The Left Pursues Its Goals By Any Means Necessary

Stephen Kershnar

By Any Means Necessary

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

October 29, 2018

The American left have clear goals. However, their unprincipled pursuit of them is a troubling indication of what can be expected of them when they next regain power.  

            Democrats have three central goals. First, they want to socialize as much of the economy as they can. In particular, many of their leaders want to socialize medicine (Medicare for all), education (make college free), and elections (publicly finance elections). Other sectors, such as manufacturing and high tech, they wish to regulate as much as possible in pursuit of their views on discrimination, diversity, the environment, healthcare, privacy, retirement, safety, unions, etc. Sometimes this is to be done via regulation, other times via government contracts, subsidies, and tax breaks.    

            Second, they want an interventionist foreign policy. Obama’s war on Libya, meddling in Syria, continuing Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and frequent use of drone killings was unsurprising. Earlier, Bill Clinton involved us in wars in Serbia and Somalia. Historically, Democratic presidents oversaw the two world wars as well as the Korean and Vietnam wars. This tendency to get the U.S. mired in wars, some of which were not in the U.S.’s interest, is different from some Republicans, although not left-leaning ones such as the Bush dynasty and John McCain.   

            Third, Democrats reject the Constitution as envisioned by the country’s founding fathers. They reject the notion that the federal government has few and enumerated powers. Instead, they view the Commerce Clause as permitting Washington’s vast centralized control. They also reject the founders’ vision of limits on the police’s power to search (Fourth Amendment), individual gun rights (Second Amendment), and restricted eminent domain and regulatory powers (Fifth Amendment). Consider, for example, how Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer would have ruled on most of these issues. The founding fathers would have thought that the Constitution disallows Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the current smorgasbord of welfare programs. These programs result in the federal government taking and spending more than one in five of the dollars Americans earn.  

            These goals reflect a coherent, albeit mistaken, vision of centralized-and-powerful government as necessary to correct and, in some cases, replace the free market. The left views the Constitution as open-ended and thus allowing for reinterpretation, if not rewriting. On this vision, the hands of white men dead centuries ago should not reach out and control our destiny.

  

            What is disturbing is the any-means-necessary way that the left pursues these goals. One area in which this occurs is in their attempts to rein in speech. The American left simply does not believe in free speech like it used to. Facebook, Google, and Twitter all censor political speech. While this is legal because they are private companies, one would expect the American left to join the right in denouncing such censorship. Instead, crickets.

In academia, campus administrators try to censor, regulate, and chill speech as much robust discussion of race, gender, sex, etc. as they can get away with (see, for example, Michigan, Stanford, and Wisconsin). The courts have had to repeatedly slap them down.

The courts have had to protect religious speech on gay marriage (see Masterpiece Cakeshop) and spending on political speech (see Citizens United) as leftist state officials tried to clamp down on it. Elsewhere, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, campus protesters, and political mobs intimidate, and sometimes smash, those with whom they disagree. Consider, for example, the violence in Berkeley, Charlottesville, Portland, and Washington D.C.  

            A second area in which the any-means-necessary stance can be seen is in the tolerance of criminality in politics. Contra to the left’s stance, it is clearly unlawful for tens of millions of illegal aliens to work, live, and use fraudulent documents in the U.S. Similarly unlawful is their ignoring hearings regarding their often spurious claims for asylum.

            Sanctuary cities involve state and local authorities refusing to participate and, in some cases, preventing the federal government from finding and returning illegal aliens. This refusal to participate in the federal government’s efforts might be legal, depending on the degree to which they refrain from helping the federal government rather than blocking it. Still, if Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi decided to be sanctuary states with regard to the environmental regulation, gay marriage, or transgender bathroom use, the left would need fainting couches.  

            Everyone who closely followed the FBI and Department of Justice’s Russia investigation knows that leading officials were neck deep in criminality and corruption. Consider, for example, those who misled the FISA court, leaked information to the press, put a spy into the Trump campaign, lied to Congress, hid and slow-walked documents to keep them from Congress, or tanked an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s crimes. For example, no adult thinker believes that Clinton’s minions were permitted destroy evidence under subpoena. The list of leading FBI and DOJ officials who have been fired or demoted because of misconduct is impressive. Here are just a few: James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok. Other officials are so conflicted that in a sane world they would never be permitted to oversee the investigation (see, for example, Rob Rosenstein and Robert Mueller) and would be forever banned from government.

            A third area of the any-means-necessary approach has to do with the double-standards that infect the left. Claiming that merit matters and then flagrantly discriminating against Asians students is one example (see, for example, Harvard). Another is the different attitudes toward sexual-harassment allegations the left has with regard to Brett Kavanaugh when it still celebrates Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy and shields Keith Ellison. A third instance is the deafening silence when the Obama administration ran up the debt to the point that it is larger than the economy. Now that Obama is out of power, the left now worries about fiscal responsibility. 

   

            One can understand why Democrats and the left want to pursue socialism, interventionism, and rewrite of the Constitution. The any-means-necessary pursuit of it, though, is disturbing.