Does A Headline With A Question Mark Imply Its Own Answer?

     You could certainly be forgiven for getting that impression. But in the meantime, such headlines beckon to us in tones of sweet reason that isn’t consistent with the record.

     Flash back to 2009. A number of Republicans, stunned by Obama’s election as President, begin a grass-roots movement to take back their party. The movement gains momentum and, over the next several elections, Republican officeholders find themselves in the fight for their political lives. Except it’s not against Democratic rivals but against members of their own party. Voters took to the polls and long-term incumbents soon found themselves tossed out of office. Sound familiar? It should. Except it isn’t Republicans seeing their party torn apart. This time, it is the Democratic Party, thanks to the Democratic-Socialists. It’s time to get out the popcorn and to sit back and watch what happens in the next installment of “How the Democrats Turn”.

     No one batted an eye when Bernie Sanders, self-described “independent” and hero of democratic-socialists around the country, ran for president on the Democratic ticket. Not even the Democratic National Committee seemed bothered, In fact, it embraced Bernie, offering him up as their sacrificial lamb to the anointed one, Hillary Clinton. What they didn’t foresee was that, by giving Bernie a national platform, they gave his political ideas legitimacy. In doing so, they brought on their own form of the Tea Party and, if you don’t mind my saying so, it couldn’t happen to a “nicer” political party.

     But the Tea Party – supposedly the “Tea” was an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already” was fiercely resisted by the GOP Establishment. Republicans in high office had been defaulting on their promises to restrain and (hopefully) downsize the federal Leviathan. The Democrats’ analogue, if such persons as Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez really do represent an “uprising” among Democrats, merely exhorts the party to go further, faster, in the direction in which it’s been headed for a century.

     I rather suspect that the “Not Taxed Enough Party” -- Thank you, Sarah Hoyt, for that translation – is a fabrication by the Democrat Establishment. They could well be using it to slide the Overton Window further to the left. Such a leftward shift of the window of acceptable public discourse could be seen as a way to limit the ambitions of the Trump Administration and to pre-constrain those of its successors.

     A great part of the art of politics, including the machinations of its media handmaidens, is prestidigitation: luring the public’s attention away from what’s really being plotted and planned with well timed distractions of all sorts. For politics is the pursuit of power. Ordinary people don’t like it when others assert power over them, no matter how high-minded the representations of the power-seeker might appear. Therefore, those who seek power must constantly work to disguise their intentions. As we mathematical types like to say, Quod Erat Demonstrandum.