Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s an old phrase that rings timelessly through the ages because people continue to prove the saying absolutely correct. Even the greatest of men will eventually succumb to the corruption of their station when given enough power and time.
He’s not given enough credit for it, but George Washington’s decision to reject his own power was one of the wisest things anyone has ever done in the history of mankind. His decision was integral to setting the pace for a nation that would go on to become more powerful than any nation in history with the limitation of power being one of its core values.
Many Americans are pretty averse to authority, or overbearing authority at the very least. When told outright that the plan is outright control of their lives, they will do what Americans do and rebel. To control them, it has to be masked in some sort of virtue that preys upon their sense of right or their sense of guilt.
Democrats have spent a lot of time mastering the ability to prey on Americans’ sense of virtue and have even created a very large subculture out of it. “Woke” culture is a byproduct of Democrats’ continued efforts to signal virtues in order to manipulate people into agreement and compliance.
What’s more, they’ve fooled themselves into thinking that they’re the ultimate good in this world and that even the evil that they do is just because those means justify their ends.
But absolute power corrupts absolutely, and an already highly corrupt Democrat party wants absolute power. As I’ve written previously, they’ve wholly forgotten that the entire purpose of being an elected official is service to the people, not service to the party.
It’s something that, thankfully, Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema haven’t forgotten, and thankfully have resisted their own party’s efforts to seize complete and total power. They’re not backing down when it comes to the elimination of the Senate filibuster. As a result, they’ve been labeled everything under the sun, including “traitors.”
But a traitor to who?
As detailed by Fox News, Sinema, in particular, has recently been labeled a traitor to the memory of Sen. John Lewis, for instance, according to New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman:
U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is a “traitor” to the legacy of the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis after reaffirming her support for the filibuster, a New York Democrat asserted Thursday.
U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman shared his views in a Twitter message in which he retweeted a photo that Sinema had posted of herself with Lewis, who died in July 2020 at age 80. She had captioned the post “My hero.”
“Hero: a person who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. Traitor: a person who betrays a friend, country, principle, etc.,” Bowman wrote.
“John Lewis is a hero, you [Sinema] are a traitor to his legacy, your constituents and our democracy.”
Firstly, we’re not a Democracy, and I’ve written about how that’s a good thing in more detail in a previous article.
(READ: Politico Writer Complains the Constitution Is the Enemy of Democracy…He’s Right)
Secondly, being a traitor to Lewis’s legacy isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Lewis wasn’t exactly a stand-up politician and without meaning to speak ill of the dead, the man let his people languish while he coasted by on the reputation of a civil rights fight he took part in long ago. His “legacy” is a great example of how not to govern. He was a man who effectively secured power in a place where he wasn’t going to be voted out. He achieved absolute power in his area, and he was corrupted absolutely.
His “legacy” is worth betraying.
But where Bowman gets it wrong the most is in the betrayal of her constituents. It’s true that Democrats in her state are ready and willing to send her to the unemployment line by a vast majority, but Arizona is a Republican state as of this writing, and it’s likely that many Republicans have become huge fans of hers. While Democrats may be her voting base, those Republicans are still her constituents as well, and Bowman doesn’t seem to be factoring them in.
But more than that, Sinema isn’t betraying her constituents in principle. She’s keeping the American ideal of limited power alive, and while many leftists in Arizona may be outraged by that now, they may change their tune very swiftly once Republicans (likely) take power after the midterms.
Democrat voters, whether they know it or not, are big fans of limited power when that power isn’t theirs, and the nature of the United States is that power doesn’t belong to one side or person for too long. Democrats should be wary of those looking to seize absolute power just as much as Republicans are, even when it comes to their own side.
