Pollak: Democrats Have Destroyed the Border Between Party and State

Democrats have an “open border” policy — not just with Mexico, but on the boundary between the governing party and the state itself.

That is the basic story of the Department of Justice (DOJ) search of former President Donald Trump’s home last month at Mar-a-Lago. No president, former president, or presidential candidate has ever been treated so badly for so flimsy a reason.

Yet the DOJ and FBI have a long history of bias against Trump and share the Democratic Party’s hostility toward him. So, too, do the CIA and other intelligence services, which collaborated in the “Russia collusion” hoax.

The attitude of former intelligence officials like ex-CIA Director General Michael Hayden, who implied that Trump should be executed, and called Republicans the world’s worst extremists, is likely still shared within the agency. In 2020, 50 former national security and intelligence officials even claimed, falsely, that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation; none has apologized.

While federal law enforcement agencies have, appropriately, cracked down on the threat of terror from white supremacists, there is little enthusiasm to do the same with radical left-wing groups like Antifa. Federal prosecutors have thrown the book at January 6 rioters, while doing nothing to punish the Black Lives Matter rioters who attacked federal government buildings in 2020.

The double-standard suggests that Democrats have weaponized federal law enforcement against their political enemies.

The distinction between the ruling party and the state is a crucial element in the structure of constitutional democracies. The civil service and the police powers of the government are meant to be politically independent.

Yet we have arrived at the odd circumstance in which federal government employees are almost uniformly supporters of the Democratic Party, thanks in part to the fact that Democrats are ideologically committed to expanding the power and budget of those agencies ad infinitum.

For 60 years, those federal employees have also been allowed to unionize, thanks to a change introduced by President John F. Kennedy (and opposed, a generation before, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt). The result is that most public sector unions help elect the Democrats with whom they will negotiate. Except on the rare occasion (Wisconsin under Gov. Scott Walker, or Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis) that a Republican wins, taxpayers and the users of public services have no representation.

Teachers unions have a stranglehold on public education, and ensure that Democratic Party ideology — on race, on gender, and the like — is absorbed into school curricula that ought to be politically independent, to the detriment of the students.

Likewise with energy policy, where the Democratic Party has been able to impose its “green” ideology to the point where the cost of complying with “climate change” policies is barely questioned, even as many states face urgent power shortages.

More ominously, Democrats are trying to control freedom of speech. The Biden White House was recently caught telling Twitter directly whom to censor, for example. And the same tech companies often collude to suppress alternative media.

Democrats have convinced themselves that what is good for the party is good for the country — an attitude that is reflected by the news media, by Hollywood, and much of corporate America.

The latter is controlled by Democrats indirectly — through activist shareholder groups; through “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG) scores; and through diversity mandates on corporate boards, whose beneficiaries almost always share the Democratic Party’s priorities.

A common — and valid — criticism of Trump is that he confuses his own interest for the national interest. But with Trump, at least, the problem is obvious. Democrats have blurred the boundary between party and state so completely that it is almost impossible to undo.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.