On June 17, 1953, more than a million East Germans walked off the job and launched a massive strike in protest of unfair production demands imposed by the communist government. The playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was living in East Berlin, responded by composing a poem about the Soviet-installed government’s approach to the problem, “Die Lösung” (which translates into “The Solution”):
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Anyway, you know things are bad in America when East Germany seems like a relevant historical analog, but here we are. Perusing the press these days, you’d think Brecht’s satirical joke about the government voting out the people was a real possibility. In fact, I’d dare say attempts to impose our rulers’ wishes on the electorate are now a prominent feature of American discourse.
The morning of the Iowa caucuses, The New York Times published a typically oblivious op-ed headlined “The Responsibility of Republican Voters,” essentially commanding them not to vote for Donald Trump. In reality, such a sentiment coming from the Times is tantamount to encouraging Republicans to support Trump, both as a result of its own sins and as a synecdoche for America’s utterly reviled journalistic establishment. Naturally, a guy the Times insists is “distinguished from the rest of the Republican candidates primarily by his contempt for the rule of law” went on to romp to victory later that day.
Anyway, speaking of contempt for the rule of law, just over a week after the Iowa caucuses, we launched headlong into what could be the biggest legitimacy crisis the federal government has faced since — well, perhaps comparing it to the Civil War overstates things. But to quote Biden, Texas’ standoff with the federal government over illegal immigration is “a big f-cking deal.” There’s a very solid argument that Texas is well within its rights to seize control of its border and enforce the laws Biden won’t, but please tell us more about which candidate is distinguished “primarily by his contempt for the rule of law.”
At a minimum, Biden’s complete disregard for border enforcement is a far bigger threat to America’s security and constitutional order than anything that happened on Trump’s watch, Jan. 6 included, an event the media and Democrats have been bleating about for three years. Yet how much discussion have you seen in The New York Times lately about Biden’s corrupt responsibility for America’s immigration disaster?
New York made kids go to class remotely so it could use their school as an immigrant shelter. (Though if you try to point out how outrageous this is, fact-checkers will tell you that any discussion of kicking taxpayers’ kids out of school for illegal immigrants “needs context,” and by “context,” they mean selective framing to mitigate the issue for the Democrats enabling this.) You have to provide ID, take off your belt and shoes, have your bags examined, and submit to a body scan to fly, but the government is flying planeloads of immigrants all over the country without any identification or due diligence to determine whether they are terrorists. Oh, and Boston is also literally housing illegal immigrants in Logan Airport, so no security threat there, I’m sure.
Even if arguments about maintaining the most basic level of national security and sovereignty don’t move Democrats, you’d think that the feds losing track of tens of thousands of kids and handing them over to sex traffickers would mean that the news wouldn’t be largely confined to the ghetto of local news affiliates and GOP press releases.
Aside from the lack of accountability for violating reams of immigration laws and imposing an avoidable economic and humanitarian crisis on entire states and communities, you’re definitely not allowed to talk about why Biden has allowed, by some estimates, 10 million people to cross the border illegally.
If you suggest that Democrats are counting on the fact that at some point in the future there will be some kind of amnesty or other mechanism to offer these illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship and voting, thereby achieving the literal fulfillment of Brecht’s joke about the government creating a new electorate, well, there’s an entire ideological infrastructure, one that the media are happy to parrot, dedicated to telling Americans that this common-sense concern is part of an elaborate neo-Nazi conspiracy theory.
The only way you’re allowed to be concerned that a sudden and dramatic influx of immigrants will dramatically alter the political or cultural character of your community is if you’re the kind of disgustingly wealthy liberal who lives in Martha’s Vineyard. Then your concern suddenly merits days of news coverage. Fifty new migrants in Barack Obama’s backyard is a humanitarian crisis; 10,000 Haitians living under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, is a statistic.
Of course, polls now show immigration is the top concern for American voters, ahead of inflation and the broader economy. And near as I can tell, the White House and media strategy (but I repeat myself) seems to be ignoring the voting public’s grave concern and making the next 10 months about whether half the country should even be allowed to vote for Donald Trump.
This is not an exaggeration. On Thursday Politico ran a piece from a “professor of law and political science at Yale University,” arguing, “Trump’s Supreme Court Must Kick Him Off The Ballot.” This op-ed contains such modest proposals as saying the high court “should issue an injunction postponing Super Tuesday to early May” because nothing quite instills faith in American democracy like unelected jurists telling states where and how to hold their elections, never mind the author’s endorsement of a ridiculous interpretation of the 14th Amendment that says state officials can unilaterally kick someone off the ballot and disenfranchise millions of voters who support him.
Now, I do agree with the author’s sentiment that “a democracy can’t possibly function if presidents use force to remain in power after they have lost elections.” I just missed the part where there was any compelling evidence Trump organized or instigated the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, the riot itself was a serious attempt to keep Trump in power, and Trump was convicted in a court of law on any of these things. And this is emblematic of years of concocting fantasies about how the will of the voters can be overturned — recall this started before Trump was even president, with an organized attempt by Hillary Clinton and her allies to convince the Electoral College not to validate Trump’s victory at the ballot box — which strikes me as a far bigger threat to democracy than Trump has ever been.
It is truly amazing the lengths that America’s establishmentarians will go to avoid actually meeting voters where they are and entertaining persuasion and compromise. Along those lines, we can debate whether this was a planned strategy to ensure Trump got the GOP nomination, but it ought to be a far bigger concern that Trump got even more popular with the electorate after they brought a bunch of (admittedly dubious) criminal charges against him. Isn’t anyone concerned that tens of millions of Americans now think the Democrat Party isn’t above orchestrating the political prosecution of those that threaten to defeat them in elections? Or that once firmly established, this perception could have very harmful effects on “our democracy” long after Trump is gone?
The lack of concern here only seems to make sense if you fully expect that you can repress the opposition and/or remake the electorate so much that you eventually achieve uniparty control of the country. By then, elections, to the extent they are permitted and the problematic will of the people is not simply overruled by unelected bureaucrats and activist judges, are little more than a rubber stamp.
It’s not a crazy thought. It’s already happened in blue states such as California, where supermajorities mean that none of the elected leaders are particularly worried about voters holding them accountable for their obvious and many failures. The only problem for the rest of us is that once uniparty control of the entire country is achieved, the result won’t ultimately look like California and its present dysfunctions. Given enough time, they’ll turn America into something a lot more like East Germany.