Democrat Debate: Behold the Glory of the Church of the State

All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State – Benito Mussolini

All Democrats on stage Tuesday viscerally agree with that statement, and I’ll debate anyone who thinks otherwise.

All we heard about from these people was the towering glory of government.  To them, the private sector is a tiny vestigial organ in the American body, existing only to pump fresh blood into the mighty State from which all good things flow.

None of these candidates had a single good word to say about private-sector America.  On the contrary, they spent all night wildly accusing it of crimes, without offering any evidence or naming suspects.  They kept boasting about how many years they’ve spent in government “service” – and then Hillary Clinton hilariously claimed she was an “outsider” candidate, because she has a vagina.

None of these candidates are “outsiders” in even the remotest sense of the term.  They don’t think there is an “outside.”  Every aspect of private life and commerce demands government control or subsidy to them.  Americans longing to be free can dream of a day when they don’t have to worry some fatcat politician decides they earn too much money, but today is not that day.

Bernie Sanders spends a lot of time bellyaching about Wall Street “criminals” and “casino capitalism,” but he never names any crooks or specifies their crimes, because he’s a blowhard coward who doesn’t want to get sued for libel.  I have the name of a suspicious character who made a billion dollars disappear for you to chew on, Bernie: Jon Corzine.  But he’s a Democrat in good standing, former Senator and governor, big Obama bundler, so he’s untouchable, right?

It’s funny how Obama apologists spent years pointing at the stock market as the sole source of good news in his dreary economy, but now they all want to rail against the market as a shady craps game where the Little Guy always loses, unless Big Government steps in to roll the dice.  It’s also amusing how they so desperately want us to forget that Democrat politicians created the subprime crisis, and lied through their teeth to protect it from oversight during the Bush years.  The bottom line is that when you hear Democrats thunder against evil capitalists, they mean the capitalists who haven’t purchased indulgences from them.  They think of government as a protection racket, with themselves as big bosses.  The actual Mafia is much less sanctimonious about what it does.

Musssolini’s name for his 1920s Italian version of this political catechism is “corporatism,” and it was quite popular among FDR’s people until the shooting started. Amusingly enough, Mussolini pulled his catechism out of Catholic social doctrine, which tries to combine decentralized action within a common ethos. 

These Democrats also view politics as a religion, the glorious Church of the State.  As you can tell from listening to their irresponsible prattle about how “climate change” is America’s big national security threat, the Church of the State gets along very well with the Church of Global Warming.  Why not?  Imaginary demons are very useful for the Democrat priesthood.  There are no consequences for failure.  Hillary had a few sweaty moments when she tried to wave off the bloody catastrophe of Libya, but since climate change isn’t real, there is no such wreckage to clean up when idiotic policies fail.

Conversely, the climate change demon will never be exorcised; if the current “global warming pause” stretches from two decades out to five, your grandchildren will be watching Democrats wave around the latest hot-off-the-griddle doomsday computer models and warning that only another hundred billion paid to their green energy cronies can hold the polar ice caps together.

The most striking demonstration of politics-as-religion in the Democrat debate was when Hillary brushed off questions about her vote for the Iraq War by saying Obama purified her by tapping her for Secretary of State.  It’s as though Hillary were an errant bishop, and Pope Obama absolved her Iraqi sins in some political ritual.

Or take Bernie Sanders mumbling that the crisis at the Department of Veterans Affairs was “solved” because a certain amount of money had been thrown at it.  This is a signature feature of the Church of the State.  Taxpayer dollars are their communion wafers.  Nothing matters except the amount of money government spends on a problem.  The disastrous outcomes are irrelevant.  If the government isn’t spending enough money, then heartless America doesn’t care about the problem.  You could write the holy scripture of the Church of the State on an index card with a crayon.

Gun control is the catchism of this twisted church, and abortion is its sacrament.  It’s a strange turn of events when the confessed socialist on stage becomes the voice of reason on gun control, but there was Bernie Sanders, arguing against sleazy tactics intended to bankrupt gun companies and make firearms all but impossible for law-abiding citizens to purchase, without doing the hard work of passing gun control laws or repealing the Second Amendment.  Bernie is a fundamentalist in the Church of the State.  He wants its power and majesty revealed to all, not imposed quietly through slip-and-fall lawyer tactics.

In addition to the political reality of the Second Amendment having become a Republican issue, Democrats who worship at the altar of Big Government despise the notion of self-reliant citizens protecting themselves, and bearing arms against a potentially tyrannical State.  Both of those notions are pure sacrilege to them.  Public safety is the exclusive concern of the political elite, who distribute it as they see fit, with due regard for the sensibilities of powerful activist groups.  No citizen should be thinking heretical thoughts about revolution.  When Bernie Sanders gushes about “revolution,” he means American citizens making war against other citizens, not the blessed State and its clergy.

Naturally, abortion is sacred, because it also means liberation from personal responsibility, and destroys independence.  The great thing about Democrat abortion scripture is that it tricks women into thinking the Left values their independence, because it grants them sexual license.  In truth, Democrat culture leads to broken homes, the devaluation of marriage, and dependency upon the State.  Abortion scripture teaches people to think of human life as a problem to be solved, and only the State can solve it.

Has there been a more unintentionally humorous moment in this campaign season than Hillary Clinton claiming that Republican efforts to defund a powerful liberal constituency and top Democrat Party donor, Planned Parenthood, represented an “expansion of government?”  It sounds insane to outsiders, but within the cloisters of the Church of the State, it makes perfect sense.  Democrat interest groups are entitled to other peoples’ money.  Turning off the cash spigots is tyranny.

Also, pro-lifers make great hate fetishes for liberal constituents, when the global warming demon needs to take a smoke break.  Of course the Church of the State hates all other religions, unless they are willing to abase themselves and become useful to socialism.  Pope Francis just got a stern lesson in that principle, didn’t he?  He worked so hard to make himself useful to the Left, but at the first whiff of heresy against the Church of the State – a meeting with that horrible woman in Kentucky who dared to place her own faith above sacred State doctrine! – he was swarmed by angry online mobs and torn to virtual pieces.

All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.  It’s the prayer everyone on that debate stage recited in unison.  There is nothing they think the government should not control, no amount of private wealth it should not consider confiscating, no part of this bloated State that could be administered more efficiently by the private sector.  The Democrats are growing quite hostile toward dissent, and have even been speculating that midterm congressional elections should be done away with, because Congress should be a rump institution serving the pleasure of an all-powerful executive.  One election every four years is plenty; all disagreement after that is “gridlock.”  It won’t work any better here than it did in Mussolini’s Italy, but that won’t stop his intellectual heirs from keeping the faith alive.