Why they want to impeach even if it means losing in 2020.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Like two rabid dogs fighting over the same rotten bone, the Democrats are in the middle of a civil war over impeachment. The Democrat leadership wants to defeat President Trump by winning an election, but its leftist hard core will settle for nothing less than impeachment even if it means four more years.

Speaker Pelosi opposes impeachment because she’s seen the numbers. Impeachment polls badly with independents, would increase turnout among Republicans, and doesn’t even score well with Democrats. The impeachment obsession has led to the perception among a majority of voters that the House is focused on going after President Trump to the exclusion of all else. Like actual bread-and-butter issues.

Unlike the average ActBlue donor and San Francisco billionaire, the average voter doesn’t actually want his elected officials spending all their time holding three hundred hearings about Trump every week.

So why the unpopular impeachment push that can’t succeed because of the composition of the Senate?

Voters don’t like impeachment because they want to be the ones to remove politicians from office. Pelosi is asking the Left to let the voters do that just in 2020. But for the Left, that’s exactly the point.

Impeachment isn’t about punishing whatever imaginary crime involving whatever country was hit by a dart thrown at a world atlas this week in the offices of the New York Times and the Washington Post. The same media operatives who claimed that President Trump was a Russian spy are now insisting that he’s working with the Ukrainians, whose country was invaded and partially annexed by Russia. By next month, Trump may be accused of secretly colluding with the Netherlands, Burundi or Australia.

The purpose of Random Treason Accusation #17 has always been justifying the use of surveillance, espionage and secret evidence against the political opposition. Or Watergate to the power of ten.

The Russia election hacking accusation and the current Ukraine smear have the common purpose of delegitimizing an election. The Russia lie was about delegitimizing 2016. The Ukraine lie is a preemptive effort at delegitimizing the 2020 election in case Biden is the nominee and Trump is the winner.

Impeachment plugs into the same narrative which is not just about winning, but delegitimizing.

Democrats want to win elections. Radicals want to delegitimize the entire idea of elections. Pelosi wants to win an election. The radicals don’t want to win elections. They want to destroy them. Their real goal is to use blind hatred of Republicans to convince Democrats that elections are inherently illegitimate. All their arguments, whether about Russian Facebook bots or the Electoral College circle back to that.

The choosing of governments, it follows, is too important an issue to be left to mere voters whose voting machines and brains are all too easily hacked by disinformation campaigns and FOX News.

And the removal of President Trump from office is also too important to be left to those same voters.

Lefties have made it very clear that they would rather, practically or symbolically, reverse the results of the 2016 election than focus on winning in 2020 because of the larger principle at stake. The second part of the principle appears in every media piece pushing impeachment. It hinges on President Trump’s alleged unfitness for office. The first part of the principle is the unfitness of the voters to choose leaders.

Elections are a humiliating process that force lefties to lie to voters, hide their agendas, and appeal to the people they despise to be allowed to rule them. Even when they win, a sour taste lingers afterward.

The Left desperately wants impeachment proceedings because it wants to exercise direct power.

People wonder what the Left really wants? Post-gender bathrooms, banning cows, and paying reparations to drug dealers are just random policies. They’re not the endgame.

Unless the Democrats take the Senate, impeachment would be a meaningless show trial. But Marxist regimes love show trials of political opponents. The Marxist element in the House desperately wants a show trial of President Trump because such a proceeding is an explicit rejection of our political system.

The push to impeach President Trump did not begin organically with a crime allegedly committed in office, but began before he even took office and, in some elements of the media, before he even won. The premise of impeachment has always been an inherent unfitness. The actual basis for impeachment has always been a corollary to that claim of an inherent unfitness that preceded even the election.

Inherent unfitness expresses the idea that the voters never had any right to elect President Trump.

Impeachment is not just meant to be a trial of President Trump, but of the voters who chose him. Its outcome, whatever the composition of the Senate, is meant to be an argument for remaking the system of elections, whether by abolishing the Electoral College or tampering with the judiciary, that would take the power further out of the hands of the voters and concentrate them with the right sorts of people.

The right sorts of people usually being wealthy and influential lefties in California and New York.

But the real appeal of impeachment is more emotional than strategic. President Trump’s victory threatened lefties by suggesting that, despite the Obama era, they are not actually in control.

"Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship," O'Brien tells the hapless Winston Smith in the novel 1984. "The object of power is power."

Marxist regimes love show trials because they allow them to destroy and humiliate their enemies.

"How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?" O'Brien asks.

"By making him suffer," Winston replies.

Outside the media and social media, where the purges of cancel culture are a daily event, the Left lacks the power to regularly drag its political enemies before its bar, to put them on trial and break them. And yet it craves that terrible power above all else. All its obsessions, political correctness, cancel culture, political protests, demonization and impeachment bend toward that consuming evil obsession.

The Mueller investigation enraptured lefties with its spectacle of police state tactics, night raids, prolonged interrogations, eavesdropping, and then finally trials that bankrupted their opponents.

Nothing else, not even winning in 2020, excites the Left as much as the prospect of more show trials.

That’s why it must have impeachment even if attaining it will destroy its chances of victory.

Impeaching Trump isn’t about him. It’s a Rorschach test that reveals the ugly inkblot of the leftist soul. Its real purpose is for an ugly totalitarian movement to live out its fantasy of casting aside the vestiges of democracy, divesting itself of the illusions of representative government and holding a show trial.

Leftists speak less about equality these days than about justice. This is the justice they have in mind.

Their vision of utopia isn’t equality or progress, it’s trial after trial, an endless series of proceedings against Trump and you and me, and Bob next door, who votes Democrat, but once used the term “illegal alien” in a conversation. The nightmares of the French Revolution, the Soviet Union, Communist China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia weren’t accidental misfires: they’re the essential truth of what the Left is.

Terror is in the political DNA of every radical movement. And the arc of the Left is always radical.

“Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever,” 1984’s O’Brien rhapsodizes.

Impeachment is a feverish effort by the Left to live out this evil fantasy. It’s one of a million show trials that the radicals who are taking over the Democrats envision, not just for Trump, but for America.