I have a lot of friends who are Democrats. A lot. Having spent my entire adult life in the entertainment industry and much of it living in Los Angeles, that is just a fact of life.
Back in olden times (the 1990s), the Democrat politicians in Washington seemed to be much like the people who elected them. They also went about business in a way that was rather normal, if not to my particular ideological liking. This was all due to the fact that the extreme progressive hippies hadn’t completed the takeover of the party that they had begun in the 1970s.
Patient lot, these hippies.
Now the fix is in and the Left-of-Castro wing of the Democratic party is fairly well in control and dystopia is upon us. The people who began their political lives by expressing an overwhelming hatred of all things government have done a 180 and now embrace the egregious use of the federal monster to the point it almost seems like a fetish. It’s sort of like the “no bigger smoking nag than an ex-smoker” thing in reverse.
With a stealth progressive in the White House the fully armed and operational battle government has been deployed for purely political reasons in ways that should give any regular citizen pause.
An unelected regulatory agency is actively engaged in dismantling an entire industry. The IRS has become not only an enforcer for the Obamacare monstrosity, it can also be used as an attack dog to go after political opponents, even though the higher-ups are working in unison to pretend that is not the case.
Now, the United States Patent Office is enforcing the arbitrary rules of the speech police, and that sickening end-around was celebrated by Democratic leadership.
Taken separately, each of these is disturbing. That each is coming hot on the heels of the other should be setting off the FreakOutOMeter on both sides of the aisle.
There are a variety ways that rank and file Democrats might be looking at what is going on. My somewhat educated guess is that they’re not aware that the people they are electing are flexing authoritarian muscles that could very easily be used against them.
There are a variety of reasons people vote for one of the Big Two in America. One is tradition. A lot of Americans vote the way their parents voted just because that’s the way it’s always been. Many of us who keep our noses to the political grindstone forget that not everyone in the country engages in a lot of political introspection.
Another consideration is that so many of us aren’t immediately aware of changes in the ethos of the governing elite who allegedly represent us. Republican voters rode the Reagan model out of the eighties and paid little attention to the fact that GOP legislators were morphing into big government fans in the nineties. By the time we noticed, George W. Bush was creating a brand new government agency to essentially be the most expensive redundancy in American history.
The Democrats who vote for Harry Reid probably think he is probably still all about fighting for the little guy. In their minds, he fights the Koch brothers because they are big, bad rich guys who do nothing but ruin the lives of people who aren’t rich. This sort of scheming is all rich guys do on their yachts, when they aren’t flinging empty bottles of champagne and underperforming staff overboard. They don’t know that Harry Reid hates the Koch brothers because they are two of only a handful of people who can still effectively fight his New World Order.
Regular Democrats still view the government as a benevolent agent of social good. That has always been a part of their worldview and, on the rarest of occasions, it has been true.
There is, however, a tale of two governments when dealing with your average Democrat on the street. The same people who want the government fully involved in our health care are horrified by the NSA spying on us. They never seem to grasp that it’s the same government. So they remain fans of the Good Government while dwelling in blissful ignorance about the fact that supporting that mostly fictional entity is acting as a steroidal growth drug for the authoritarian monster.
The IRS and Patent Office’s actions are unnerving. Both are involved in an unmitigated assault on the First Amendment. The former is trying to affect the transition to a one party state and the latter is enforcing capricious political correctness. Most Democrats I talk to view one as a silly misunderstanding and the other as “fighting racism”.
I will not weigh in on whether “Redskins” is racist or not. I do know, however, that the meanings of words take on different contexts in different eras and those changes are generally dealt with in an efficient fashion by society. Employing a supposedly ideology-free government agency to kneecap a business to comply with something that can’t be legally dealt with is enough to get George Orwell screaming, “Oh HELL no!” from his grave.
It is not the “what” but the “how” that should have every American worried.
How surreal has the government landscape become? While defending the agency, the IRS commissioner tried to comfort questioners about missing evidence with the idea that the NSA might have it.
“Hey kids, that spying you’re creeped out about sure comes in handy, doesn’t it?”
I get along with so many Democrats because I know there is a difference between real Americans and the Governing Class. At some point, it is imperative that we make one realize that they’re helping the other grow into something so unmanageable that we will all regret it.