How The Left (and the Establishment) Undermine Democracy

Liberals have expressed horror at the idea that Russia worked to undermine American democracy.  Perhaps liberals fail to realize that they don’t need to rely on Russia to undermine American democracy. They’ve done a pretty good job doing that themselves. Let’s take a look at how:

Relying on the Courts to overturn the will of the people: In 1994, California voters approved Proposition 187, which sought to remove the magnet for illegal entry into the United States by preventing illegal immigrants from accessing government benefits, including subsidized health care and public education.  It did not take long for a Jimmy Carter-appointed judge to declare the law unconstitutional. Republican Governor Pete Wilson had appealed the ruling but his successor, Democrat Gray Davis, dropped the appeal.  As a result of Proposition 187’s failure to go into law, the surge of illegal immigration has turned into a crisis.  Additional judicial rulings, especially the “Flores settlement” have effectively rolled out the red carpet for any illegal immigrant from Central America seeking “asylum” who brings a child with them, as Obama-appointed Judge Dolly Gee ruled that the government can only detain migrant children for 20 days. After 20 days, the immigrants disappear into American society; becoming statistics for Democrats to point to when they demand amnesty.    

In more than 30 states, voters made it perfectly clear that they wanted to uphold the traditional definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman by voting for amendments that would enshrine that definition into their respective state Constitutions. However, liberals did not like the outcome of most of these referendums.  They ran to the Courts to get the bans on same-sex marriage overturned and the Supreme Court eventually struck down all the remaining bans on same-sex marriage that lower Courts had not yet struck down.  The Supreme Court effectively flushed the will of more than 45 million Americans down the toilet in favor of appeasing the very vocal more than 28 million Americans who voted the other way on the issue of same-sex marriage.  Liberals did walk away with some democratic victories when it came to the same-sex marriage debate; as voters supported referendums for same-sex marriage in Maine, Maryland, and Washington and rejected a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in Minnesota. But they could not accept the election results in all of the other states, so they instead relied on the judicial branch to overturn the will of the people.

Refusing to accept election results: Democratic Congressman John Lewis appeared to stun NBC’s Chuck Todd when he told him that he did not view then-President-elect Trump as a legitimate President. Lewis had basically the same thing 16 years earlier upon the election of President George W. Bush.  As Ann Coulter pointed out in her book Resistance is Futile: How The Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind, “Democrats claim they are robbed every time they lose an election, unless it’s a landslide.” Coulter then proceeded to outline “History, according to Democrats.”

·         1968: Nixon won with his racist (and mythical) “Southern strategy.”

·         1972: Nixon landslide –no provable cheating.

·         1976: Carter won—FAIR ELECCTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!

·         1980: Reagan won by conspiring with Iranian mullahs to prevent the release of American hostages before the election.

·         1984: Reagan landslide—no provable cheating.

·         1988: Bush won because of his racist Willie Horton ad.

·         1992: Clinton won with 43 percent of the vote—FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!

·         1996: Clinton won with 49 percent of the vote—FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!

·         2000: Bush won because the Supreme Court stole it for him.

·         2004: Bush won because of Halliburton hacking the voting machines in Ohio.

Obviously, the 2008 and 2012 elections, which President Obama won, fall into the “FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!” category. Coulter had made the point that the left has alleged that “Trump, an incompetent buffoon, managed to engage in a complex international conspiracy with Russian intelligence to steal the 2016 presidential election from Hillary.” She wrote this book before the 2018 election, where liberals have refused to accept the results of gubernatorial elections in two of the nation’s largest states: Florida and Georgia.  More than six months after Election Day 2018, losing candidate Stacey Abrams still refuses to acknowledge she lost the Georgia gubernatorial election.  Abrams told a crowd at the National Action Network Convention, filled with left-wingers who subscribe to voter suppression conspiracy theories, “We won.” While Andrew Gillum, who narrowly lost the Florida gubernatorial election to Republican Ron DeSantis, has taken a more measured approach to his defeat, he has called the legitimacy of his opponent’s victory into question.  During an appearance on HBO’s “Real Time,” Gillum argued that “had we been able to legally count every one of those votes not just in Florida, but also in Georgia, I wonder what the outcome may be.”  Does “every one of those votes” include votes cast by illegal aliens?  Probably. Abrams argued that the “blue wave” that would sweep her to victory would include “those who are documented and undocumented.”  One of the top-tier Democratic Presidential candidates, Kamala Harris, has openly refused to accept the election results in both states, telling a speech in front of the Detroit NAACP Chapter, “without voter suppression, Stacey Abrams would be the governor of Georgia, Andrew Gillum is the governor of Florida.”   

