by Sean Hannity
Beinart anticipates a further GOP backlash in the event Democrats resort to such measures. With the two sides thoroughly polarized and vying for their respective positions, Beinart says this “third left” movement will prevail only if it can “convince Americans that the true cause of radicalism is injustice, and the best guarantee of social peace is a more equal country.”51
“HIJACKING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE”
The Democrats’ elaborate schemes to abuse their power are ironic considering their main complaint against President Trump is that he maliciously “abuses his power” and “interferes” with “our democracy.” In fact, this leftist Democratic Party has no respect for the system they pretend to uphold. If they did, they wouldn’t be attacking it with designs from abolishing the Electoral College, to packing the Supreme Court, to effectively eliminating our borders, to stripping our civil liberties. While complaining about alleged Republican corruption they are active agents of chaos, trying to undermine the system itself at every turn—whatever it takes to make America “more equal.” Just as the Democrats themselves were the ones interfering with the 2016 presidential election while falsely accusing Trump of having done so, they are the ones threatening our constitutional order while pointing the finger at Republicans.
Democrats tirelessly accuse Trump of being a tyrannical autocrat—an authoritarian who flouts the Constitution and believes he is above the law. During the impeachment trial, Congressman Jerry Nadler even accused Trump of being a “dictator,”52 apparently unaware that dictators don’t allow themselves to be impeached. Once again, the Democrats are projecting—it is they who refuse to accept elections they lose, pay for phony dossiers falsely accusing their political opponents of treason, and skew our constitutional norms for their own political benefit.
In fact, Beinart’s prediction that Democrats might try to pack the Court has already come true. Frustrated that President Trump has appointed justices and judges who will uphold the Constitution rather than bend it to the left’s political ends, multiple Democratic presidential candidates proposed adding justices to the Court. Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand all said they would add judges or consider the move.53 While Biden didn’t join the Democratic field on this issue, he has shown his flexibility under party pressure, so we have no assurance he won’t eventually come on board.
Similarly, in light of Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump becoming president without winning the popular vote, Senators Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren support, or would consider, abolishing the Electoral College. Here again, Biden didn’t join the pack, but we can’t rely on him not bending later. The framers wisely designed the Electoral College to establish republican government instead of pure democracy in order to bolster the power of the states, reduce electoral fraud, and protect minority rights. “Our founders so deeply feared a tyranny of the majority that they rejected the idea of a direct vote for President,” says legal scholar Tara Ross. “That’s why they created the Electoral College. For more than two centuries it has encouraged coalition building, given a voice to both big and small states, and discouraged voter fraud.”54
But Democrats don’t like the results that the Electoral College sometimes yields, so they are attacking this institution from numerous angles. Senators Brian Schatz, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College and elect presidential candidates by national popular vote.55 Knowing this proposal had little chance of succeeding, progressives proposed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPV) to circumvent the Electoral College and the Constitution’s high bar for amendments. Under the plan, states would agree to ignore their own voters’ choice and select their presidential electors based on the national popular vote.56 “If you think that through, it really… hijacks the Electoral College… to do exactly what the American Founders rejected, which is to create a direct election system, a national popular vote, a direct election for president of the United States, rendering state lines irrelevant, rendering state governments and state laws potentially irrelevant in the process,” says Trent England, director of Save Our States, a program to preserve the Electoral College.57
England helped launch the organization in 2009 after several states adopted the NPV from 2007 to 2009. This effort worked well until Trump’s Electoral College victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, which revived the momentum for NPV. Now some fifteen states, plus the District of Columbia, with a total of 196 electoral votes, have joined the compact.58 The agreement won’t take effect unless the signatory states have a total of 270 electoral votes. If that happens, the Electoral College will be effectively nullified and presidents will be elected by national popular vote, despite the fact that it’s unconstitutional. The framers viewed the Electoral College as a crucial constitutional safeguard, but since it’s not working to the Democrats’ advantage, it has to go.
THE FLAWED PREMISE OF EQUAL OUTCOMES
Beinart apparently believes leftist militancy is justified because the “third left” will effect transformational change only if it can convince Americans that its radicalism is a natural response to society’s injustices and that its goal is “a more equal country.” Beinart is not considered radical compared to many on the left, so his justification of this militancy is an ominous sign that should serve as a wake-up call to conservatives.
As long as patriots resolve to defend this nation’s guarantees of liberty, the left will have difficulty extorting the electorate to cater to their demands in exchange for social peace. Progressives are free to try to persuade Americans that socialism is a superior and fairer system, but not through threats of violence. Such tactics would meet resistance in any period of American history, but today, leftists will find it even harder to prevail because grassroots conservatives and the Republican Party have never been more united. Awakened to leftist extremism, hatefulness, and intolerance, and fully aware of what is at stake, we have begun to fight back under the leadership of Donald Trump. We must continue to do so. I believe that we will win this battle if we conservatives make the case relentlessly and convincingly to the American people, especially younger people, that America’s founding principles are no less worthy now than when conceived by the framers and that the system of government they gave us is still the best guarantee of liberty and prosperity.
