It’s the wise person who recognizes the limits of his abilities and plans accordingly. It’s the much wiser — and much rarer — person who continues to understand his own limits even while enjoying the pinnacle of their success.
There is almost zero evidence of today’s Democrats possessing any wisdom whatsoever.
Before we get to that, let me spend a moment defining the term Democrat.
I don’t mean your Great Aunt Ethel who has been voting Democrat since the Polk Administration because she’s a nice person who means well but doesn’t pay much attention to politics.
I do mean Washington Democrats. I do mean the high-level power-brokers who have effectively taken control of the federal bureaucracy no matter which party holds the White House. I do mean the entertainment industry, where acting “woke” is the price of stardom. I do mean our institutions of higher learning, where anti-American maleducation and totalitarian speech codes are the norm. I do mean the Tech Lords of Silicon Valley, Seattle, and elsewhere who don’t care one whit about ideology but who have found the Democratic Party a convenient means of protecting and extending their wealth and power. Finally, there is the American news media, which is supposed to act as our country’s antibodies against corruption and lies, but which instead has made themselves into the Democratic Party’s propaganda arm.
Have I forgotten anyone?
Oh, yes: Antifa/BLM street thugs, AKA our postmodern brown shirts.
Imagine: One party holding the White House, Capitol Hill, the infotainment industry, entertainment and education (increasingly difficult to tell apart), our digital social networks, and even ownership of the electronic infrastructure undergirding them.
Holding all the reins of power must be a heady feeling for a Nancy Pelosi or a Chuck Schumer or an Andrew Cuomo, or even a Joe Biden, assuming he’s aware enough to understand just how complete his party’s victory is.
This is the time when Democrats ought to show wisdom enough to take a look at all that power and say: No.
Would that that were the case.
This country faces two potentially existential crises.
A significant fraction of the American voting public, 40% according to at least one poll, believes the November election was effectively stolen.
If those people are kooks (and I’m one of them), they’re kooks in numbers too large to ignore. Thirty people inhabiting an internet chat forum, murmuring about the Illuminatti conspiring with space aliens to control us with mind rays is one thing, easily dismissed. When there are tens of millions of people with at least some justification for thinking an election was stolen, their concerns must be addressed.
But if the Democrats are serious about this “unity” thing, then an honest and thorough accounting of what millions believe to be election irregularities (at best) is called for.
SPOILER: Democrats aren’t serious about this “unity” thing.
Instead, we’ve gotten months’ worth of “‘Shut up’, he explained.”
Granted, President Trump and his legal team’s scattershot, Hail Mary approach to challenging the election results made matters worse. Overpromising and underdelivering isn’t a good look for anyone, especially when the issue is so serious and the stakes so large.
Whatever the Trump Team’s inadequacies might have been, a condescending “Don’t you worry your little head about that election fraud nonsense” from Pelosi et al. is hardly enough to address the legitimate concerns of millions of Republicans, conservatives, and MAGA types.
Worse though than telling us to shut up is actually shutting us up — which is exactly what Big Dem Tech has been up to since the election.
“Facebook and Twitter are private companies. If you don’t like what they’re doing, go somewhere else.”
Well, we did go to other places like Parler, MeWe, and Gab. They lack the sheer numbers of users — hence, less advantageous network effects — that the established social media players enjoy, but we made do.
But then Google removed Parler from the Google Play store. Apple swiftly followed suit and removed Parler from its App Store.
“Fine,” I told myself, “users can still go to Parler’s web page in their mobile or PC browser.
But then Amazon joined in the fray, and cut Parler off from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Other web service providers are following Amazon’s lead.
So just when Parler was set to enjoy robust user growth, the company found itself digitally homeless. They’re threatening an antitrust suit and looking for a new host, but it’s no stretch to conclude that their money will run out before they gain any legal traction.
Will Gab and MeWe be next? It wouldn’t exactly be outrageous to conclude that they will be.
First, Democrats herded us into the digital ghetto. Now, they’re razing it.
Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk warned on Monday — in response to a Babylon Bee tweet! — that “a lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech.”
The problem is that a lot of other people — the people who own those platforms and the politicians who benefit from them — are super-duper happy with the current situation.
Conservatives in this country have been denied the right to peacefully protest and our petitions for redress of our grievances are mocked.
This is when a wise Democrat would look at tens of millions of seething Americans and decide, “Maybe we need to back off, cool down, take our fellow Americans’ concerns a bit more seriously.”
Instead, they invite the very backlash they affect to disdain.
Isn’t there just one wise Democrat brave enough to come forward and say that their party’s hamfisted attempts at totalitarian “unity” is going to rip this country apart?
