For many years now, Democrats in one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs have been sporting a bumper sticker that may well encapsulate what is wrong with the Democratic Party. The bumper sticker reads, “Yes, Virginia, There Are Democrats in Great Falls.” While it’s an obvious allusion to Virginia O’Hanlon, of “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” fame, once you unpack the message behind this bumper sticker, you will arrive at a nucleus of truth explaining what is wrong with voters who toe their Democrat party line. Superficially, though, Democrats must think that they are an adorable lot.

Located in affluent Fairfax County, Virginia, Great Falls is a bedroom community of Washington, DC. Notable residents have included Steve Case, former CIA director Stansfield Turner, Peggy Noonan... you get the picture. Bloomberg’s 2020 Richest Places ranked Great Falls at number 20 in the nation.

But first a few words about the phrase that this bumper sticker is riffing on: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” On September 21, 1897, New York’s The Sun published an unsigned editorial. The actual writer was Francis Parcellus Church, a veteran newsman, and he was responding to a letter to the editor from Virginia O’Hanlon, an 8-year-old resident of “115 West Ninety-Fifth Street.” Virginia had written in to inquire as to whether there really was a Santa Claus. Church’s heart-warming affirmation is the most reprinted newspaper editorial in history. “No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives and he lives forever” is his conclusion. “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist”.

Of course, the Democrats’ Great Falls bumper sticker is a coy play on words. It’s not addressing any young girl named Virginia but rather the state of the same name—and a shrinking number of residents in that state who haven’t yet recognized the Democrat party’s charms.

The bumper sticker is self-congratulatory, while simultaneously assuming the driving public little understands how the left operates and what it delivers. First to the self-congratulation. Those sporting this sticker seem to be preening—“Yes, we conform to the expectation that Great Falls residents are affluent, but look at me. As a Democrat, I do not vote my self-interest; I vote for the interests of the downtrodden. Aren’t I noble?”

But are these drivers really voting against their self-interest? Absolutely not. Democrats expand on the welfare state—call it “big government” if you will. But for all the Democrats’ nastiness about “trickle-down economics,” it’s not the poor who benefit from these policies, it is residents of locales such as Great Falls who are the true beneficiaries of such government largess. That’s because Great Falls residents often either possess a well-remunerated high-level government post or, in one way or another, they feed off big government contracts (government spending, if you will).

This bumper sticker—often seen as Christmas nears—assumes that most of the public hasn’t caught on to the Democrat con. But day by day, people seem to be learning that it is these preening, falsely humble Democrats in Great Falls who are the elite, for they are not creating jobs and donating great works as Andrew Carnegie did, but they are, instead, feeding from the government trough.

Image by Andrea Widburg

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