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The next time you drive down a freeway on a clear day, look up. You might notice what looks like an airliner suspended in mid-air. All you need is the right angle and distance from the plane and the right velocity of the clouds behind it, and an airliner speeding at 500 knots can look to hang in the sky, motionless. So, too, may today's Democrats look stationary even as they rapidly radicalize to the left.
As more Americans start to pay attention to the upcoming midterm elections, what they will find is a Democratic Party racing to the left at the speed of a jet plane. They will find coming from the opposite direction a Republican Party moving to the right at the speed of ordinary traffic.
Some will think they see the converse. They will be tricked by an illusion. A moving backdrop of elite Leftism across global and political institutions will from every angle set the agenda and change the subject to suit the optics of the Democratic Party. It's just enough to trick the casual voter into thinking that the Republicans are as extreme as the Democrats claim them to be and that the Democrats are not extreme at all.
Take the Supreme Court. Democrats want to end the over-215-year-old Senate filibuster and to stuff the Court with new Justices. The Democratic incumbent in Georgia's Senate race confirmed in a campaign debate that he's open to the scheme. His opponent, Herschel Walker, confirmed that he's not. The Ohio Democratic candidate for Senate said in a campaign debate that he would have multiple "litmus tests" for any new Justice and would vote only to confirm those who would decide a list of hypothetical cases exactly the way Democrats want. His Republican opponent, J.D. Vance, said simply that he'd look for a Justice who would follow the law. In rejecting litmus tests, Vance shared common cause with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
Imagine if Republicans were as radical on this question as Democrats. When Republicans controlled Washington, they could have tried to shrink the Supreme Court. That would have been the Democrats' plan in reverse. How many Republicans in Congress ever proposed shrinking the Supreme Court by even a single seat? Zero.
Take abortion. Every Democrat in Congress but two voted to mandate that a woman be allowed to kill her unborn child for any reason as late as seven months' gestation—and through the rest of her pregnancy for whatever reason an abortionist may say is good for her "health." Their law, which applies to "pregnant patients" because Democrats believe men can get pregnant, envisions that a good enough reason for an abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy may be the word of an abortionist. Democratic Senate candidates in Arizona, Ohio, Georgia, and Nevada all voted for the bill, which would overturn every state law that placed any real limit on abortion, with no exceptions.
How many Republicans in Congress have proposed, let alone voted for, a law banning abortion with no exceptions? Zero. But that would be the Democrats' plan in reverse.
On almost every issue, the pattern is the same: Democrats are the radicals, even—and especially—when they accuse Republicans of being radical.
Democrats call Republicans radical for protecting kids from trans surgeries and for keeping boys out of girls' sports. They call Florida Governor Ron DeSantis radical for passing a law to shield children from inappropriate sex talk with their schoolteachers.
Republicans are too often too polite to make the obvious case that Democrats are the true radicals for their insistence on talking sex with schoolchildren.
Democrats call Republicans radical for wanting to make elections unquestionably sound. But, Democrats are too proud to admit to their long and sordid history of standing up in Congress with crackpot accusations of "stolen" elections and "deliberate fraud" to throw out electoral votes in every presidential election a Republican won since 2000.
The "Republicans are radicals" ruse works. Even public officials get duped. The town supervisor in Amherst, N.Y., had to disavow comments by the town's attorney, who said police cannot release photos of suspects in the firebombing of a pro-life medical office, which a Leftist terror group took credit for, because the Right—somehow—poses too great a threat.
Shifting focus from the clouds to the horizon shows the illusorily suspended plane to be moving. Shifting focus from the Democrats' accusations to the Democrats' conduct shows who the true extremists are.
Recall the New York Times calling Kamala Harris a "pragmatic moderate" ahead of the 2020 election. Today, Harris calls for disaster relief to go to some races over others in the name of "equality." Put in charge of securing our southern border, she's copied Joe Biden's absurd policy of turning a blind eye to illegal border crossings and bogus asylum claims. This has caused an epochal surge of millions of scofflaw aliens to flood our country.
A casual voter must not be judged too harshly for having better things to do than to keep a close track on politics year-round. But he must be careful not to be duped a few weeks out from an important election.
This election season, if a casual voter thinks he can spot a radical Republican from a mile away, he'd better look for the horizon and blink twice. He's seeing things.
Sean Ross Callaghan is an attorney, a tech entrepreneur, and a onetime federal law clerk.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
