Watching Democrats flail and flop like a fish caught on a hook during this first five weeks of Donald Trump’s second term in the Oval Office, one cannot help but note the hot rage and utter confusion that characterize their reactions. Political and cultural reality has flipped with a speed and efficacy that, truth be told, has never before been seen during the history of our nation, and the leadership of the Democrat Party is struggling mightily with one basic question: What the heck is happening?

This is a simple question with a simple answer: The liberal fantasy of a free-spending parental government that tucks everyone into bed at night with warm milk, a cookie, and an entitlement payment always depended on our willingness to endure daily spankings—and we’re done with that.

What have these spankings consisted of? More taxes. More regulations. More mandated behavior. More censorship. Governance in America over the past decade has turned into a daily dose of eat your overcooked radishes and keep your damned mouth shut. Democrat leaders, who have over the last few decades often been incubated at elite universities where free thought has been regularly and ruthlessly extinguished, told us what to do and how to do it. Our complaints only served as proof that we were both ungrateful and stupid.

This was not a sustainable equilibrium in a nation built on freedom. Nagging and negative parents who know they are losing control often resort to more heavy-handed tactics to assert their authority, so the rules eventually became more onerous and the punishments more cruel. It is, therefore, no surprise that we came to the point of what is now an open rebellion against those who have been ruining our lives—while claiming to help us.

Even worse, as often happens in these circumstances, we started hanging out with a kid who put “bad” ideas into our heads about telling mommy and daddy to shove it. Despite all their efforts to keep us from listening to “that nasty Donald boy” (even trying to get him thrown in jail), the end result has been both inevitable and understandable. Voices are being raised, doors are being slammed, dishes are being broken, tears are being shed, and our world has veered in an entirely new direction.

It turns out that most Americans want to eat what they want to eat, drive what they want to drive, live where they want to live, buy what they want to buy, think what they want to think, and have no interest whatsoever in creating carve-outs to support freeloaders, cuckoos, and criminals. This has, apparently, been a shock for those who believed with every fiber of their being that we would eventually come to love liberal totalitarianism in all its wondrous and wacky forms, whether this meant actively importing illegal immigrants, adding cross dressing to our school curriculum, or creating a jobs program for worthless bureaucrats. 

Although there still seems to be an amazingly large cohort of Americans who crave the overbearing controls of our quasi-parental government, probably because they have been indoctrinated to believe that they will be left vulnerable and alone if the parental boot is lifted off their necks (and ours), the anger and frustration now being unleashed against the arrogant elites who believed they could bully us into paying for our own enslavement can no longer be suppressed with a blizzard of official lies and 24/7 media propaganda. As more and more Democrats are daily exposed for what they really are, smug and sneaky cowards who hate America (but love their paychecks), the direction of our national dialogue has shifted from governmental central planning and thought control to private enterprise and free speech.

The closest analogy I can conjure to capture today’s incredible moment is the fall of the old Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991. At that point we witnessed what happens when the tattered moral, ethical, and intellectual fabric of an oppressive and lunatic political and administrative state finally shreds and gives way to the will of the people. The profound confusion of the commissars and apparatchiks of that communist regime, who were certain they were both essential and irreplaceable, neatly mirrors the shock on the faces of D.C. insiders who are now suddenly finding themselves on the outside and watching the maze of agencies and programs they ran without the knowledge of the voters evaporate before their very eyes. 

The amazing speed of the collapse of our morally bankrupt Democrat “utopia” is the clearest possible indication it was built on a fragile tissue of fantasy and falsehoods forcibly funded for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. Declining real estate prices in the D.C. metro area and tearful meltdowns on TikTok seem a small price to pay for restoring the founding principles of our nation to their rightful place and balancing the federal budget, but we certainly have not heard the last from those who enjoyed the power and privilege—not to mention the cold, hard cash—of the many liberal lies.