Democrats do not have principled positions on anything

OPINION:

Democrats regularly preen about their moral superiority. We are led to believe their policies are somehow grounded in a deeper virtue of which they are both proud and certain. The reality, however, is very different.

Let’s begin by considering their newly discovered concern about the power of billionaire “oligarchs.” This concern was nowhere in evidence when media billionaires regularly did the bidding of the Democratic Party. While hawking Russian collusion, burying Hunter Biden’s business deals and censoring free speech around COVID-19, there was nary an oligarch to be seen.

Now that Elon Musk has established the norm of free speech on X, Jeff Bezos has instructed Washington Post editors not to endorse Kamala Harris and Mark Zuckerberg has done away with Meta’s phony “fact-checking,” billionaire media oligarchs seem to be springing up everywhere.

By the way, it is not as if Messrs. Zuckerberg and Bezos and others in the media business have become rock-ribbed Republicans. They have not; they have taken the slightest steps toward a modicum of balanced media fairness. To gauge how ridiculous Democrats’ recent fears about billionaire oligarchs are, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s attorneys has resigned in protest. He said that eliminating fact-checking represented “toxic masculinity and neo-Nazi madness.” Where do these people come from?

However, the larger point is that Democrats’ newfound concern about media oligarchs is not a one-off. Democrats’ naked partisan self-interest informs every policy. When was the last time Democrats demanded campaign finance reform? Now that Democrats regularly outraise Republicans, what was once sacred to the essence of democracy has become a dead letter. One can correlate the waning of campaign finance reform demands with Democratic fundraising advantages with nearly mathematical precision.

So, too, with the Electoral College. Since President Trump won the popular vote, Electoral College reform — or abolition — seems no longer an existential threat to the democratic order.

And the Senate filibuster rule? Barely three months ago, before Republicans won the Senate, filibuster reform was crucial to pass legislation vital to the nation. Reforming the filibuster rule, which now protects the Democrats’ minority rights, has lost its urgency, to say the least. It no longer seems to be an anti-democratic relic of slavery but a rule that guards against majority-party excesses.

Or Democrats’ transformation from the party that proudly elected John F. Kennedy as the nation’s first Catholic president. Today, we have the spectacle of an FBI working for a Catholic president, targeting Catholics and Catholic groups as potential terrorists.

The fact is that today’s Democrats do not have a principled position on anything. Every policy position is fully transactional: Does a policy help or hurt Democrats’ chances of gaining or expanding political power? Self-interested partisan policies come first, and the moral hauteur is added as window dressing. There is no reason to be moved by Democrats’ moral self-congratulation. But neither should a prudent observer expect this to change anytime soon; the soothing bath of an imaginary moral superiority is about all that Democrats have left.

• Jeff Bergner served in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.