The Democrat Insurgency

Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
February 26, 2006

I would assert that the domestic conflict the current Bush Administration — along with a majority of the American people, who cherish democracy and liberty and who deplore terrorism and dictatorial governance in any of their manifestations — is engaged against is nothing less than the western equivalent of a terrorist insurgency. In other words, Democrats' response to being muscled from power by legitimate political and electoral means has been remarkably similar to the response of the Islamists who were unseated by the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Each has mounted and sustained an insurgency aimed at reinstating administrations that stood for, at the very least, overwhelming centralized governmental control over the lives of their citizens.

In light of a paradigm shift such as I've described, just imagine how you'd feel if your political party, which had stood for a powerful central government that would exercise control over virtually every aspect of its citizens' lives, had been driven from power. Imagine that your political juggernaut — which was characterized not only by its virtually absolute legislative and judicial control but also its control over the communications media that determined what your country's citizens could hear and see — was in danger of becoming irrelevant, if not extinct, in the wake of the aforementioned sea-change.

And then imagine that in place of your broadly-powerful regime there emerged an administration which championed individual rights, an administration that stood for decentralization of power, for transferring political control over its citizens' lives to the citizens themselves, an administration that was supported by and gained strength from the fact that communications media were evolving to the point where a broad variety of viewpoints was represented, where the marketplace of ideas — and not simply political expediency — determined what news and what political viewpoints were available to its citizens.

The response of the deposed Baathist Party in Iraq to just such an outcome has taken the form of a terrorist insurgency whose only tactic has been to destroy, by any means possible, every target sympathetic to the impulse toward giving a say in their lives to Iraqi citizens. The response of the Democrat Party in America to their recent equally crushing loss of power and influence has been, absent IEDs, RPGs, and homicide bombers, categorically similar to that of the Iraqi "insurgents."

The mainstream left-liberal American and international media — the same people who are more and more having to defer to the increasingly democratized communications milieu comprised of the internet, talk radio, and at least one cable news network — have continued to flaunt the term "insurgency," arguably in order to downplay the unacceptability of tactics used by Islamists against the United States and Iraqi forces deployed to provide security and to insure that a government of the people is installed in Iraq.

Indeed, there has emerged among many American print and electronic "journalists" a palpable sense, almost, of "glee," that their own country was encountering difficulties in exporting democracy to the Middle East through its incursion into Iraq. (That the term "insurgents" has not to this point been applied by mainstream media to Democrats only reinforces my thesis in this piece.)
The term "insurgency" seems to have come to stand for, at least among left-leaning American journalists, a "legitimate" force opposing what they (the aforementioned journalists) have been all too willing to mis-characterize as a contemporary iteration of American Imperialism. In other words, if it can be construed as working against American interests, then it can be marshalled as yet one more journalistic weapon in the arsenal against perceived American militarism and in support of the Islamist "insurgency."

Indeed, among those on the left, the word "insurgency" has acquired a kind of clandestine, nod-and-a-wink legitimacy, as Wolf Blitzer and others of his leftist-biased ilk have used it to describe the opposition in Iraq to a democracy that might ultimately result in a positive outcome, not only for our President's foreign policy, but in the ultimate democratization of Iraq's citizens, not to mention the other citizens of our planet.

Never mind that in the past year alone millions of Iraqis chose to vote in national elections, thus expressly and at enormous personal risk demonstrating their support for the installation of a democratic government in their country. And never mind that these same Iraqi citizens daily face hardships, including the prospect of random death at the hands of Islamist terrorists who wantonly and willfully murder their own fellow ethnic and religious brethren in the name of some finally insupportable Islamist religious precept that most Americans, not to mention most Muslims, simply cannot even entertain.

And never mind that the even deeper principle at stake amounts to nothing less than a positively humanistic resolution of western democracies' war against a global terrorist enemy that would reduce all the citizens of our planet to the level of subjects of an Islamist master more brutal by orders of magnitude than, for instance, any English medieval lord — to cite but one of many instances that might be offered in opposition to this notion — could have thought of being.

The front page of the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition recently featured what I would characterize as a grim, albeit ingenuous, characterization by one of that paper's Iraq correspondents of the growing difficulties of maintaining security in Iraq ("Under the Gun," by Farnaz Fassihi, February 18, 2005). Nor do the more recent outbreaks of sectarian violence argue that the situation in Iraq is improving. The message is clear: It will take nothing less than an all-out effort by American interests to keep the Islamist forces of chaos and nihilism from undermining the impulse for decency and positive democratic change in that country.

The same can be said of what will be required to repulse the Democrat insurgency currently under way within our own borders. While I won't pretend that the threats posed by Dem insurgents such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are quite as murderously immediate as those posed by Islamist terrorists operating in Iraq, I will nonetheless assert that the long-term effects of U.S. Democrats' destructive criticism, of their intransigence and implicit lack of commitment to the positive values on which our nation has been founded, and based on which we pursue our current military policy in Iraq, are no less deleterious with regard to democracy and the rule of law in the United States than are those of Islamist terrorists to the goal of implementing a democratic government in Iraq.

Since American Democrat-left-liberals are no longer able to implement from a position of political power their blatantly Marxist-socialist-totalitarian agenda, they have been relegated to attacking in any way they can the forces and institutions that represent for most Americans and for many people around the world the chance to have a legitimate voice in their own affairs, the opportunity to worship freely no matter what religion they espouse, and the hope that their culture will not be subsumed by some sort of illegitimate collectivist vision of how things "ought to be."

Because that is precisely what the current Democrat insurgency (taking its lead, it would seem, from its insurgent counterpart in Iraq) is proposing, albeit by default, by failing to offer any positive proposals in support of its agenda. Translation: Democrats, in the absence of any demonstrable positive solutions for the problems — including dramatically revising funding for Social Security and revamping Medicare, among many others — seem to have resorted to a "take no prisoners" strategy.

Like the Marxists of the Frankfurt School in the 1920s, whose "Critical Theory of Society" advocated that leftists only criticize and denigrate the positions and proposals of their adversaries while offering no constructive alternatives in the debate on social and political issues, today's Democrats, like their communist antecedents, seem to be incapable of offering even so much as the most rudimentary positive alternatives to the Republican positions and programs they purport to oppose.

Democrats have thus far demonstrated nothing beyond the fact of their faith in the principle that if you attack indiscriminately anything and everything that is positive in your opponents' agenda, you will likely manage to position yourself as the voice of a constituency estranged from precisely the political and moral and spiritual values that western democracy stands for. To my ear, this sounds uncomfortably like what the terrorists in Iraq are trying to effect.

All I can say is "Good luck" to any political figure or party that determines it's in his, her, or their best interests to buck the expressed will of the American people. I'm talking about the will of the people to elect regional and national representatives who share with their constituencies an overwhelming commitment and adherence to the values that a significant majority of Americans hold.

A majority of Americans already intuitively understands the similarities between the goals of the insurgency in Iraq and those of the Democrat insurgents in our country. The result in both countries will ultimately be — although not without a profound and perhaps prolonged struggle — victory for the positive values on which our own country has thrived and on which incipient middle eastern democracies will come to build new outposts of personal and national freedom.