But instead of popular sovereignty, the Democrats gave them government by coercion. If a voter rejected the choices offered by the Affordable Care Act, he or she paid a fine; party leaders extended many rights to gay individuals and even decided where some children went to the bathroom over the outcry of parents and individual schools. This is government by authorities—select men and women—not government by the people. A free people rejects the loss of sovereignty, as they have done.
After the election, the leadership showed no evidence of moving back toward popular sovereignty. An obvious way to do that would be bargaining for their constituents with President Trump. The president is a negotiator. He even put his name on a book about negotiating. He is not a traditional Republican, so he might be open to some Democratic programs on health care in return for votes on his legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. Or he could reach agreement with Democrats on some tax changes. That’s what successful presidents, including Ronald Reagan, did.
The Democrats have rejected compromise. They chose to oppose all appointments and all policy changes. This achieves nothing for their constituents. Negotiating with President Trump was the better course. Their failure reinforces the image of the Democratic Party as ideologically driven by a vocal group promising a social revolution that such programs of redistribution can never achieve. No prominent Democrat in elected office has spoken out about the events at Middlebury College, where a distinguished social scientist, Charles Murray, was prevented from speaking by a group of students who disliked what they had been told about his views. What happened at Middlebury is part of a repeated series of attacks against free speech and heterodox ideas at Yale, Brandeis, Berkeley, and beyond.
The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects freedom of speech. It does not limit the protection to those we agree with. In fact, the whole purpose of it is to protect the speech of those we disagree with. The left, though, demands that we protect individuals from hearing speech that might offend them. Candidate Clinton supported a revision of the Constitution’s first amendment to protect people against unpleasant speech. Presumably, the government would decide what was acceptable. What a nightmare for freedom that would be.
