There’s a Political Storm Brewing

Commentary

With the 2020 presidential campaign season underway, I see a perfect storm that has been brewing in the United States and the rest of the world for years.

The U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights are ready for the trash heap—or to be consistent with contemporary trends, for recycling—because of two generations of undereducated college graduates.

Our First Amendment is being eviscerated by political correctness in academia, media, and politics that houses advocates of what philosopher Herbert Marcuse called “repressive tolerance,” which holds that it’s imperative for a free society to permit freedom of expression, as long as the ideas being expressed aren’t harmful to society.

But who is to make the decisions about what speech should be thus categorized and then repressed?

Defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights has been subtly redefined as tiresome and outdated.

As for an independent and objective FBI—the cornerstone of a true democracy—one need only look at the arrests of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and political strategist Roger Stone by heavily armed FBI SWAT officers as part of the Mueller probe, as an illustration of how close we are coming to an Orwellian police state.

When it comes to the 2020 Democratic candidates, I am particularly concerned.

On one hand, there is—as reported by Jenna Johnson in The Washington Post—former failed Senate candidate and now presidential candidate Robert “Beto” O’Rourke questioning the modern-day relevance of the Constitution and whether the country should still be governed by “the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago.”

On the other hand, there is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The Constitution stands in the way of her ascending to the presidency of the United States, an inconvenience to be overcome, in the eyes of many.

Filmmaker Michael Moore has argued that he hopes the age restriction on becoming president will be lowered to 30 from 35, thus making it possible for Ocasio-Cortez to run. According to Moore, Ocasio-Cortez is the leader of a “mass movement” and there is no “middle ground anymore,” as he urges the Democratic Party to “stop being moderate.”

If one would follow these trends to their logical, frightening, inexorable conclusion, we could find ourselves with President Ocasio-Cortez and Vice President O’Rourke.

O’Rourke has already stated publicly that he’s not a slave to facts and rather would work with ideals and principles. His comments about border security, conflicting as they do with the knowledge of those who actually work on the border and deal with its reality on a day-to-day basis, put into perspective his lack of attention to the real world. Now, imagine this new world order even as it’s forming today.

In Europe, we see a continent that has emasculated itself. Unchecked immigration from the Middle East has sorely burdened the economies of these countries, bringing their social welfare states to the brink of collapse.

In the Middle East, the stew of ethnic and tribal hatred, alongside political rivalry and envy over access to natural resources, continues to brew, with Shiites fighting Sunnis and Turks versus Kurds.

The recent bellicosity on the part of Iran is doubtless a minor manifestation of what can be expected from its fanatical regime in the future. Then there’s the wild card North Korea, which is also a nuclear concern. All it would take is a spark—the modern equivalent of the shots fired in Sarajevo in the early 20th century.

Will cool heads prevail? Ocasio-Cortez and O’Rourke simply don’t have the wherewithal to deal with the world in such a crisis. And the same can be said for the entire ill-qualified pool of Democrat candidates.

It’s not entirely their fault. Other than old-timers Biden and Sanders, they simply grew up in a society where the educational tools weren’t present and not deemed necessary for them to exercise the political power they have sought.

As has often been the case in history, the most violent conflagrations have resulted from the actions of those supposedly committed to peace.

Epoch Times contributor Marc Ruskin is a 27-year veteran of the FBI, an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the author of “The Pretender: My Life Undercover for the FBI.” He served on the legislative staff of U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and as an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, New York.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.