The refusal to accept the will of the voters applies not just to the left but to the establishment as a whole in the United States and around the world.  In 2016, a majority of voters in the United Kingdom voted to leave the supranational organization known as the European Union despite the pleas from President Obama and Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to vote “remain.” When the results showed that a majority of United Kingdom residents ignored his wishes, Cameron announced his decision to resign; giving supporters of the “Brexit” initiative hope that his replacement would share their passion for declaring independence from the bureaucrats in Brussels.  Instead, Brexit opponent Theresa May became Prime Minister.  Nearly three years after the Brexit referendum, Great Britain remains in the European Union because Parliament kept rejecting May’s Brexit proposals, which basically amounted to a “soft Brexit.” 

Brexit opponents hoped that the voters would eventually regret their decision.  May’s decision to call for a “snap election” in 2017 in an effort to receive a stronger pro-Brexit mandate backfired as the Conservative Party ended up losing seats, forcing them to ally with the Northern Ireland-based Democratic Unionist Party in order to form a majority coalition. Two years later, British voters made it perfectly clear that they did not regret their decision to vote “leave.” Six weeks before the European Parliament elections, Great Britain, initially scheduled to leave the European Union by March 29, agreed to postpone its departure until October 31.  Therefore, it did end up participating in the European Parliament elections.  Brexit supporter and former head of the United Kingdom Independence Party Nigel Farage created the Brexit party and led his party to an astonishing victory; capturing 30.5 percent of the popular vote and 29 of Great Britain’s 73 seats in the European Parliament.  Like in the United States, anti-establishment fever runs wide and deep in Great Britain; as the two traditional left-right parties in the UK finished in third and fifth place, respectively.  The Liberal Democrats, a farther left version of the Labor party, finished in second place with 16 seats and 19.6 percent of the popular vote. Theresa May’s Conservative Party finished in an abysmal fifth place, capturing only four seats and 8.8 percent of the vote.

If voters in the United States had the opportunity to throw out every establishment Republican and establishment Democrat, they would.  Republicans would love it if every member of Congress shared President Trump’s positions on all of the issues of the day.  However, unlike parliamentary Europe, the two-party system reigns supreme in American politics.  Americans have a largely binary choice between Republicans and Democrats. Therefore, many of the Republicans in Congress do not share President Trump’s views when it comes to immigration, trade, and foreign policy. It appears as if the same applies to the folks in President Trump’s inner circle, whose views on the aforementioned issues contradict the views of the only elected member of the Executive Branch: the President himself.

The anti-establishment wave has swept through other European countries in recent years as well.  In 2017, both of the major political parties in France found themselves shut out of the Presidential election.  Emmanuel Macron’s Centrist Party ultimately prevailed over Marine Le Pen’s National Front Party; which shares a similar stance on the European Union to the Brexit Party.  Two years later, the National Front, now known as the National Rally, received a plurality of seats in the European Parliament election; although it had won a plurality of seats in the 2014 election as well.

The New York Times’s “conservative” writer Bret Stephens lamented that “More than 600 million Indians cast their ballots over the past six weeks in the largest democratic election in the world. Donald Trump won. A week ago, several million Australians went to the polls in another touchstone election. Trump won.” Stephens pointed out that “Trump’s name, of course, was on none of the ballots in these recent elections.” To paraphrase President Obama, Trump might not have been on the ballot but his policies were. In both of the aforementioned elections, the conservative and/or right-of-center party prevailed over the liberal and/or left-of-center party.  Stephens titled his column “How Trump Wins,” warning that the election victories he mentioned in his article bode well for President Trump in his re-election bid next year. 

If history serves as any guide, liberals and the establishment will not respect the results of these elections either. Ironically, these same people constantly harangue President Trump for undermining American democracy by attacking the institutions vital to its success.  Any democracy undermining at the hands of President Trump pales in comparison to the aforemtioned democracy undermining that liberals and the establishment have participated in over the past quarter-century.  Nothing undermines and shakes the public’s faith in democracy more than a consistent failure to ignore the will of the people. If people feel that their voices don’t matter and their votes don’t count, they will begin to feel like the contestants going up against James Holzhauer on “Jeopardy,” who know that they don’t stand a chance.

That’s exactly how California Republicans feel on every single Election Day, as they know that the Democrats will win every statewide election in a landslide before the polls even close thanks to Proposition 187’s failure to become law.  In turn, the number of legal and illegal immigrants has exploded in California, and liberals’ intended result of the demographic changes has paid off: Hillary Clinton beat President Trump there by a nearly 2-1 margin and carried 46 of the state’s 53 Congressional districts.

If liberals and the establishment really cared about democracy, then Proposition 187 would have become law, same-sex marriage bans would remain on the books in a little more than 30 states, and Great Britain would have already left the European Union by now.  But they don’t care about democracy. They care only about power. Until that changes, they can spare us the lectures about how President Trump and the Russians undermined our democracy.