Democrats Just Can’t Help but Signal How They Plan to Lock in Permanent Power

“Mainstream” Democrats are doing a good job right now of telegraphing to America what they plan to do with national power the second they get it back. They plan to make it permanently theirs, by any means necessary.

You can be sure that they will be even more maniacally committed to this agenda following the Supreme Court’s 9-0 striking down of Virginia’s absurdly biased redistricting plan that would have effectively locked the GOP entirely out of power despite it being a divided state.

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and her new Democrat majority, who collectively campaigned on the idea of “affordability,” spent their first days in power pushing every loony leftist policy under the sun while doing their best to amass additional power for their party at the local and national levels.

They were suddenly impeded because as it turned out their redistricting scheme was so blatantly unconstitutional that it was not only rejected by the Virginia Supreme Court but by a unanimous decision at the Supreme Court of the U.S.

Even Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson couldn’t figure out how to finagle that one.

These defeats have only fueled the fire of the angry Democratic Party faithful who insist more must be done to rig the system in their favor.

And it’s hard to understate just how much the demand for raw, unrepentant power grabbing is becoming the norm on the left side of the political spectrum. At this point, even their dishonest but clever bait-and-switch strategy to seem moderate but rule like Mao is taking a back seat.

They just can’t restrain themselves from telling the whole country that their only real governing plan is to restore “democracy” by liquidating the Constitution, destroying the parts of the government they can’t control, and ensuring that elections—for whatever they’ll be worth after that—always go their way.

Here’s former Vice President Kamala Harris last week calling for a “no bad ideas brainstorm” that consisted of entirely bad ideas. She said Democrats need to think about abolishing the Electoral College, packing the Supreme Court, and adding two new Democrat-dominated states to the union.

That’s quite a plan for America’s future.

Obliterate not one, but two of America’s longstanding political institutions that committed the crime of not giving them exactly what they want right now, then add a few more politically friendly states to pad their voting advantage.

Notice that these had nothing to do with the economy, or improving America’s standing in the world, or really anything that would even conceivably make our lives better. They aren’t even bothering to make that pitch.

This was just a list to describe a blatant power grab, nothing less.

Now, one can dismiss this as just Harris’ ham-handed attempt to seem edgy to appeal to Democrat base voters. But I think she did capture the mindset of what is entirely mainstream in her party right now.

Sure, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a few other local leftist darlings are riding high on support for democratic socialism and all that. But a much broader base of Democrats is less concerned with specific redistributive policies and more concerned with power for the sake of power.

They want to recapture something that they had until very recently: total institutional, cultural, and political control.

The institutions are still mostly theirs, but those have taken a beating in this age of mistrust and decentralization. They were entirely convinced that at this point President Donald Trump would be in a jail cell, his supporters cowed and silenced.

It was supposed to be the Age of Obama forever, with the 2016 election being just a disturbing outlier produced by Russian collusion or something.

Then 2024 happened, and they saw that they’ve truly lost the ability to just rely on institutional inertia and legacy media to produce the political results they want. They’ve lost the plot, and that’s driving them insane.

The “No Kings” protesters are perhaps the best representative of this mindset. They are mostly aging, liberal Boomers used to getting their way in politics, used to being “IT,” but who are increasingly powerless and irrelevant. They don’t really care about “kings” or any of that nonsense.

What they are opposed to is a political system that allows their opponents to win and take the country in a different direction. This is what they are rebelling against.

Now their aim is to turn the whole nation into California. They want a one-party system where the assumption is that any real challenge to the Left’s dominance can simply be swept aside by last minute shenanigans, institutional deus ex machina.

That’s essentially what California Gov. Gavin Newsom said would happen in that state’s governor’s race if somehow two Republicans emerged victorious in the state’s open, jungle primary (which was meant to secure the power of incumbent Democrats, oops).

When they talk about restoring “democracy,” what they mean is that they want a political system that ensures Democrats simply can’t lose.

That the Left has become so open and brazen about its intent to grab power and pull up the drawbridge says a great deal about their respect for elections and “norms.”

The American people can’t say they weren’t warned.