Our choice next week has been billed widely as ‘the most consequential election of a lifetime.’
On so many issues, this is true.
But no American institution faces a more existential threat on November 3rd than that of limited government.
This is limited government’s Helm’s Deep. The final battle. The last stand.
If Democrat Party leaders are simply held to the standard of their own rhetoric, the American people can plainly see how radical they have become.
By their own talking points, our country is inherently flawed and needs revolutionary transformation.
The Democrat Party platform inserts government into nearly every aspect of American life. “Biden’s platform is a risky love letter to social justice warriors and those who believe capitalism is the root of all evil,” writes the Boston Herald.
Government is spoon-fed as the only solution. Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing became the Democrats’ soapbox for government-run healthcare. Using poster-sized pictures of Americans with health conditions, they argued that the Affordable Care Act was their only hope.
Anything the government runs becomes less effective, less efficient, and enormously costly.
The healthcare industry can be reformed to make it more affordable. Costly regulation props up insurance conglomerates that keep healthcare costs high. Let the market be the great equalizer that it is.
The same goes for jobs and wealth in this country. Government wealth redistribution can only bring people down to a common denominator. Only a free people can build wealth across the board.
For every scenario in which the Democrats create a false binary between government or nothing, there is a people-based alternative.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris waffle on the Green New Deal. It was promoted on their campaign website and voted for by Senator Harris, but they both denied supporting it in the debates. They know what it means to the size of government. They know what it will cost the American people. They want to enact it, but don’t want to be blamed for it.
A Biden Harris administration will put up no earnest resistance to other massive government overhauls from a far-left that is rapidly overtaking the Democratic Party.
The Democrats have lost the dialogue within their party and among their leaders about how big government should be, and where government influence should end within American life.
They have very nearly succeeded in shifting attention away from their designs of radical government overhaul, and making this election entirely about the personality of Donald Trump.
And America’s limited government system can’t be defeated through legislation alone.
Minds and hearts have to be complicit and obedient for the government to grow.
Here again, no hyperbole is needed. The left should simply be held to the standard of their own actions and statements.
America as an experiment in bold and unique individual freedom is under attack. It’s no longer extreme to question the motives of America’s founders or claim that her flaws are irredeemable.
The left has seeded a tribalism by reducing self-worth to the group that one identifies with. Freedom of speech is now second to compliance with an accepted orthodoxy on the campus or in the Twitterverse. Censorship and doxing await the noncompliant.
Government constraints are central to the design of America. To unshackle it will be permanent and irreversible.
Opposition to unbridled government growth is increasingly ridiculed and belittled as “chumps,” “deplorables,” and the “anti-science” crowd. Some leftist personalities have recommended that this “existential threat” must be “prosecuted” and “eradicated from society.”
With so much at stake, this election is the last stand of limited government.
But it won’t be the last, last stand. If this radical vision for government takeover isn’t thoroughly rejected, it will fester and embolden until the next election.
So once more, unto the breach for limited government. May the potential for a socialist revolution meet its deathblow at the ballot box next week.
Bryan Griffin of the London Center for Policy Research is a lawyer and author who specializes in American policy in the Middle East.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.