Tectonic plates are shifting in the American polity. A new dynamic is emerging, and a big part of that new dynamic is a Democratic Party and a political left that is no longer concerned with persuasion or negotiation, no longer willing to chase after popular legitimacy or win over public opinion, but is so convinced in the righteousness and urgency of its cause that it believes it must resort to force.

I’m not just referring to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or the two assassination attempts against President Trump, or the weaponization of the federal government under Biden, or the ongoing Antifa riots in Portland, or the violent rhetoric embraced by the mainstream Democrats who still support Jay Jones for attorney general in Virginia even after he fantasized about killing Republican Todd Gilbert.

I don’t just mean that left-wing influencers like Hasan Piker and Destiny regularly call for violence against the right, or that media darlings like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein publicly muse about whether it would be better to negotiate with conservatives, lie to them, or force policies on them against their will.

And I’m not merely thinking of rogue federal judges, like the one who gave Nicholas Roske — who now identifies as a trans woman named “Sophie” — a light sentence for attempting to assassinate U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, or the parade of liberal judges who have tried to shut down the Trump administration’s agenda through a deluge of nationwide injunctions and temporary restraining orders, many of which have been overturned by higher courts.

It’s all of these things, but it’s also the recent pattern of behavior by the Democratic Party establishment, which seems totally uninterested in winning anyone over or engaging in democratic politics at all.

Consider the government shutdown, now nearly two weeks old. Unless you consume some form of increasingly irrelevant corporate news product, where the shutdown is being covered merely as a means of attacking President Trump, you might not even know about it. In an earlier time — before Covid, before mass immigration, before the normalization of political assassinations and violent political rhetoric — a government shutdown would have dominated the news cycle and the broader discourse.

This shutdown, by contrast, is practically a non-event. To the extent it is even registering with Americans, they oppose it. A Harvard CAPS-Harris poll this week found 70 percent of respondents are against the shutdown, and 65 percent think Senate Democrats should end it by accepting the spending bill already passed by the House, which simply carries forward Biden-era spending levels. But because the bill in question doesn’t include health care subsidies for certain classes of illegal immigrants, Democrats have decided to shut down the government.

They even think that their position is somehow getting stronger as the shutdown drags on. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared on Thursday: “Each day our case to fix health care and end the shutdown gets better and better.”

Setting aside that no one really believes Democrats have a case, much less a plan or even a desire, to fix health care, it’s a strange hill they have chosen to die on, politically. As my colleague Brianna Lyman explained last week, the foreign nationals that Democrats want to include in federally subsidized health care are people who, under normal circumstances, would have been detained and deported. The only reason they’re in the U.S. at all is because the Biden administration applied an unprecedented and legally dubious reading to a section of federal immigration law that allows for the “parole” of certain illegal aliens only on a case-by-case basis. Under Biden, millions of illegal immigrants were “paroled” under this provision.

Not only do Democrats oppose the deportation of these people, they want to give them federal health care subsidies while they live and work in the U.S. for years on end waiting for the outcome of asylum cases that 90 percent of them will lose. Democrats, incredibly, decided to shut down the government over these subsidies — and then expected ordinary Americans to care.

This follows a curious recent pattern of Democrats getting on the wrong side of the American public on major issues. Another Harvard CAPS-Harris poll, released last week, shows a whopping 78 percent of respondents support deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes. This includes 69 percent of Democrats and 87 percent of Republicans. Criminal illegal aliens are of course the very people Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are out there arresting. They are doing so amid protests and threats and sometimes rioting from Antifa activists, whose views on this issue seem to be shared by Democrat officer-holders — and almost no one else.

It’s actually worse than it seems for Democrats. The same poll found 56 percent of respondents support the deportation of all illegal immigrants, criminal or not, including 36 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans. Sixty-eight percent, including a majority of Democrats, support closing the border entirely and enacting policies that deter illegal immigration. Fifty-five percent support using the U.S. military to stop illegal immigration. A majority support using the National Guard and active-duty military to police America’s large cities and reduce crime.

These popular policies — strict immigration enforcement, closing the border, imposing law and order in crime-ridden cities — are precisely the policies Democrats cite when they accuse President Trump of imposing fascist or authoritarian rule. They don’t seem to care that most Americans want these policies and voted for Trump so he would enact them. Instead of trying to persuade Americans that they have a better plan to accomplish the things voters say they want, Democrats are rallying against those things. Their argument, to the extent they have one, is that they know better than the American people. They will tell you what you want.

This isn’t merely abstract or rhetorical. The Democratic mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, signed an executive order Monday establishing ICE-free zones. The Democratic governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, is suing the Trump administration over the deployment of the National Guard to enforce federal immigration laws in that state. Gavin Newsom and other leading Democrats are invoking “states rights” and dusting off their Confederate talking points. No amount of polling data, or actual election results, will deter them from resisting broadly popular policies if they conflict with their party’s left-wing orthodoxy.

The same goes for issues like transgender ideology and medical care, or unrestricted abortion-on-demand. It doesn’t matter how unpopular the Democrat position is with actual Americans, their ideological priors prevent them from reconsidering or even negotiating with the other side — even when the other side outnumbers them seven to one. This week Katie Porter, a former Democratic congresswomen who is (or was) the frontrunner in the California governor’s race, scoffed at a CBS News reporter who asked how she planned to win over Trump voters. The idea that she needed to win those votes, and that a reporter would dare to ask her about it, was ridiculous and offensive to her. When the reporter pushed back, Porter threatened to walk out of the interview.

Democrats, in other words, are giving up on democracy. Maybe they were never interested in it to begin with. In the same way the corporate news media has given up on reporting in favor of propaganda, Democrats have given up on persuasion in favor of coercion. Public opinion, after all, can be a great obstacle to revolution, which is what today’s Democrats are after. Back in 2008 when Obama said just days before his victory that he meant to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America, he might have been forgiven for thinking the people were on his side, that his was a popular revolution.

No one would make that mistake now. The people are not on Democrats’ side, but the Democrats don’t care. If you disagree with their revolution, you’d better watch out. They are done talking.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.