This excerpt has been adapted from John Tillman’s new book, “The Political Vise: How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty.”
What are they thinking? How could they be so misguided? Who could possibly believe that nonsense? