Democrats have officially stopped pretending. The Patriot Post's Michael Smith laid it out on Wednesday in a piece that documents what every conservative with a pulse already knew — the modern Democrat Party views individual liberty and limited government not as founding principles, but as obstacles to their grand plans for your life. They're not even hiding it anymore.
Honestly, give them credit for the honesty. It takes real courage to look at the freest, most prosperous nation in human history and say, "Yeah, that's the bug, not the feature."
Smith traces the intellectual rot back decades, connecting the dots from Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign to the present day. The argument Democrats have been workshopping since the Johnson era has finally shed its last fig leaf — free enterprise is evil because some bad actors participate in it, individual rights are dangerous because some people exercise them in ways progressives don't like, and limited government is a threat because it limits them. The logic is kindergarten-level. If a person gets rich through free enterprise and some unscrupulous people do too, then all free enterprise must be evil. That's their actual reasoning.
It's the same rhetorical swindle they run on race. Smith points out the naked absurdity: "If a black person is a Democrat and the reaction to that person is limited to their politics, it is really just racism." Sound familiar? It should. It's the same playbook Joe Biden used when he told Black voters "you ain't black" if they didn't vote for him. Disagreement isn't allowed. Dissent is bigotry. Freedom of thought is the real enemy.
And that's exactly the point.
The Democrat Party has become the party of George Wallace wearing a different costume. Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door screaming "Segregation Forever" in Alabama. Today's Democrats stand in the doorway of the American economy screaming "Regulation Forever" — and somehow they've convinced half the country they're the good guys. The uniform changed. The authoritarian impulse didn't.
Smith digs into the philosophical foundation that Democrats want you to forget exists. He cites Adam Smith — the other Smith — whose The Theory of Moral Sentiments was written before The Wealth of Nations precisely because free markets were never meant to operate without moral grounding. The Founders understood this. Milton Friedman understood this. Ayn Rand understood this. The only people who don't understand it are Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who think the answer to every human problem is a bigger government program funded by your paycheck.
Thomas Jefferson said it in 1809: "The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government." Notice what Jefferson didn't say. He didn't say government should manage your life. He didn't say government should decide what happiness looks like for you. He said government exists to protect your ability to pursue it. Democrats read that quote and see a typo.
Here's what makes this moment different from the usual progressive hand-wringing. They're not couching it in euphemisms anymore. They're not talking about "common-sense regulations" or "reasonable limits." They are openly, publicly arguing that the American model of individual freedom and limited government is itself the problem. Not a specific policy. Not a specific law. Freedom. The whole thing.
Let that sink in.
We've spent 250 years building a country on the radical idea that people can govern themselves, make their own choices, start their own businesses, speak their own minds, and worship as they please. And one of our two major political parties has decided that experiment was a mistake.
They haven't changed their goals since the 1960s. They've just stopped lying about them. Every conservative who's been called a conspiracy theorist for pointing out that Democrats want to control your life, your money, your speech, and your kids' education — congratulations. You weren't paranoid. You were early.