As I was reading the summary of Fulton County attorney Fani Willis's mind-numbing indictment of Donald Trump, I immediately thought of the most consequential sentence in John Locke's 1689 Second Treatise on Civil Government, the essay that legitimated the revolution against King George III and his Parliament by the British colonies in North America, which then led to the founding of the United States of America.

Locke wrote:

Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty, will be borne by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going; it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouze themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected[.]

Following Locke, our Declaration of Independence says:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

In indicting Donald Trump and others for conspiracy, Willis has extended a "long train of abuses and usurpations" to the point where the Democrat party has trespassed into a political realm where it should not be.

Why have the Democrats crossed Locke's notorious boundary line between lawful government and abuse of power?

Because they no longer believe in the constitutionalism of John Locke.

Locke wrote his treatise to put checks on royal government.  Supporters of the crown and their allies in the Church of England, the landed aristocracy, and the House of Lords opposed Locke and formed the Tory Party to sustain royal prerogatives and privileges.  Those who followed Locke became the Whigs.

In the United States, the Republican Party arose out of our Whigs to defend the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence against the slaveholders and, after the Civil War, to build a middle-class society under the Rule of Law with authority decentralized to states, counties, cities, and towns, and with respect for the autonomy of private enterprise.

After the Civil War, the Democrats became an anti-Whig/Republican coalition of Southern whites, big-city machines, Catholic immigrants, workers, and followers of the Social Gospel Movement.

Then, in 1972, the movement protesting the Vietnam War took over the Democrat party.  This gave the party a new social orientation — more and more turning the values and narratives of a college educated elite into legislation and regulations governing all Americans.  These new Democrats were neither Whigs nor Tories, but more the heirs of the left Jacobins in the French Revolution, using Reason to discern a General Will that would take the place of God in our hierarchy of moral legitimacy.

But in their fervid persecution of Trump since 2016, the Democrats and their acolytes in the federal government (notably in regulatory agencies, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice, even the military), the media, educational institutions, and large corporations with dominant market shares in their sectors have left the anti-establishment Jacobins behind to become a new American Tory establishment.

The new Tory mission of Democrats mostly is to defend privilege — the privilege of those who hold power to enforce certain social and cultural norms of their own devising.  The apex of this new Tory Party is no longer a monarch, but a divine right of those presuming to have superior minds and hearts to determine our beliefs and values.

Tory parties are not parties of the people.  They are elite parties that, in a constitutional democracy, must seek permission now and again from all the people to hold public office.

Tory parties are also conservative parties because they exist to conserve their powers and prerogatives against the views and interests of the "deplorables."  The Democrats today want above all to conserve the discourse hegemony of their cultural narratives about listening only to their "certified" experts, climate change, white racism, entitlements for those "victimized" or marginalized by insensitive others — and, most importantly, about justifying subsidies for those who vote to keep them in power.

Our new Tory Democrats talk a lot about "democracy."  They fear Trump as an existential threat to that which they call "democracy."  But by "democracy" they don't include all of the American people in the "demos" to be empowered by elections and served by government.  Rather, they believe that our "democracy" includes only their kind, only those with Tory sympathies.  It is a system of "democracy" for right-thinking Americans and un-democratic regimented subordination for the rest.

Thus, maybe from here on out, we should speak of "Tory democracy" as being in competition with "American democracy."  I think Locke would today side with the latter.

Image via Picryl.