The Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the fierce ratification struggle that followed produced one of the most deliberate acts of political moderation in human history. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay did not write The Federalist Papers to celebrate pure democracy or concentrated power. They wrote to persuade a skeptical New York that a carefully balanced republic—checks and balances, divided government, an independent judiciary, a presidential system rooted in virtue and limited authority—could endure. Their project assumed a citizenry capable of self-restraint and a political culture that rejected absolutism. They never imagined that one of the two major parties would someday be captured by a radical minority determined to dismantle the very architecture they designed.
That capture has occurred. Today’s Democratic Party is no longer the party of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society—programs that expanded the welfare state while still presupposing a robust private sector, entrepreneurial energy, and a broad middle class. Nor does it resemble Nordic social democracy, which coexists with market dynamism. What now dominates the party’s leadership ecosystem is a revolutionary current: intellectually indebted to Marxism, methodologically shaped by Gramscian cultural strategy and Fabian gradualism, and increasingly comfortable with the civilizational hostility of Islamist ideology. Not every Democratic officeholder is a card-carrying communist. Most are not. But they operate inside a party structure whose commanding heights are controlled by radicals who treat the American constitutional order as an obstacle rather than a inheritance.
The policy wish list makes the ambition plain. Defund or severely constrain the agencies of public order. Abolish the Senate or render it impotent. Eliminate the Electoral College. Expand and politicize the Supreme Court while subordinating it to a unicameral legislature. Draft a new constitution. Redesign the prison system in ways that weaken accountability. These are not marginal talking points; they are recurring proposals from the party’s activist core and its intellectual allies. Each would erode the separation of powers that The Federalist treated as essential to liberty. The destination is not “more democracy.” It is democratic centralism—Lenin’s model of a “people’s democracy” in which formal elections coexist with one-party direction of the state and culture. Epistemologically, the same leadership doubles down on the grievance frameworks descended from the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, treating American institutions as systems of domination rather than imperfect but improvable guarantors of ordered liberty.
Against this project stands the record of Donald J. Trump’s second administration. From the first day, the administration moved to restore civil liberties that had been systematically narrowed. Executive actions protected speech, ended the prior government’s pressure campaigns against social media platforms, and began the work of depoliticizing federal law enforcement. Equally decisive was the rollback of cultural Marxist policies that had been embedded across government, education, and federal contracting: critical race theory, gender ideology, and critical queer theory were stripped from official training, school curricula receiving federal funds, and agency practice. The weaponization of the FBI and the justice system against political opponents was not an abstraction; it was a documented pattern under the Biden-Obama government. Restoring equal application of the law is not authoritarian. It is the minimum requirement of a free society.
On the economic front the administration pursued a deliberate re-industrialization strategy aimed at reducing Western dependence on the Chinese Communist Party’s manufacturing base. Tariffs were the primary instrument. Critics predicted immediate and explosive inflation. The data have not cooperated with the prediction. Average inflation under the current administration has run roughly half the rate recorded during the preceding administration. Manufacturing employment recovered ground. Poverty rates reached historic lows. Targeted innovations—accounts for minors, sustained pressure on prescription drug pricing, and aggressive efforts to reduce fraud and waste in federal programs—produced measurable results without the bureaucratic bloat that usually accompanies such initiatives.
Public safety improved because the administration rejected the class-war apologetics that had excused disorder in too many cities. Criminals were held accountable. The border, left effectively open for years, was brought under control. The scale of illegal entries and the subsequent deportation effort were the direct consequence of prior policy failure. A competent administration would never have allowed the crisis to reach the magnitude that required such a response. Trump resolved the problem Biden and the globalist left engendered.
Abroad, the administration confronted Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions with a clarity previous governments lacked. The Western Hemisphere was treated as a strategic priority rather than an afterthought. Efforts to reduce the influence of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea in the Americas—particularly regarding Venezuela and Cuba—marked a sharper break with decades of neglect. Regime change remains the only durable solution for those two dictatorships; the administration has treated it as a live objective rather than a rhetorical flourish. The rise of conservative elected governments across Latin America is not accidental. Power projects culture, and a clear anticommunist posture in Washington has encouraged like-minded forces elsewhere.
No administration is without flaws. The purchase of certain Russian energy products, delays in the Venezuela and Cuba campaigns, and occasional overreaches by immigration enforcement against individuals already navigating legal status and certain erroneous incarcerations waiting deportations are legitimate points of criticism. Perfect politicians do not exist. The relevant comparison is not with an imagined ideal but with the alternative actually on offer.
That alternative is the return of the radicalized Democratic Party to congressional majorities. Committee control determines the agenda. Executive action can only go so far. A Congress dominated by the current Democratic leadership would revive the institutional assaults that the founding fathers sought to prevent. The midterm election is therefore a referendum—not merely on one man, but on whether the American system of moderated power and constitutional restraint will be preserved or further dismantled.
For those who still believe that ordered liberty is preferable to revolutionary transformation, the choice is not subtle. A MAGA-aligned Republican majority, imperfect though its standard-bearer may be, remains the only practical barrier to the consolidation of a political force that views the Constitution as provisional and the American experiment as a problem to be solved. The Federalist authors sought longevity through balance and virtue. The radical leftist project seeks permanence through capture and centralization. In this election, a vote for Republican candidates is the available instrument for defending the former against the latter.
© The CubanAmerican Voice. All rights reserved.
🖋️Julio M. Shiling es politólogo, escritor, conferenciante, comentarista y director de los foros políticos y las publicaciones digitales, Patria de Martí y The CubanAmerican Voice y columnista. Tiene una Maestría en Ciencias Políticas de la Universidad Internacional de la Florida (FIU) de Miami, Florida.