For the left, it’s not just a presidential election — it’s a total takeover

Since at least 80 percent of journalistic political comment is from people who think that President Trump has horns and cloven feet, comparatively little attention is being paid to the Democratic effort not only to execute a radical turn to the left but to ensure semi-one-party rule. 

It must be said — and will be much noted by historians — that Donald Trump inflicted great trauma when he surprised the world by defeating the bipartisan incumbency of a declinist, globalist American political establishment straddling the Reagan and Trump years. That has emboldened Democrats not just to throw off the yoke of a bipartisan consensus with centrist Republicans and lurch to the democratic Marxist left, but also to end-run the Constitution and wrench the United States out of reach of moderates and conservatives. They have been tainted with the anti-Americanism of today’s militant movements and been energized to attempt both an ideological and an electoral putsch, while hiding behind the panic over the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Biden-Sanders unity agreement reached last week commits Democrats to the discontinuance of the petroleum industry and the heavy subsidization of uneconomic renewable energy in pursuit of complete decarbonization — all on the authority of a faction of scientists professing alarm over climatic developments. Chartered schools are to be suppressed; the absolute primacy of the teachers unions, chiefly responsible for the deterioration of state education and intimately linked to the Democratic Party, is to be reimposed. There will be drastic tax increases and possibly wealth taxes for those above the average income, and immense expenditures on broadened health care, subsidization of education, infrastructure, and direct transfers of money from those who earned it (or their descendants) to those who have not, apparently irrespective of merit.

All illegal migrants now in the United States will be affirmed as rightfully in the country and on a fast track to citizenship; immigration will continue to be on the basis of the unification of families to the outermost relatives, rather than the merit-based system the present administration proposes and as is practiced in most other advanced countries. The national emergency on the southern border will be declared to be terminated, and the southern border wall will be torn down. America will not really have a border, and all who wish to enter will be welcome. There will be universal health care with an immensely costly “platinum level, federally administered health insurance option with low fees and no deductibles.”

Student loans will be reduced by an immediate $10,000 each, and interest and repayments will be capped at 5 percent of the individual borrower’s income thereafter; all loans remaining after 20 years will be cancelled. Tuition in public colleges and universities will be free to all students from families earning less than $125,000 annually. There will be no tampering with any aspect of the Social Security system, which is now headed determinedly towards bankruptcy. The war on drugs will be abandoned and replaced by an unspecified system of “prevention.” 

In key locales Democrats will remain fixedly attached to their nonsensical plan for self-enforced quarantines and economic shutdowns, based not on science but on electoral considerations, until the election has passed in November. Coupled with their heavy emphasis on collective inequalities, this assures a racially charged, unprecedentedly contentious atmosphere vastly exceeding anything the United States has known in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. 

What has passed almost stealthily so far is the companion plan of Democratic strategists to gain an electoral stranglehold on the country and make it a virtual one-party state, though Republicans would continue to exist as a token minority. Only the fading names of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan would resonate quaintly with future generations slumbering contentedly in the brave new world that has been outlined for them by Joe Biden’s total capitulation to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). No such horrifying aberrations as the 2016 election could recur, because of the de facto overthrow of the Electoral College, the resumption of mass illegal migration, the frustration of any attempt by the Census Bureau to distinguish between citizens and residents, legal or illegal, and the harvesting of whatever numbers of mailed ballots may be necessary to assure electoral victory of adequate proportions — along with the addition of the District of Columbia as a state, providing an automatic added pair of Democratic senators. 

Once all of these measures are in place, changes of government direction would have to be effected within the Democratic Party itself. It would be like the tussles within Argentina’s Peronist movement or even China’s communist party. Republicans would be reduced to a toothless minority of no more significance than the Republican Party enjoyed in the southern states between the withdrawal of the U.S. Army in 1877 and the full enfranchisement of African Americans a century later.  

The recent apparent Supreme Court victory by advocates of the traditional Electoral College, prohibiting Electors from violating their pledges to support a particular candidate, was compromised by assurance of the right of state legislatures to direct the votes of Electoral College members as a whole. States representing 196 of the 538 electoral votes already have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact that pledges the state’s electoral votes to whichever candidate leads in the national popular vote. In the past, this would have barred Presidents John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, John F. Kennedy (if the votes from Alabama were attributed accurately), George W. Bush and Donald Trump from the White House. The combination of these initiatives would give Democrats a huge advantage of migrant voters and tactically deliverable mailed ballots to tip the balance where necessary to obtain a national plurality and assure an Electoral College majority, regardless of the distribution of the popular vote. 

With its now customary vigilance, the Trump-hating national media have ignored most of this unprecedented Democratic Party lunge for a permanent advantage for extreme-left government. It is an unprecedentedly audacious departure from broadly centrist policies and constitutionally guaranteed fair elections. Whatever happens, no person in American history has driven his opponents to such an orgy of partisan chicanery as has Donald Trump. His enemies are trying to impose an irreversible authoritarian socialism on a country no significant part of which has ever freely approved such a regime.

Conrad Black is an essayist, former newspaper publisher, and author of 10 books, including three on Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.