Being disenfranchised is a pretty big deal in America. I am not talking about silly stuff like claiming that showing an ID to vote is essentially disenfranchising someone. I am not even talking in this case about actually preventing someone from voting. In what I believe is a mistaken impulse, we do everything we can to give everyone we can the right to vote and encourage people that can’t balance their checkbook to do so.
No, what I am talking about is making the votes of tens of millions of people functionally irrelevant. Letting them cast a ballot like in the old Soviet Union but not really following their will. I am talking about an idea I was tossing around last night: retroactive disenfranchisement. That is what is being done with the Kavanaugh nomination, a series of unprovable and really not all that serious accusations thrown out there from over 30 years ago in an attempt to thwart not just President Trump but those that voted for him.
This whole series of charges doesn’t have much to do with Brett Kavanaugh and pretty flimsy and unprovable allegations of drunken shenanigans when he was 17 or 18. I am a little younger than him and the drunken behavior of boys and girls when I was in high school and living in the dorms were pretty atrocious but most of it, like what Kavanaugh is less than credibly accused of, was harmless. Some people had drunken sex with people they might not have and in college one girl got pregnant her freshman year but otherwise it was just teen rebellion and the testing of waters of freedom.
It is also not about Roe v Wade, although that is a popular talking point. Certainly the Left sees the Roe decision in danger and abortion on demand is a sacred sacrament for liberals with the bodies of unborn children as an unholy offering to their goddess Choice. No matter who is President or by what margin they won, anyone that threatens their devotion to killing babies demands that the threat be defeated by any means necessary. But that isn’t it.
What is happening over the last week or so is a continuation of what we have seen since the disbelieving media, the Deep State and the cultural elite realized that Trump was going to win the election. It is the startled reaction of someone with a timid dog that suddenly turns and bites them. The reaction across the board from the Left, and a lot of “conservatives”, is summed up as “How dare you!”. It is shock and outrage that a population that they thought was tamed after decades of abuse had suddenly proven for the briefest moment to still have some defiance in them. Trump wasn’t supposed to be the nominee, he was an amusing sideshow. The nominee was supposed to be Marco Rubio or John Kasich, the latest lackluster sacrificial lamb that would tiptoe around Hillary out of fear of being called misogynistic. They would have lost gracefully and probably even wiped away a tear during their concession speech and waxed poetic about how marvelous it is that the “glass ceiling” has been broken.
Instead those darn deplorable voters proved that they were not house-trained and did the unthinkable. Even though Trump has so far not broken out the Nazi regalia we were warned he had hidden in his closet, it doesn’t matter. The slight suffered by our betters had to be punished. So we started getting the attempts to de-legitimize his Presidency almost immediately. First it was the “he didn’t win the popular vote” nonsense, even though we don’t elect Presidents based on the popular vote, liberals didn’t seem to care when Bill Clinton won with less than 50% of the popular vote and more people voted for candidates on the Right than on the Left in 2016. Then the “Russian collusion” narrative started and is still going on with no end and no evidence in sight. On we went to the “kids in cages” theme with liberals posting pics taken during the Obama administration and the least in touch people in America boldly proclaimed that enforcing the law was “not who we are”. In the middle of all of this we got the Roy Moore smear campaign which set the precedent for the charges against Brett Kavanaugh.
Now we see the latest, trying to destroy a man and his family as part of the quest to undo the 2016 elections. Our betters let us pretend to vote and they would in turn pretend to listen to us but otherwise they just did whatever they wanted and ignored us, all while importing a new, more pliable, electorate. Now they are going to burn the whole thing down to teach us our place and send us a message back in Ohio and Oklahoma and Alabama that we better do as we are told.
I think they may have underestimated what is going on in the country outside of the urban enclaves.
What happens when tens of millions of people are told: oh so sorry, I know we had an election but the results were just not what we can permit so your votes no longer count. What happens when you tell half of the country that they are supposed to be content to be wage-slaves and tax-cattle to fund the machinations of the elite, but that they simply can’t be trusted to make any meaningful decisions? When people realize that they have no say in their own government, that a small cabal of technocrats and managerial elites rule over us and use progressive religious jihadis like the antifa, to attack and cow anyone that steps out of line, what are they going to do? I don’t think they are going to stand for it and I don’t mean writing an angry letter to their Congressman. We stand on the precipice of something really dangerous in this country. People that just want to live their lives, work their job, raise their kids, worship or not as they see fit, and vote every fall to determine who runs the government are finding out that they will not be permitted to do that. The people that have formed the bedrock of this country are looking around and seeing that the country that they love and the world envies is on the verge of disappearing. What will these quiet, unassuming people do then?
I think we might be about to find out.