Conservatives must refute Beinart’s flawed premise. The promise of this country has never been income equality. Its guarantee has always been, and must continue to be, opportunity for all. Forced equal outcomes are themselves unfair and destroy liberty and prosperity. We must never let the American people or their elected representatives be held hostage to radical mobs who threaten social unrest unless their socialist demands are met, and who offer social peace only in exchange for our abandonment of the American dream.
Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, economic conditions for all income groups improved under President Trump, and wages were at an all-time high, which would have made the left’s task of seducing voters into accepting socialism that much tougher. Regardless of what impact the virus-induced economic slowdown will have on voters, conservatives must continue to explain the dangers of socialism. Income inequalities have always existed, and not because of capitalism. Under a socialist system income may be more evenly distributed, but only because everyone has less except for the ruling class, which has existed in every socialist country throughout history.
There’s also something more basic we should consider. Conservatives and progressives have fundamentally different outlooks on economic growth and opportunity. The left generally believes economies are finite, which means that if the wealthy get wealthier there will be less for everyone else. Free market advocates know that economic growth expands the pie, and that one person’s gain is not necessarily another’s loss. Indeed, studies show that even when there are increases in income inequality, there is not generally a decline in upward
mobility.59 That is, Bill Gates growing rich does not keep other Americans from improving their own standard of living. If anything, it opens doors of opportunity for them. “Standards of living have increased for everyone—as have incomes—and mobility, however one measures it, remains robust,” write Heritage Foundation scholars Rea Hederman and David Azerrad. “Simply put, how much the top 1 percent of the population earns has no bearing on whether the bottom 20 percent can move up.”60
We have direct evidence of this with the Trump economy. To the chagrin of class warfare demagogues, under Trump’s economy—again, prior to the coronavirus downturn—Census Bureau records show that while Americans’ standard of living is improving across the board, the share of income for the top 20 percent fell by the largest amount in a decade, and households between the 20th and 40th percentile had the largest increase in average household income in 2018.61
But the facts don’t matter to Democrats. They focus on income inequality because they have no ideas to help the poor, argues Akhil Rajasekar in the Federalist. And make no mistake, Biden has been pandering to middle-class voters on income inequality like the rest of his rivals—while simultaneously raking in money from his rich donors.62 Even if the income gap between rich and poor or between rich and middle class increases with free market policies, should you oppose those policies if everyone’s living conditions improve? If socialist policies decrease the income gap but all groups are worse off, what have you gained? “Here is the problem with thinking in terms of inequality,” writes Rajasekar. “By focusing on closing the gap, one is only concerned with the differential between the two classes, regardless of how each class is doing independently…. Diverting existing wealth by force of government will close any economic gap, no matter how large. But, as the post-revolutionary French will attest, pulling down those at the top is never a sustainable solution to inequality. Instead we must seek to raise our overall economic health so that bridging the wage gap becomes a natural side-effect of market conditions, not a forced outcome.”63
That’s true. The left’s economic policies kill economic growth, so they resort to class warfare. But they can’t have it both ways: if they foment jealousy and resentment among Americans and pursue policies to equalize outcomes, they will shrink the economic pie. Increasing taxes and transfer payments smothers economic growth, which explains why Democratic icons Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama urged us to lower our expectations and accept permanent economic malaise. Each time, their respective conservative successors—Reagan and Trump—proved them wrong. But as long as the left, when in power, implements radical policies based on class envy, they’ll never preside over a robust economy. To embrace growth policies, they’d need to abandon class warfare, and that’s not in their DNA.
Conservatives also generally believe it’s morally corrupting and biblically forbidden for people to dwell on other people’s possessions. Thus, the left’s obsession with class conflict is detrimental not only to our economy but to our moral and spiritual health. The American dream involves the freedom to work hard and prosper—it is not about coveting your neighbor’s property and having the government seize it for you.
RADICALS ARE A MOB—NO MATTER WHO DENIES IT
I have highlighted Beinart’s piece because I think it’s revealing about the left and the Democratic Party—written by a progressive connected to their thinking and inner workings. It’s one thing for us conservatives to speculate about the motives and future intentions of the left and the Democratic Party. It’s another to let the words of their thought leaders illuminate their mind-set.
I believe it’s important we take seriously his view that leftist radicals are more mobilized than they’ve been since the 1960s and that they are exerting enormous influence over the Democratic Party. Now we face a double threat from activists mobilizing their fellow leftists outside the party structure and from those inside the party itself. Even when these radicals get blowback, they are undeterred and do whatever it takes to advance their agenda. For the left, the end justifies the means, and that’s even more true of leftists today, because the greater their ideological intensity, the less their respect for democratic norms, the Constitution, and the rule of law.
