The Left Thinks Losing Power Is Equivalent to ‘Authoritarianism’

If you listen to the Left’s elite opinion makers, you might think that the Trump administration’s current large-scale attempt to reform and reduce the scope of the vast federal bureaucracy is tantamount to dictatorship.

President Donald Trump is certainly launching a full-scale barrage against the administrative state. The left’s #Resistance from within has been feeble at best compared to the last Trump term, though the lawsuits and court injunctions are rolling in.

It’s hard to say what direction things will go on the legal front. Undoubtedly, the Supreme Court will be ruling on many administrative law cases in the near future.

In the meantime, leftists are having a full-on meltdown. They are accusing Trump and entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency of running a diabolical stealth government that’s ending “democracy,” by which they mean the unelected bureaucracy.

The Left seems to think that these moves represent some kind of attack on the “Constitution.”

Keep in mind, these same people were silent or even praised former President Joe Biden when he unilaterally forgave student loans (a move even Biden seemed to know wasn’t strictly constitutional), drew up proposals to pack the Supreme Court, and literally just declared a long ago defeated Equal Rights Amendment a part of the Constitution as one of his final acts.

Biden’s particular brand of toothless Caesarism, whereby the executive bureaucracy ran on autopilot to further a left-wing cultural revolution while the president literally snoozed, apparently triggered no alarm bells for America’s ruling class.

They are delivering dire warnings about Trump, though.

In a particularly silly piece written for The Atlantic, Harvard professor Steven Levitsky decried the Trump administration’s “New Authoritarianism.” He admitted that we aren’t likely to see a one-party dictatorship like Nazi Germany. How measured. Instead, what we will get is “competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition.”

It’s amusing to read this and remember that the piece is about Trump and not the previous president. You know, the administration that ruthlessly used its institutional power to unperson Trump after he lost, pushed Big Tech to censor Americans on social media, punished political enemies through a politicized FBI, and literally attempted to goad the courts into throwing Trump in jail on ticky-tack “crimes” while he was running for office.

Levitsky continued to note supposed examples of Trump’s authoritarianism, such as “replacing professional civil servants and policy specialists with loyalists in key public agencies.”

These hordes of so-called “professional civil servants” were only too happy to cause as much chaos for the previous Trump administration as they could. By what right do bureaucrats think they have an unlimited capacity to rule Americans without any form of accountability?

This country was founded on the idea of self-government. Replacing a king with millions of little Caesars with unchecked power is hardly what the Founding Fathers would call “freedom.”

The fact is our so-called nonpartisan civil servants have been almost monolithically aligned with the Left and the Democrat Party for a long time. When Biden took office in 2021, they assumed they had defeated any populist roadblock to their power for good and so acted like the woke petty tyrants that they were.

Fortunately, democracy intervened, and we now have an administration willing to go to the root of our government’s institutional rot. Thanks to DOGE and Musk we are finding out even more about the lunacy that we the people have been endlessly funding for generations.

And that’s why the ruling elite is shrieking “authoritarianism” over and over.

We are going through an actual transition in power. Isn’t that what the American people voted for? The abuses and corruption of our government are being wholly revealed. The power that ruled in Washington for a very long time is finally facing a reckoning.

So what the Left sees as authoritarianism is just the normal process of one party replacing another in a self-governing republic. They had become so accustomed to simply ruling and gatekeeping acceptable thought and speech in our society that a loss of power to them seems like tyranny.

When the Right complains about social media it’s almost always about censorship. When the Left complains, it’s almost always that there isn’t enough censorship. Do you see how this works?

A massive legal and governmental shift is underway and the Left is now being put in the position of the Right not long ago. The institutions they’ve relied on are crumbling, the deep state is under assault, and Big Tech is increasingly pleading with the new administration, insisting that it was mean old Biden and his henchmen who forced them to censor American citizens and embrace DEI.

This isn’t the result of authoritarianism. It’s a realignment, a political revolution that took place at the ballot box. That’s how our government is supposed to work. Elections matter once again.

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