'A Terrifying Moment of Authoritarianism Among Mainstream Democrats'

Shot:

We are experiencing a terrifying moment of authoritarianism among mainstream Democratic politicians: Harry Reid’s highly personal campaign of vicious demagoguery against Charles and David Koch is a national disgrace, but his party’s attempt to repeal the First Amendment is a national crisis. While Harry Reid wages war on free speech, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls for the literal imprisonment of people with the wrong ideas on climate change. These aren’t Occupy terrorists trying to blow up a bridge in Cleveland; this is the United States Senate and a man bearing one of the most famous names in American politics.

The Left no longer has a credible intellectual case for its core program of control and planning. But, as Hayek predicted, the failure of central-planning aspirations is not going to be met with a renewed sense of humility on the part of our would-be rulers, but with denunciations of enemies of the people and demands for ever-more-extraordinary powers to deal with the emergency, which is now, it goes without saying, permanent. The world is moving on from command and control; the campus of Google might as well be on a different planet from the Rayburn House Office Building, its inhabitants practically alien. Power is shifting decisively in the direction of technology, capital, and innovation, and the planners are on the verge of losing, and spectacularly.

That is what is going to make them so dangerous.

—Kevin D. Williamson, “The Unmanageable Man: When plans unravel, fists are clenched.” NRO, September 23rd.

Chaser:

We need a new constitution: Here’s how we save American democracy from charlatans, loudmouths and the 1 percent http://t.co/klyPA1pMl0

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) September 28, 2014

And Donna Brazile, the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and Time-Warner-CNN-HBO employee, is far from the only prominent member of the left who have repeated the above thoroughly regressive mantra in recent years. Not the least of which recently being, as Williamson noted in the passage quoted above, half the Senate.