The Democrats are poised to show America who they really are. Despite the promises of the Biden campaign, the Democrats are not the party of moderation, decency, and respect. The nomination of Judge Amy Barrett to the Supreme Court is likely to set off the ugliest political fight we’ve seen since, well, the last Supreme Court confirmation battle, in which Senate Democrats accused Brett Kavanaugh of being a high school gang-rape mastermind.
The gang-rape fantasies are probably off the table this time, but Barrett’s confirmation fight is still expected to be brutal. Left-wing activists and media are launching personal attacks on Barrett’s faith and family, including calls to investigate her adoption of two children from Haiti. Politico has already run an error-filled piece arguing that “Barrett’s religious beliefs…need to be front and center” and a Yahoo News headline screamed, “This Is Amy Coney Barrett, The Potential RBG Replacement Who Hates Your Uterus”—those mothers of seven, with their hatred of uteruses.
This will not be the first time Democrats have gone after Barrett’s religion. When she was nominated to her current seat on the 7th Circuit, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein told Barrett, “I think in your case…the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.” Some Democrats realize that this assault on Barrett’s faith was a mistake, but others, such as Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, are ready to resume the attack.
Recall that Hirono, along with the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, recently suggested that a Catholic nominee should be rejected because of his membership in the Knights of Columbus. These scorched-earth tactics are unlikely to stop Barrett’s confirmation, but they will alienate moderates and energize Republicans, thereby damaging Democratic hopes of retaking the Senate and the presidency. But left-wing activists and their media allies apparently cannot restrain themselves, and many Democrats seem inclined to join in.
It is not just that they are desperate to keep President Trump from filling another Supreme Court seat. It is also that Barrett is culturally alien to the increasingly insular class of people running the Democratic Party and its media and activist allies. The persistent references and bogus links to “The Handmaid’s Tale” reveal less about Barrett than they do about those whose only point of reference for a fecund religious woman is dystopian feminist fiction.
This is emblematic of the increasing divide between the left’s leadership class and many of the voters the Democratic Party relies on. Educated white progressives—the class that dominates the institutions of the left—have become culturally separated and radicalized, not only compared to conservatives but also compared to most minority Democratic voters.
Statistically, white Democrats now constitute the left wing of their party. With regard to religion, they are far more secular than nonwhite Democrats. As the Pew Research Center noted in 2018, “In their beliefs about God, nonwhite Democrats more closely resemble Republicans than white Democrats.”
This radicalization extends beyond religion. For example, surveys show that, on average, white liberals are now to the left of even black voters on racial issues.
The data confirm what is obvious via observation: the Democratic Party and its allied organizations have been captured by radical, mostly white, progressives, many of whom have made politics into a substitute religion. Furthermore, their control of crucial institutions allows them to advance their agenda even when they are out of political power, or after their favored candidates lose.
Thus, although Democrats’ moderate, more traditionally religious minority voters gave Biden the nomination, they could not stop the leftward stampede of the Democratic leadership class. Biden, who can’t even keep up with his minimal campaign schedule, will not be able to restrain the radicals, who will be led by his own vice-president. Moderation for the Democrats these days consists of cozying up to Wall Street, big business, and China, not easing up on the culture war.
Therefore, although Biden is nominally Catholic, he has been forced to renounce Catholic teachings that are at odds with the Democratic platform. He has promised to once again have the federal government try to force nuns to fund and facilitate the distribution of contraception. He has abandoned the last shreds of abortion moderation and now supports taxpayer-funded abortion on demand until birth. This position is more extreme than that of many, perhaps most, Democratic voters, but it is unquestioned among the party elite.
This cultural radicalism requires control of the courts in order to invent new rights as well as suppressing those actually included in the Constitution. Establishing and sustaining a national regime of abortion on demand has therefore required the left to keep the people and their representatives from having a say in the matter. Hence the ugly fights to maintain control of the Supreme Court.
But it is not just that Barrett’s jurisprudence will be an obstacle to the left’s ideological goals. Left-wing activists see her as a personal affront, for she is a living rebuke to the ideology they live by. She has achieved more than they ever will and done it while living a life filled with faith and family. Instead of a career spent writing for a feminist website from an apartment filled with cats, she is about to join the Supreme Court from a house full of children.
Her faith challenges those who insist that religious belief is only for the weak and stupid. Her children are a rebuke to those who insist that female empowerment is incompatible with fertility and that the disabled should be systematically eliminated in utero. The left-wing radicals running the Democratic Party are going to do their worst to Amy Barrett because she reveals, by contrast, the worst in them.
