The storied Democratic Party of yesteryear was considered—at least in the 1960s and ’70s—to be the friend and political champion of working-class, upwardly mobile strivers, including people like my parents and many others of America’s “Greatest Generation.” But by 2016, the Democratic Party had long since fallen heavily under the influence of progressives such as Barack Obama’s Marxist mentor Saul Alinsky, and had already put the people it used to champion on its enemies list.
Democrats are now moving rapidly toward forcing a kind of socialism and the inevitable authoritarian government necessary to enforce it on the American people. They do not recoil at the brutal conversion of inveterate free-market America into a command economy. They are sanguine with the kind of society they believe will be run by progressives.
Of course, Marx understood socialism to be Communism in the inexorably maturing larvae stage—and, of course, he was correct.
Similarly, so-called progressives who seek to impose confiscatory taxes, expropriate property, take over businesses, and run the personal, familial, and religious lives of Americans are something distinctly evil—whatever they are called. They most definitely are not good-hearted utopian reformers selflessly seeking the betterment of mankind.
The leading progressives who now dominate in both the House of Representatives and what still poses as the Democratic Party are like pirates flying a false flag while they plot the destruction of free people, free speech, and the free market in America. It is sad to see these radicalized “me-first” post-Boomers mercilessly turn the Democrats into the political party of hate, not help—but that is, after all, the work they were trained for during years of indoctrination from kindergarten onward.
“Joe-the-Plumber” People vs. “Progressives”
Unrelenting antipathy toward America and American exceptionalism was the air they breathed. They now reflexively scorn their generational contemporaries who emerged from the forced brainwashing with their minds and hearts intact to become good examples of what makes America great. These stalwart exemplars today are like the iconic Reagan Democrats of yesteryear—those who together comprise the essential cadre of Americans I admiringly call “Joe-the-plumber” people and upon whom our future depends.
For progressives, “Joe people” are a problem to be eliminated whether they be Democrats, Republicans, or independents. “Why must Joe and Ms. Joe be so stubborn about clinging to religion and notions of truth, merit, productivity, and patriotism?” peevish progressives complain just before they banish them both to a virtual gulag.
Joe and Ms. Joe may be rich or poor. Most are comfortably in between. A few are plumbers. Some are farmers. Others are doctors and some are Wall Street tycoons. They may be Anglo, Hispanic, black, or whatever. But, like the Greatest Generation from whom they are in quality and character descended, all Joe and Ms. Joe Americans are strivers. They follow the upwardly mobile path toward making themselves and America better and stronger through merit and hard work. Every time they take another step up the ladder, the best of them reach back to give the next meritorious climber a helping hand up.
Joe-the-plumber people are what make America great. They believe in God, America, freedom of speech and religion, productive work, private property, capitalism, the sanctity of home and family life—and they insist that the only function of government bureaucrats is to be obedient servants who do what they are told as quietly and unobtrusively as possible. Government should be small, respectful, kept on a short leash—and above all things, it must keep its hands to itself and its nose out of our business.
Bonafide Joe people are hard to hate—even for progressives—and impossible for a prosperous economy and civilized society to do without. They are for real. There’s nothing virtual or fake about them. They are the true practitioners of the peculiarly American creed, the unwritten joint and mutual compact of competence, integrity and everyday decency that defines and unites Americans. They are good at their jobs. They have to be. They get tested in the marketplace every day—and they prevail.
Senior Democrats and aging Baby Boomers have surrendered their souls and minds—and the moral and intellectual integrity of the Democratic Party—in a Faustian bargain with young progressives.
When necessary, Joe people also fight the wars to defend the nation from enemies who threaten us from within or without. They are the first to volunteer. They fight hard, never give up, and always mean to win. Joe people are by DNA or in spirit and kind, the descendants of the revered “Band of Brothers” from the 101st Airborne who inspired and saved the civilized world by defiantly holding out against Hitler’s onslaught at Bastogne almost exactly 75 years ago in the winter of 1944-45.
Similarly, Joe people walk in the heroic footsteps of those who for a big chunk of the 20th century fought the Cold War and a bunch of smaller hot wars to save America from the ravages of Soviet and other forms of communism—including the progressives’ pet project of socialism.
Destroy the “Bourgeois” Joe-Type Americans
Progressivism seems to derive from the same strain of millenarian evil that inspired the Jacobins to chop off the heads of middle-class Frenchmen and thereby destroy the economy during the most bloodthirsty part of the French Revolution. It also guided Stalin when he slaughtered nearly 5 million “Kulak” middle-class peasants for the mortal sin of owning small farms; and in milder but never benign forms, it has under various names been present in portions of the Democratic Party since the early 20th century.
