In response to last week’s editorial “None Dare Call It A Republic,” one reader said I&I prefers “the term republic over democracy because” we “like the Republican Party” and “don’t like the Democratic Party.” Therefore we refuse to use the word “Democratic” because it “sounds just like the word ‘democratic.’” We can’t say we like the Republican Party, but we can say we despise the Democratic Party. Read on and we’ll tell you why.

First, though, take a look at the reader’s full comment, found here. He calls us ignorant, which is fine – he’s entitled to his opinion. But his statement reminds us quite a bit of the gibberish yakked up by Joe Biden in last year’s presidential debate, which was so incoherent that in one instance Donald Trump said “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

But we understand enough of what our dedicated reader said to feel that it would be helpful to explain why we don’t like the Democratic Party, and not just so readers will understand but also to make it clear just how dissolute that party is.

We could start with its lust for big government and all that comes with it: steep taxes, cruel regulation, appalling violations of property rights and an imperious and ever-hungry administrative state.

Or we could frame our argument in terms of civil society vs. political society, with the Democrats hard in favor of the latter, which is a serial violator of liberty.

Instead we’ll focus on what the Democrats want over all: a revolution.

Don’t mistake this “revolution” for any similarities with our own war for independence from the British crown. That war was fought to slough off the heavy hand of government and found a nation built on liberty and independence.

The Democrats want a revolution that would turn that achievement on its head.

We know this because the late David Horowitz has provided “the receipts,” as the kids would say. In his book “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model,” he recounts what a Students for a Democratic Society radical wrote during the turbulent 1960s:

The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.

“In other words the cause,” says Horowitz, originally a far-left activist who later committed his life to the cause of freedom, “whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.”

This is why the “big tent” Democratic Party attracts disparate groups, such as environmental activists, eager central planners, redistributionists, anti-gun scolds, antifa goons, COVID tyrants, neo-New Dealers, radical Islamists, militant transgender moms, pride cultists, race hustlers, criminal coddlers, infanticide advocates, male-hating feminists, DEI zealots, busybodies, nannies, groomers, dancing geriatrics and raging protesters who have no idea what they’re protesting.

(Why does this list remind us of the “Blazing Saddles” scene in which the scheming Hedley Lamarr, played brilliantly by Harvey Korman, ordered Slim Pickens’ Taggart to round up a gang of “rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men …”?)

That the groups listed above have little to nothing in common yet fit snugly together is no mystery. Their grievances are not their grievances, they are merely means for a revolution, or, as we sometimes seem to be heading toward, a civil war.

The Democratic Party’s intersectional politics are why Greta Thunberg can shift from climate warrior to a Hamasnik wearing an Arafat keffiyeh (also known as the “hipster swastika”) and no one on the left blinks. They furnished the stage for Barack Obama to promise that if elected, he’d get busy “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” and be cheered as if he were a deliverer having descended from Olympus.

The revolution that the Democratic Party has been pressing for at least six decades would abolish capitalism and free markets, seize the means of production, destroy the nuclear family, erase Christianity and Judaism, defund law enforcement, reopen the borders, censor speech, pack the Supreme Court, ration energy and health care, overturn our civil order and uproot Western civilization.

Our “democracy loving” Democrats want a regime they fully control, a subservient proletariat, unchallengeable compliance, all life “within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

We hope we’re wrong, that one day rather than saying “we told you so,” we’re admitting our mistake. It would be best for our nation if that’s how it turns out. What makes us doubt that will happen is the Democratic Party, as constructed, does not want what’s in the best interests of the country, but instead wants what’s in the best interest of its political power.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board