When to Fear Dictatorship Coming to America, Part Six

Victor Davis Hanson

5) Do ideologues try to destroy the ancient system of governance and create new replacements designed to give them power that they could not otherwise obtain through elections?

Determine the following: Which group, party, or cabal is clamoring to make the following radical changes, despite lacking almost no public support for such radical transformation?

1) Who wishes to pack the 169-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court, because after decades of left-wing justices, they feel the current court does not reflect their agendas?

2) Who wishes to end the 237-year Electoral College, by detouring around the process to amend the Constitution legally, and instead pressuring state legislatures simply to vote to send electors of the party that wins the popular vote—a patently unconstitutional effort?

3) Who wishes to alter the 67-year 50-state union, by admitting Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as states, solely to gain four liberal senators and two representatives that they might not otherwise achieve in Congress?

4) Who wishes to destroy the 200-year Senate filibuster, solely because they lack the confidence to win a majority in the Senate—a gambit the Left only utilizes when they are in a minority and wish to block the majority party’s agenda?

5) Who, for the first time in history, impeached a president twice?

6) Who for the first time in history, tried an ex-president and private citizen in the Senate?

7) Who, for the first time, systematically tried to remove a presidential candidate’s and ex-president’s name from state ballots to end his chance of a third run for president?

8) Who helped organize—and in some cases fund—five criminal and civil suits to indict Donald Trump in ways that will never again be applied to any other major presidential candidate or ex-president? None of the lawfare circuses would have occurred had Trump decided not to run again for President.

9) Who, for the first time in history, raided an ex-president’s home with an armed SWAT team to find some 102 disputed classified files out of a presidential paper trove of some 14,000 documents?

10) Who cooked up ways to remove a president through the 25th Amendment by allegedly having the acting attorney general and the interim head of the FBI plan to wear a wiretap, entrap Trump into saying something embarrassing, and then taking that recording to the U.S. Senate?

Between 2021 and 2025, the Biden administration also deliberately destroyed the southern border, achieving its goal of leaving it wide open, negate all existing federal immigration law, and allowing more than 10,000 illegal aliens to enter. Perhaps 10-12 million illegally crossed the border, including some 500,000 known criminals.

The purpose? To alter the demography and electoral balance of the U.S. by importing impoverished entrants who would need vast amounts of federal and state largess, and thus cause higher taxes to be imposed on the wealthy. The ploy championed in books and articles as “The New Democratic Majority” or “Demography as Destiny,” and was designed to revive a sagging Democratic Party with new poor constituents in need of vastly expanded entitlements—and higher taxes on the now supposedly hated “billionaires” and “millionaires.”

In sum, for the last nine years, the Left and the Democratic Party have routinely broken the law, spied upon private citizens, applied unequal enforcement of our laws, created a number of hoaxes that altered elections, tried to remove a president by any means necessary, and considered laws valuable if they stopped Trump, and even more valuable if their non-enforcement or reversals helped Trump.

The final irony? In order to destroy Trump, Democrats left a legacy that the laws, traditions, and protocols don’t matter—and now shortly they will miss them. Republicans may soon agree and remember their Thucydides that in time of civil strife, extremists do away with the very traditions and laws that might save them when the roles are reversed:

“In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities, human nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master, gladly showed itself ungoverned in passion, above respect for justice, and the enemy of all superiority; since revenge would not have been set above religion, and gain above justice, had it not been for the fatal power of envy. Indeed, men too often take upon themselves in the prosecution of their revenge to set the example of doing away with those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity, instead of allowing them to subsist against the day of danger when their aid may be required.”