the party’s credibility will offer conservatives at least a foothold in their effort to climb out of the pit into which they fell in the last election.

Perhaps the legacy of the Tea-Party movement ultimately will prove to be this: that the people, even in the absence of real leadership, paid attention when it was truly important for them to do so, and did exactly what they needed to do in order to make their voices heard, undaunted by the forces arrayed against them. Watch closely, because we could be looking at one of democracy’s finest moments.