USA: One Party State Coming Up. By Daniel Greenfield.
Republicans want to hold the majority and co-exist with Democrats, while Democrats, under the influence of the Left, want to eliminate Republicans.
This fundamental difference between the two sides was on display during Biden’s fascist rant in Philadelphia where he denounced half the country as a threat to democracy.
And it would be a mistake to imagine that all the talk of a “threat to democracy” is mere rhetoric. …
Biden’s speech was the tip of a much more dangerous iceberg.
US constitution, 14th Amendment, section 3, was aimed at confederates after the civil war:
After Biden took over, Democrat activist groups began a push to disqualify Republicans who had participated in the Jan 6 protests from elected office based on the 14th Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War, it’s mostly notable for abolishing slavery. But Section 3 also banned anyone from holding elected office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Aimed at Confederates, most would have considered this a dead letter, but the Left excels at digging up obscure legal fossils and making use of them.
The insurrection lawsuits have targeted members of congress, Senator Ron Johnson and local officials. But by defining anyone who questioned the 2020 presidential election results as an “insurrectionist” or having provided “aid and comfort”, the scope could be vastly larger.
A New York Times article lists “147 Republicans who voted to overturn election results”. Lists like this are proliferating in time for the midterms and they are meant to be actionable.
The criminalization of the Republican Party achieved its first real win when a New Mexico judge removed Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin from office over his role in the Capitol riot using Section 3. …
Ban anyone who was “engaged in the insurrection”:
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which is a 501(c)(3) and is supposed to be non-partisan, was behind the successful New Mexico disqualification lawsuit
“Section 3 of the 14th Amendment can and should be used to bar anyone who engaged in the insurrection,” its leader argued.
How is “engaged” defined? In the case of Trump, there is the false insistence that he bears “responsibility” for violence during the Capitol riot even though he was opposed to it. The Constitutional Accountability Center quoted an opinion suggesting that anyone who engaged in any “overt act for the purpose of promoting the rebellion, may well be said . . . to have engaged in rebellion.” Both CAC and the CRS paper promotes the idea that the “expression of an opinion” is enough. …
The left means it, because it is one of their few means to retain power — and they are afraid of what will happen to them if the Republicans get back into power and start investigating the 2020 election:
Leftists didn’t oppose McCarthyism. They just wanted to be the ones dispensing it.
Beltway Republicans shrug at this sort of thing as posturing. They refuse to believe that this is a serious statement of intent. And even if it is, they privately argue, it won’t go past a few state officials, some fringe House members, or Trump at worst. They’re sleepwalking into disaster.
This particular bid to outlaw the Republican Party may go nowhere, but if so it won’t be because of Republican opposition. It will be because leftist groups decide to prioritize their resources on more immediate programs rather than launching a dramatic moonshot. But it remains part of the agenda. And Biden’s speech shows that the agenda is being entertained by the White House.
Framing the midterms and 2024 as all about Trump’s insurrection:
The midterm and the next presidential election are being defined not in terms of policies and issues, but as a response, in Biden’s words, to a “threat to this country” posed by a “Republican Party” that is “dominated” by “MAGA Republicans”. That’s rhetoric, but among Democrats, unlike Republicans, rhetoric is a political program, not just fundraising text messages.
Democrats and their allied non-profit groups have laid out a political program for reviving Section 3 to bar most Republicans from holding office. They have spent money on it, field tested it in courts, gotten Obama and Biden judges, along with prominent legal experts, to sign off on it, and only fools would assume that they don’t seriously mean it. Or that they just thought of it. …
The clue is in the left’s reaction to the anti-communism hysteria of the 1950s:
Conservatives missed the most important point about the Left’s hysteria over the fairly minor Cold War investigations of Communism or the Patriot Act’s light touch on Islamic terrorism.
How was it possible to seriously accuse mild-mannered men like Eisenhower or George W. Bush of being fascist dictators in complete contrast to their unambitious domestic programs?
The Left wasn’t making bad faith arguments. Talk to a leftist and you will see that leftists genuinely believed that Republicans were prepared to use national emergencies to wipe them out of existence. Why did they believe that? Because it’s what they would do in their place.
When you have a two-party system and one party is effectively outlawed — or the only parts of it that are allowed to exist are the same as the other party — then you have a one-party state.
Comrades: the media, the bureaucracy, private industry (because otherwise government makes life difficult), and the education system are all strongly allied with the party. What could possibly go wrong?