Today’s progressives, in yesterday’s parlance, might have been called Marxists, Reds, Communists, commies, leftists, left-wingers, pointy-headed pinkos or liberals—and they are in differing degrees certainly all of those bad things, but in my opinion, today’s breed of Millennial leftist is unique and uniquely dangerous in ways not to be anticipated by reference to the past.
In a progressive-run “virtual” world where a falsehood can be instantaneously transmogrified into a truth, and vice versa, just imagine how quickly our lives could, and probably would, be turned upside down if the Democrats take control of the White House, the Senate, and the House.
The retrogression is easy to foresee: An economy and incomes made smaller, speech and thought repressed, wealth and property redistributed and made scarce, national borders thrown open, citizenship and nationhood redefined, history rewritten, school curricula changed, merits and standards downgraded, population and language replaced and almost everything else altered to render us less significant and government more powerful. The New York Times in its 1619 Project is already rewriting history to portray America as an evil nation and people like us as evil people who must pay “reparations” for offenses allegedly committed by our ancestors centuries ago.
And do not be misled by fake debates and “policy disputes” among Democrats seeking to be president. Whether it’s former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or whomever the Democrats nominate, that person will follow the script written to detailed order in the devil’s own highly progressive workshop. And, further, do not assume that the Democrats will concede even if “we the people” were to re-elect Donald Trump and elect a Republican majority in the House and Senate.
The unexpurgated Jacobin evil and official governmental perfidy that plagued revolutionary France from roughly 1770 until well up into the 19th century provides a useful comparison with the progressives’ ongoing attempt to overthrow the Trump presidency and take over our government by extraordinary nonelectoral means. Charles Dickens’ fictional account in A Tale of Two Cities as seen through the evil eyes and actions of Madame Defarge also suggests much about the inhumanity of self-centered zealots. The preternaturally ruthless Defarge pretended to be tending to her knitting while arbitrarily denouncing and sending to the Bastille and the guillotine an ever-expanding list of enemies. Mock trial. No due process. No truth. Simply “J’accuse.” Off with their heads.
Sound familiar? Of course. Progressives do not need to behead dissenters with a guillotine. They use technology to deaden the brain while leaving the head attached.
An “Almost French Revolution Atmosphere”
The Jacobins cared little for “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” And the same can be said of the Jacobin imitators in the rapidly emerging progressive-dominated Democratic Party. Because the Jacobins were Rousseauian in philosophy and were led by the bloodthirsty Robespierre, they sought to tear down the middle class and aristocracy at the top instead of seeking to raise up the poor people on the bottom rung of French society.
This same “tear down instead of lift up” mindset inherited from the Jacobins seems also to be the hallmark of the new progressive-dominated Democratic Party.
“There’s almost a French Revolution atmosphere out there,” declared Chris Matthews, a smart Irish kid from Boston when he worked on Capitol Hill for the much-venerated Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.), and who is now, by virtue of his talents, the richly paid host of “Hardball” on MSNBC. On the December 6, 2019, edition, apparently shocked down to his old-line Democrat roots, Matthews went on to say, “You know, the Democrats for years were just for helping their average person get a little ahead, get a better education, get economic chances . . . . But now, there’s a feeling there’s something wrong with the very rich . . . . What’s going on?”
What’s going on is that senior Democrats and aging Baby Boomers have surrendered their own souls and minds—and the moral and intellectual integrity of the Democratic Party—in a Faustian bargain with the young progressives in exchange for part of the power and the in-kind wealth with which the streets of Washington are awash.
Progressives are political entrepreneurs, not reformers. They peddle Marxist evils because good products, such as capitalism, freedom, and prosperity are already on sale by someone else with a “Joe-the-plumber” sign out front.
You know something is terribly wrong when, in addition to overtly pushing for fewer jobs, lower wages, and less freedom, the Democratic Party of JFK, my parents, and many others of America’s “Greatest Generation” is standing four-square for abortion-enabled infanticide and replacing millions of deceased young Americans with foreign-born immigrants, many of whom are agents provocateurs in daily violation of the spirit (if not always the precise letter) of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and who, in league with homegrown progressives, are often dedicated to the overthrow of our government.
If these offenses against God, man, and common sense are not “high crimes and misdemeanors,” what is?