Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

The choice is ours

- Victor Davis Hanson Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institutio­n, Stanford University.

We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary. The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020. It was absorbed by hard-left ideologues. They were bent on radically altering or hijacking existing institutio­ns to force radical equality-of-result agendas that otherwise do not earn majority support.

The American people want affordable power and fuel and energy autonomy. They do not want a Green New Deal that results in dependence on the Middle East. They want fiscal sobriety, not a permanent stagflatio­nary economy marked by bank failures, soaring interest rates, crony capitalism, and subsidies for those who choose not to work.

They know no country can exist without a border, much less while offering blank checks to foreign cartels that kill 100,000 Americans yearly. They demand realist deterrence abroad, not the current woke military whose erosion is spelling the end to American credibilit­y and global stability.

To implement such an unpopular program, the new left must radically alter our institutio­ns.

So the “Democrats” periodical­ly threaten to pack the courts, end the filibuster, destroy the Electoral College, and override the states’ prerogativ­es to establish balloting laws.

They deny the committee assignment­s of the House minority leader. They engage in stunts like tearing up the State of the Union address on national television. With impunity they mob the homes of Supreme Court justices to leverage their decisions.

This revolution is run by elites and is a topdown operation.

University deans all but prompt students to disrupt invited campus speakers. District attorneys release violent arrested criminals without bail.

The Pentagon lectures the country on its supposed innate racism, even as the United States continues to lose wars abroad, abandons billions of dollars of equipment to terrorists, and allows communist China to surveil domestic American military bases with impunity.

Words change their meanings. “Racist” now means “don’t dare object.” “Diversity” means tired orthodoxy. “Equity” is a synonym for bias. “Inclusion” ensures exclusion.

Institutio­ns are no longer recognizab­le. The FBI as we knew it no longer exists. Three former FBI directors either lied under oath to federal investigat­ors or pleaded amnesia in congressio­nal testimonie­s.

The IRS is weaponized against political opponents of the Democrats. The Department of Justice is more likely to send the FBI after grammar school parents than mobs threatenin­g the homes of Supreme Court justices.

Still, to thoroughly erase America, our Jacobins must radically alter our customs and traditions.

So under the cover of the covid-19 quarantine­s, election day was made irrelevant. In the new America, 70 percent did not vote on the designated day but, fueled by third-party vote harvesting and relaxation of audits of non-election-day ballots, extended the vote over a period of several weeks.

Like the Jacobins, names and dates had to be radically transforme­d. So 1619, not 1776, is now America’s birthdate and, we are told, an ignominiou­s one.

Statues are toppled, careers Trotskyize­d.

What triggered the collective madness and this Jacobin takeover?

The Left’s perfect storm of the 120 days of riot, death, arson and looting of 2020? The covid-19 pandemic? The disastrous two-year lockdown? The 2016 election of the outsider Donald Trump?

All those catalysts and more.

America now has three potential futures, and two are bad. 1. The Jacobins have two more years to finish what they started as the founders’ dream descends into our worst nightmare.

2. The revolution has so warped our legal system, our voting on election day, and the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, and the IRS, that even a despised unpopular left will “win” elections.

3. New York Prosecutor Alvin Bragg has jumped the shark. His pathetic prosecutio­n is so patently incoherent, illiberal, and in spirit anti-American that two-thirds of the country will soon conclude the center is not holding. The Jacobins’ reign of terror is unsustaina­ble. And so in 2024 the left will not be defeated, but so defeated so that it is utterly discredite­d.

The choice is ours.

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