This Election Is About Ideology, Not the Candidates

It makes little difference whether the Democrat candidate is Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or someone else. Both parties are guilty of incivility, hyperbole, hubris, and engendering turmoil. But, there is a binary choice in what this election means for freedom, prosperity, and security.

To deflect from their autocratic dogma and failures, including massive illegal immigration, compounding inflation, lawless prosecutors, spiraling crime, a two-tiered justice system, rampant racism, and international wars, progressives falsely attack Trump as an existential threat to democracy. In his Oval Office address after withdrawing, Biden repeatedly insisted that the “defense of democracy” is at stake.

January 6, 2021 was a dark day. Trump performed poorly. His language often is intemperate and ambiguous. His call for retribution through success, and humor about being dictator for a day, are injudicious. But while Trump may sometimes sound imperious, or get too cozy with dictators, his actions are generally constrained. As president, he shut down efforts to prosecute Hillary Clinton. His campaign focuses on policy differences.

By contrast, progressives fuel division and violence with brutal, crude, and vile ad hominem attacks. They anoint presidential candidates who have never received a single vote in a presidential primary.

To Hilary Clinton, conservatives are a “basket of deplorables,” and to enfeebled autarch Joe Biden, they are “semi-fascist” for demanding less government, due process, and individual freedoms. Congresswoman Maxine Waters told supporters to create a crowd to push back on Trump supporters. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh “you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.“ MSNBC’s Joe Scarbrough accused Trump of going “full on Hitler.” Biden declared that “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” Two weeks ago, Harris said Trump would be a dictator, round up peaceful protesters, throw them out of the country, and “terminate” the Constitution.

The far left claims that conservatives are law enforcement’s top domestic terrorism concern, and that anyone who opposes classifying people and allocating opportunities by melanin and gender identification is homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, racist, and since October 7, genocidal. It has become so repetitive for leftists to call normal behavior “racist,” that most Americans just roll their eyes or laugh. Only in a hallucinogenic nightmare is the far left, which classifies and persecutes people by race and gender, “antiracist,” while conservatives who strive for the colorblind society championed by Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement “racist” for doing so.

Beyond their vituperations, the left is both violent and authoritarian. In 2020, a summer of far left rioting left two dozen dead, more than $2 billion in property damage, and destroyed a federal courthouse. Progressives broadly endorsed the riots, and Harris led efforts to bail out the demonstrators.

At the behest of progressives, the Biden-Harris administration disregards the Constitution, Supreme Court, and federal law, including by opening our borders to millions of illegal immigrants, forgiving student loans, stopping evictions, issuing “whole-of-government” executive orders to make decisions by race in all federal programs, employment, promotions and contracting, and unleashing an unprecedented censorship campaign that threatens our most cherished liberty.

The far left can’t win a debate on the facts. Their bag of tricks centers on banning and changing the meanings of well-understood words, and tarnishing as privileged white supremacists those who support values such as merit, hard work, religion, and even math. Progressives elevate eugenics and victimhood, and enforce their will by administrative fiat, censorship, forcing out adversaries, and abusing the power of the State to gag and imprison their opponents.

Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Leader Steve Scalise and members of the Republican baseball team, Justice Kavanaugh and now Donald Trump – Republicans all – have been assassins’ targets.

Progressive dogma is a fierce, culturally Marxist philosophy that: (1) demands all policies, resources and opportunities be allocated in accordance with a benighted view of oppressors and victims centered on race, sex, and sexual orientation; (2) believes children are wards of the state to be indoctrinated by educators, while physically cared for by parents; (3) represses religion for being what Karl Marx described as “the opium of the people;” and (4) places a green agenda, DEI, and the rights of criminals above free speech, assembly, judicial process and rights of petition. Progressives deny that ISIS and Hamas are terrorists, oppose Israel’s right of defense, because Jews are “oppressors,” and believe children may select irreversible gender reassignment surgery without parental consent.

The faux Russian collusion conspiracy, defunding police, delegitimizing conservative justices, and claims that Republicans are threats to democracy is the sophistry of leftists who despise traditional values, family, faith, equal opportunity, individual rights, Western culture, industriousness, and performance. As the ultimate centralization of authority, the far left intelligentsia seeks a liberal, rules-based international order that overrides national sovereignty.

After 50 years of progressive gains, and 12 years of Obama-Biden, the consequences of another four years of far left government would be devastating. This election is about far more than imperfect candidates. It is about competing visions for America and whether the Administrative State and international order stand in loco parentis or whether each of us remains the master of our fates.

Kenin M. Spivak is founder and chairman of SMI Group LLC, an international consulting firm and investment bank. 

This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.