By John F Di Leo -
“This is our year!”
It’s a declaration of confidence, or of hope, or of determination. A declaration known to people in many walks of life, from private to public.
Agents say it to actors and singers, as the Oscar, Emmy, and CMA nominations come out. “They’ve passed you over before, but this is our year!”
Coaches say it to sports teams, to inspire their players before the season opener. “Last year was lousy, but look at the schedule, look at the opposition, look at our great starters! This is our year!”
Families say it to each other on New Year’s Eve – especially after a year that saw them lose a job, or a business, or a friend. “Last year was lousy, but it’s all looking up now. This is our year!”
And just as it reflects everything else in this life, the world of politics reflects this too.
Politicians, political consultants, pundits and volunteers all look at every election season and seek to divine parallels with past years, hopefully favorable ones. They hope to find differences between this season and past wipeout years; they hunt for similarities with past landslides.
Democrats look for another 1932, another 1992; another 2006, another 2018.
Republicans pray to again enjoy a 1980, a 1984, a 1994, or at least – since Republicans tend to think small, not wanting to be greedy – another 2016, because even though a landslide would be great, just winning a narrow but unexpected victory would be enough.
2020 started out looking like a good year for the right. The Trump/Pence administration’s many policy successes were paying dividends: with economic growth off the charts, every American demographic was doing well – young and old, men and women, whites and blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Trouble spots across the world were settling down, the trade war with China was working out in our favor. The rebuilding of the military, the judiciary, and even the border wall were proceeding on schedule, and everything pointed to a landslide reelection for the Republican ticket.
But then came the China Virus.
Donald Trump did everything a president could, moving more quickly than traditional politicians of either party ever had. He shut down air travel with China, then with Europe, then with most of the world, to slow the infection’s spread. He immediately built a response team with Vice President Pence at the head, and mobilized American manufacturing to produce cleaning supplies, masks and other needed products domestically. He repurposed ships and other federal resources to be available in case healthcare facilities were overwhelmed, and he directed the FDA and other relevant federal agencies to fast-track the permitting, testing, and approval processes for pharmaceutical companies as they rose to the challenge.
All this… while Democrats in power, from cities to states to the federal House of Representatives, latched onto the tragedy of this disease to unconstitutionally lock down and burn our cities, and shut down whole states, shuttering American businesses by the hundreds of thousands, throwing millions out of work, undoing the bipartisan, multicultural Pax Americana that the Trump/Pence administration had so recently achieved.
Why?
However partisan a politician may be, why on earth would one do such a thing?
Because quietly, secretly, as soon as the first word of the spread of Covid-19 entered the world consciousness from a distant bioterror lab in Wuhan, the Democratic Party decided that “This Is Our Year.”
This has been their goal from the first sneeze, from the first cough, away across the ocean – to exacerbate the damage done by the pandemic so that the pain we suffer will help turn the public away from President Trump and his party when the time comes to vote.
The modern Democratic party, retooled and reborn in the turbulent 1960s, has spent its past fifty years keeping its extremism under wraps. But in 2020, they have let the cat out of the bag.
Today’s Democrats – from the socialist sorority of House freshmen known as The Squad all the way to their radical presidential ticket – are no longer hiding their radicalism. They don’t think they need to anymore.
The Biden/Harris campaign website is a panoply of statist provisions, weaponizing the federal government against the private sector across the board, from energy to education, from manufacturing to retail. Everything in the Biden/Harris campaign is about strengthening the regulatory state and increasing the citizenry’s net dependence on government.
The Left probably doesn’t read the works of Marx and Engels anymore. The socialist prose of the 1840s isn’t exactly readable, even for people who agree with such hogwash. But there is one aspect of Marxist dogma that the left has never forgotten, even though it may have to be read to them by others: it’s a concept known as the dialectic – the idea that the long march of history inevitably leads to socialism; there’s no stopping it.
The Left is drooling this year with anticipation that this is the year that the dialectic comes to America.
They think of 1789, when a bloodthirsty mob took over France and instituted the Reign of Terror. They think of 1917, when a bloodthirsty mob took over Russia and instituted Bolshevism. They remember the excitement of 1925 Italy and 1933 Germany, when the street hoods of national socialism took over those countries, and 1949 when Maoist socialism took over China.
The Left believes – not just hopes, but insists – that 2020 is their year to do the same in America. The modern Left can hardly believe that the spread of Covid-19 has given them this opportunity, but they are not going to miss the chance this nightmare year has given them.
As we watch these candidates – whether in Biden’s basement or on a public debate stage – we can see the almost manic anticipation in their eyes of the chance to become the new commissars, the rulers of a changed America, an America based not on individual liberty but on the all-powerful state.
Today’s Democrats see the chance to exercise real power, over their neighbors, over their rivals, over you and me. And they just can’t wait… because they are so certain that This Is Their Year.
Well, there have been times in the past when their side has thought that, and they have turned out to be wrong. Real Americans know that the Marxist dialectic is a falsehood, that there is no natural historical march toward socialism. Real Americans know that this City on a Hill, founded in celebration of individual rights during the Scottish Enlightenment, by the greatest generation in human history, has no reason to surrender its very essence in the face of petty tyrants.
What we have in 2020 is a contest of wills. The Left believes this is their year, their opportunity at last to rip up the Constitution for good, and remake America as a warmer Soviet Union, a prettier Red China, a cleaner Yugoslavia. They think they can simply Will it to be.
The Real America – the Right, the mainstream of a nation founded in the freedom philosophy – has an obligation: to remember and cherish our heritage, to defend this heritage at the ballot box, to stand up with an even stronger will, and refuse to lie down and be steamrolled.
This is America’s chance to show that that old 19th-century Marxist dream is a fiction, and that, in fact, the American Way is strong enough to withstand any onslaught, whether from foreign invasion or from internal subversives.
The Left thinks that 2020 is their year. This is our chance to show them they’re wrong.
The American dream – the limitless opportunity possible only through limited government – is and must remain paramount, now and forever.
Copyright 2020 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer and actor. A former county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party and a former chairman of Chicago’s Ethnic American Council, his columns have been found in Illinois Review since 2009.
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