L'État, c'est moi (English:"I am the state") – attributed to King Louis XIV
Some Democrats are beginning to pin the Socialist tail on
the donkey. Democrat Party fixture James Carville has threatened to leave the party if it does not soon begin to
organize an effective resistance to a rampant socialism. “Hasan Piker and James Carville are
not going to be in the same political party,” Carville fumed recently. “One of
us is going to leave. It might even be me. If he becomes a voice in the
Democratic Party, I’m out. I have no intention of ever being in the same political
party with that guy.”
Democrat U.S. Senator John Fetterman, who appears
increasingly to be a party of one, has publicaly protested the American
Democratic Socialists (ADA) as a threat to democracy. The party’s official
manifesto warmly embraces such eventualities as open borders, the abolition of
the US Senate, the popular election of US Supreme Court Justices. One hopes,
perhaps in vain, that current Democrat U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris
Murphy might unite to resist a call to abolish the U.S. Senate.
Back recently from Croatia, once a part of the now liberated
ganglia of the Soviet Bloc, the Croats told Fetterman that implanting socialism
in the United States would be “the worst thing ever.” The Croats, who have a
still robust memory of being swallowed alive by Joseph Stalin’s ruthless Soviet
Union, were “mystified why America is having that conversation.” Nearly
everyone in the counties liberated from Stalin’s fatal embrace, including
Poland and Ukraine, routinely calls this ahistorical flirting with socialism
“civilizational suicide.” A recent Gallup poll disappointingly shows that 66%
of Democrats view socialism favorably.
Fetterman called this death-wish longing for socialism,
historically a precursor to communism, “an orgy of socialism” in his party.
And, of course, “alarmists” in the Republican Party have been warning for some
time that the party of Harry Truman, among the first Americans of note to
recognize the state of Israel, has become an “anti-Israeli” party, in
Fetterman’s view.
Opposite Fetterman on the ideological barricades stands
Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist spouting millionaire who apparently
believes that all millionaires – including himself? – are members of Oligarchy
Inc.
Most recently, Sanders championed the socialist candidacy of
Graham Platner, whose successful
attempt to deny a party primary endorsement to Democrat Janet Mills, the
governor of Maine since 2019, secured flashy headlines for Platner. In short
order, a woman alleging sexual improprieties stepped
forward, sinking his much heralded campaign. Platner, The Guardian noted on the eve of
Platner’s primary victory, “won 72% of the [Democrat primary] vote, defeating
state governor Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but remained on
the ballot, and third-placed David Costello, based on early results reported by
Reuters. His victory on Tuesday caps a remarkable rise for a candidate who has
never held elected office and whose campaign was shadowed by negative headlines
that might have ended a more conventional political career,” an indelicate
reference to the tattoo Platner wore over his heart, a symbol worn by Jew
killers in Nazi prisoner of war camps.
The national Democrat Party’s cautious, tremulous support of
Sanders, Platner and other prominent left-leaning, headline-grabbing socialists
such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a leading proponent of the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA) insurrection, very well may lead to defeats in the
general election. We do not know at this point whether the so called “energy” the
DSA has generated in primaries will carry over into the general elections. The
electoral base in a general election is much broader than the narrow base in
primaries. And the socialist insurrection so far, with some exceptions, has
purged the Democrat Party of moderates who cannot support the DSA Manifesto.
This is what we know: The DSA manifesto envisions the
abolition of the U.S. Senate and with its disappearance a redrafting of the
Constitutional Convention’s “Connecticut Compromise,” an ingenious measure that
permanently solved one of the most pressing problems confronting participants
in the convention: how to arrange a legislative body in such a way that larger
states could not execute a permanent veto over smaller states such as Rhode
Island.
The Connecticut Compromise or the Sherman Compromise, named
after Roger Sherman of Connecticut, defined the legislative structure and representation
each state would claim under the United States Constitution. Sherman proposed a
bicameral legislature: a U.S House of Representatives to assure proportional
representation in the House chamber; and equal representation in the Senate
chamber in which each state, regardless of its population, would be represented
by two senators.
The visionaries over at the DSA
also look forward to the popular election of Supreme Court Justices, which
undoubtedly would compromise the independence of the nation’s highest court, a
common feature of socialist tyrannies.
Does anyone in the U.S. Congress believe courts in communist Russia or
communist China operate independently of communist or fascist heads of state?
How should U.S. Senators react to a measure that would abolish U.S. Senators? Why
are Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators,
Blumenthal and Murphy, silent at the prospect of the dissolution of the U.S.
Senate?
There is a point at which constitutions so reformed are
constitutions denied.
The inner cynic of this political writer is shouting in my
ear – “Idiot! Why do you suppose that the aggrieved members of the DSA – and
leftist politicians who support them – are concerned seriously with
constitutionalism or good government? What they really want is anarchism,
because it is from social disorder and the evisceration of democratic norms
that fascism as defined by Benito Mussolini arises. Mussolini’s definition goes
like this: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above
the state.” And by “state” Mussolini meant Mussolini. This is a far left and
not a conservative credo.
Some historians contest whether the sentence quoted above, “which
does not appear in the registers of the parliament, was really said by Louis
XIV, especially since on his deathbed, Louis XIV pronounced an attested sentence,
seemingly contradictory: "I die, but the state will always remain."
But of course! Samuel Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell,
supplies a relevant attested quote: “Nothing concentrates one’s mind so much as
the realization that one is going to be hanged in the morning!” That
realization rarely occurs to immodest politicians or socialist revolutionaries.
In the not too distant future, senators who support
socialism or who are loftily indifferent to the real world consequences of
socialism should have a quiet conversation with their democratic
consciences and ask themselves: Does
the United States need a revolutionary overthrow of constitutional principles?
Shouldn’t we rather be insisting on a restoration of those principles – what
Abraham Lincoln called a “new birth of freedom” to insure “that government of
the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth?”
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