Beinart defends the activists against Republican claims that they act like a “mob,” such as during the Kavanaugh hearings. He suggests it is Trump who has encouraged his crowds to commit violence. It’s been a common ploy of Democrats and Never Trumpers to paint Trump and his supporters as violent, but Trump supporters are overwhelmingly law-abiding, Constitution-respecting patriots. In fact, a sting video by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas showed that fights at Trump rallies, which were breathlessly hyped by the media during the 2016 elections, were being deliberately provoked by left-wing provocateurs who were running a dirty tricks operation for the Hilary Clinton campaign.64 We are not the ones hounding people out of public places or denying youths a dissenting voice on college campuses. We are not the ones dressed in black beating our political opponents in the streets. That is the province of the left—today, just as it was in the 1960s.
We have watched endless bullying from our political opponents and their malcontent community organizers and activists. We have witnessed their unwillingness to live and let live. We have seen their vilification of all who don’t kowtow to their agenda and demands. They no longer fool us with their simulated anguish over President Trump’s threats to our system. They are the ones who threaten the system. They are the ones who interfere with elections. They are the ones who disrespect the Constitution and undermine the checks and balances that hold it in place. They are the ones whose political candidates are dedicated to overthrowing American values, traditions, and institutions.
And we are the ones who must stand in their way. That not only requires our ongoing vigilance but our studied awareness of precisely how they intend to achieve their goals. We must not only promote “informed patriotism”—fully understanding what is so wonderfully unique about America and why it is worth preserving. We must also fully inform ourselves of the ideas and policies that threaten it—meaning the particulars of the leftist agenda this current crop of Democratic leaders intends to advance. We must do a better job convincing our fellow Americans that Democrats mean business and must be defeated.
To be honest, it’s laughable to suggest that the Democratic Party isn’t radical and out of control. It’s undeniable if you look at their policy proposals—a true horror show in the making. So let’s do that now.
CHAPTER THREE Welcome to Fantasyland: The Democrats’ 2020 Agenda
It’s important that the American people understand exactly what the Democrats are offering them: radical changes to our economic system and a severe disruption of the American social fabric. Their outlandish plans are not the result of careful consideration of their costs and benefits to the nation. Instead, they stem from a mix of the Democrats’ extreme leftist ideology, their maniacal hatred of President Trump, and a neurotic angst that has robbed them of all reason and fairness. These qualities have diverted them from pursuing any constructive agenda and rendered them generally unfit to lead this nation—which is ironic considering their constant harping on Trump’s alleged unfitness for office.
Just about everything the Democrats do and say today stems from their animosity toward Trump. They refused to stand or applaud for great American achievements during either of Trump’s State of the Union addresses—it was more important to display their contempt for the president than, for example, to celebrate rising wages for the middle class, historic lows in black unemployment, or even a schoolgirl who earned an opportunity scholarship. Even their approach to the coronavirus pandemic was focused on undermining Trump. Trump Derangement Syndrome is an amazingly powerful force that has completely overwhelmed the Democratic Party. Out of this toxic stew of rage and resentment, the Democrats have produced a preposterous agenda that would transform our country beyond all recognition.
THE JOYLESS PARTY
You can bank o
n one thing: I, for one, won’t let the Democrats divert attention from Trump’s policy successes, which I highlight in Chapter Nine and which are not diminished by the economic slowdown resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. The amazing Trump economy stands on its own merit, making it clear that it is Trump—not the whining leftists—who is best suited to lead our post-coronavirus recovery.
Seriously, how will the Democrats find an audience for their utopian schemes when Trump had already proved, before the pandemic, his ability to raise America to new heights of prosperity? Minorities were doing better than ever under the Trump economy, which made the left palpably nervous.1 As I pointed out on my show, Obama official turned commentator Van Jones warned that Trump’s 2020 State of Union speech was a “wake-up call” for Democrats because Trump was helping African American communities “in real life.”
It’s easy to forget that Trump’s election victory sparked catastrophic economic predictions from the left. Remember when economist Paul Krugman warned in the New York Times that Trump’s election would cause a global recession and the stock market would “never” recover?2 Yeah, with both the stock market and the economy breaking new records seemingly every day before the virus, it’s safe to say that one didn’t quite pan out. But in an effort to sell their grandiose economic reprogramming plans, the Democrats tried to convince the American people that the economy at its pinnacle was actually terrible for everyone except the villainous 1 percent, even if the American people somehow failed to notice it. But it’s horrifying to consider how devastated the economy would be today if Trump hadn’t put it in the best possible position to withstand the economic dislocations caused by the virus.