Memo to those who think they can simply rent their souls to the devil

Stacy McCain assesses the true state of play in modern American politics:

Anyone who thinks today’s Democrats are interested in “compromise” or “bipartisanship,” is a fool. You cannot negotiate with them. You cannot expect fairness from them. You can either defeat them, or else be subjected to their absolute authority.

Too true. There is a far greater tendency for Democrats to coalesce around a “message” – no matter how stupid, dangerous or mendacious – and to see it translated into policy by whatever means necessary, because their will to power, in the sense of wanting to control and expand government along statist lines, is more intense than that of most Republicans (at least, the non-establishment variety), and certainly than that of the majority of conservatives, who desire nothing so much as to be let alone, and to dwell happily within the “little platoons” described by Edmund Burke.

It is, however, the earnest desire of the Democratic Party to dissolve those little platoons and press their members into state (and party) –managed mass groups, to be kept in line with the carrot of government largesse, and the stick of the police, tax and regulatory power of the state. To the Democrats, this ideal requires the relinquishment of something they consider paltry and outdated, but that conservatives rightly view as the cornerstone of our nation’s reason for being – to wit, individual liberty. Given the single-minded zealotry with which the Democrats’ approach their self-imposed mission, aided and abetted in their grand scheme by their auxiliaries in the media, the unions and academe, and shamelessly schooled in the tactics of fraud, slander and incitement to violence, in most matters of significant import, compromise becomes quicksand and bipartisanship becomes betrayal. Let us remember that the handshake originated as a gesture to show that the hands bore no weapons – a ritual that should give us no particular assurance of safety in times when the weapons we ought most to fear take the form of pernicious ideas.