With Parties Polarized, Desire for Revenge Calls the Tune

The Capitol in Washington on May 7, 2019. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Commentary

“The people have spoken,” said former New York City Mayor Ed Koch after the Democratic mayoral primary of 1989, “and they must be punished.”

The understandably bitter Koch had just been defeated by David Dinkins and was bidding his farewell to politics. And in fact, the people were punished: The one-term Dinkins, who defeated Rudy Giuliani in the general election that year to become the city’s first black mayor, saw crime soar on his impeccably tailored watch, with murders hitting a high of 2,605 the following year.

Four years later, even the Upper West Side had had enough and called the cops, in the form of Giuliani and his police chief, Bill Bratton.

Still, there was a hidden grain of truth in Koch’s famous crack: There is a vindictive element to Democrat electoral politics, especially in the 30 years since Hizzoner left Gracie Mansion. As the parties have polarized, a destructive element has entered our politics, and with malice aforethought. This will not end well.

There’s always been a certain amount of pendulum swing in the peculiar version of “democracy” known as our republican form of government. Everyone runs against the “other guy,” the party in power, the Swamp, and yet too often—as with Mark Twain’s famous crack about the weather—nobody really does anything about it.

For all the talk, the comfortable middle of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush—drifting ever leftward, to be sure—was where the country seemed to want to be.

Civil War

But sometimes not. In the run-up to the Civil War, polarization over the issues of slavery and secession saw the death of one party (the Whigs), the birth of another (the Republicans), and the complete radicalization of a third (the Democrats, led in part by the spirit of the traitor and murderer Aaron Burr, who gained political advantage through Tammany Hall a decade after its founding).

The result was four years of the bloodiest armed conflict in American history. Peace was finally restored at Appomattox, but the causes still linger—in particular, the Democrats’ fondness for brute force.

Despite their loss in the War Between the States, the Democrats never gave up. Talk about the “resistance”—they fought the Reconstruction amendments tooth and nail, and gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan, which attacked not only blacks but Jews and Catholics as well.

So unyielding were they in their fanaticism that the election of 1876 wasn’t finally decided until the GOP agreed to the withdrawal of the remaining federal troops in the old Confederacy, thus instantly erasing black political progress and ushering in nearly a century of Jim Crow.

“The South will rise again!” became the rallying cry of what is, in effect, a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.

That never happened—not, at least, in terms of regional revolution. But the Democrats, who should have been disbanded and outlawed in 1865 after their armed insurrection against the lawfully constituted government of the United States, in fact, did rise again. A Maryland Democrat assassinated Abraham Lincoln, thus putting a Democrat, Andrew Johnson, into the White House.

As the Old South gradually became more populous and prosperous, the Democrats moved north, where their innate, Jeffersonian radicalism found fresh new soil. New England, which had led the fight against slavery, maintained its revolutionary inclinations as it shifted from rock-ribbed Republican to urban, immigrant Democrat, easy emotional prey for the anarcho-socialists.

So did the industrial Midwest, with its tradition of unions and socialism (read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” for a primer on Chicago’s foreign-injected radicalism at the turn of the last century). The parties didn’t switch sides; the revanchist Democrats simply fled the South and settled elsewhere—most recently California, which they’ve now all but destroyed.

Hatred and Revenge

Still, they seethe with hatred and revenge. The Frankfurt School of German-born Marxists, refugees from Hitler, preached hatred of America almost from the moment these ingrates landed on our shores, and they educated three generations of college-aged Americans before their prize pupil, Barack Hussein Obama, won the White House.

And when Obama, a disciple of Saul Alinsky (who, interestingly had begun his career as a “community organizer” working with the Capone mob in Chicago), promised the “fundamental transformation” of the country, anyone who had lived through the 1960s knew exactly what he meant.

The presidency of Donald J. Trump came as a nasty surprise—they thought they had the fight fixed. And so for the entirety of the Trump administration they sought to bring him down and ensure somebody like him could never happen again. No need to go over the entire litany, but from the sandbagging of Michael Flynn to the final impeachment “trial” even after Trump had left office, they never stopped, they never slept, they never quit.

So here we are. Their ballot harvesting and “curing,” their weaponization of the CCP virus in the form of unconstitutional COVID-19 restrictions, and their illegal monkeying with state election laws, combined with their traditional Tammany Hall-style ballot-box stuffing, won them the White House. In the Congress, they hold the barest of majorities. And the stunned mullet called the Roberts Court is helpless to stop them. Who needs a landslide?

And now, the people having spoken, they must be punished. Draconian “executive orders” signed by a shuffling, mumbling, masked non-entity have thrown the formerly booming economy into reverse. The energy sector is under direct attack.

Anarchy that would make Emma Goldman and Leon Czolgosz (McKinley’s assassin) blush has been loosed upon the land via the Black Lives Matter and Antifa movements.

The military is being deconstructed via political correctness, while Chinese spies have infiltrated nearly every corridor of power as the Russian bear hungrily eyes the Ukraine.

And we are philosophically, militarily, and emotionally powerless to stop them.

Thanks to Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School’s signal contribution to the dismantling of America, everything about the country-as-founded must be destroyed. As I explained in my 2017 bestseller, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West,” all that “critical theory” means in practice is “there is no received tenet of civilization that should not either be questioned (the slogan “question authority” originated with the Frankfurt School) or attacked. Critical Theory is the very essence of satanism, which is to say rebellion for the sake of rebellion against an established order that has obtained for eons—and with no greater promise for the future than destruction.”

In short, they’re angrier than ever and out for vengeance. At this fraught moment, with their stranglehold on the country still electorally tenuous, they will go as far and as fast as they can as they seek to get past the 2024 congressional elections and into a permanent catbird seat. And then it’s Katie-bar-the-door.

Now, what are you going to do about it?

Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, was recently published.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.