Schumer's Confusion

U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Mr. Chuck Schumer, portrays himself as an unrelenting warrior for democracy and the champion of the oppressed. But in his narrow perspective, in which maintaining his and his party’s political power appears as an overriding value that trumps all other values, he does not seem to realize that he confuses things that the majority of the American people do not.

Would someone, please, explain to him that cheating on behalf of the oppressed has virtually nothing to do with democracy and that a lack of ability or will to succeed in a merit-based society does not automatically make one an oppressed person? Because as long as he and some other Democrats share this confusion, the adjective “Democratic” is going to mean “cheating on behalf of all those who are unable or unwilling to succeed on their own.” And that would make the entire “Democratic” Party an existential threat to our Republic and to the freedom and well-being of the majority of the American people.

Schumer also showed confusion about Senate Bill S.1, disingenuously titled “For the People Act,” which attempts to perpetuate what the self-styled “Democratic Party” and its operatives have been doing for many decades now: Facilitating election fraud that benefits the party and its vigorous power grabs. The bill, among other things, will build upon the “democratic” experiences of the 2020 elections in which a lack of adequate voter identification, breaks in the chain of custody for mail-in votes, and wide-spread cheating during vote counting and tabulation led to Democrats achieving narrow victories of highly questionable legitimacy.

Schumer’s confusion does not end with misinterpreting “democracy” and “oppression.” He also seems to confuse Western ethics with the rule that (sometimes) “the end justifies the means.” That explains why he sees nothing fundamentally wrong with cheating on behalf of whomever he considers “oppressed.” It also explains why he and many of his “Democratic” allies do not hesitate to sacrifice election integrity (and some other cornerstones of our Republic) on the altar of their “Democratic” power grab.

When you scrutinize it, the excuse that “the end justifies the means,” even if only “sometimes,” emerges as a serious threat to the rule of law (as opposed to the rule of men) that is central to the American Republic and the Constitution that defines it. As much as it is often presented as an expedient way of fixing broken political and legal systems, it is a “cure” that is notorious for being worse than the disease that it purports to fight. What the end/means approach does is desensitize the powerful to the injustices they inflict upon the powerless in the name of a “higher good,” whatever that ubiquitous term may mean. It is a quintessence of corruption and it justifies virtually any wrongdoing, as long as it is done for an allegedly “good” purpose.

The Soviet Union serves as an instructive example of what may and likely will go wrong under the “end justifies the means” rule. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution promised to stop employers from exploiting workers and to secure comfortable lives for those workers. Instead, it produced the Evil Empire, economically insolvent and corrupt to the core, in which tens of millions of innocent people were killed or driven to death. Additionally, more than a hundred million lived in conditions considered miserable when judged by American standards.

Clearly, the Bolsheviks and their successors did not deliver on their promises. It’s easy to see that their commitment to an “end justifies the means” philosophy, with “communism” as the justifiable end, was the root cause of the reign of evil that their “good intentions” unleashed. Indeed, the very definition of a socialist revolutionary is an individual who gave himself the mandate to break all the rules in order to dispense “social justice,” an approach that presupposes the overriding validity of “the end justifies the means” rule.

The Soviets (by which term I mean the members of the Soviet Union’s ruling party) were notorious for adhering to the “end justifies the means” rule. They began by confiscating property from some individuals, based on the assumption that these individuals deserved to lose it, and redistributed the property among others without bothering to determine if they deserved to receive it. They replaced the presumption of innocence (a legal doctrine) with the infamous “Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.”

They relentlessly persecuted their critics and adversaries, millions of whom ended up in Gulags where all prisoners were forced to perform hard labor in harsh conditions that, in comparison, would make an American cotton farm look like a vacation resort. And -- surprise, surprise -- the Soviets instituted the rigged election system that made it impossible for their people to vote the Soviets out of their positions of perpetual power. After all, they were the party that could do no wrong, or so they insinuated.

The Soviets did not think that “the end justifies the means” rule was universal, though. They gave themselves the discretion to decide when it applied and when it didn’t. For instance, they never granted it to their opponents, who were also required to adhere meticulously to strict rules regardless of the ends that they might have served. The same is true for Schumer and his “Democratic” fellow Congressmen. When hordes of rioters vandalized, burned down, and looted under the pretext of “protesting” a criminal suspect’s death while in police custody last year, Schumer and his many congressional colleagues kneeled for several minutes in “solidarity” with the protesters.

Democrats kneel in Congress. YouTube screengrab.

At that time, the means (vandalizing, burning things, and looting) justified the end (expressing utmost disapproval about how police handled the suspect) according to Schumer and other congressional Democrats. But on January 6, 2021, when thousands of Americans engaged in a mostly peaceful protest against 2020 elections fraud and breach of public trust that, arguably, delivered control of the Senate and the White House to the “Democratic party,” Schumer and his colleagues did not think that the end (protesting the election fraud and the unwillingness of the courts and the Department of Justice to investigate it) justified the means (minor property damage and alleged trespassing into the Capitol building). They declared the protest an “insurrection” that threatened “democracy” – a democracy that, as noted earlier, Mr. Schumer confused with the widespread election fraud that benefited the “Democratic” Party.

Any individual who lives by that rule, even if “sometimes” only, or suffers from a Schumer’s confusion, is unfit to govern, and is a perpetual threat to the People and the Republic. Such a threat is particularly grave when “the end” is “equity” (the equality of outcomes), also known as “social leveling” (“ooravnilovka” in Russian). The history of the Soviet Union and the atrocities that were committed there in the name of the “greater good” should be enough warning against following that dangerous path in America.

Mark Andrew Dwyer’s recent columns are posted at The Federal Observer and Canada Free Press. His other commentaries can be found here

IMAGE: Chuck Schumer by DonkeyHotey. CC BY 2.0.

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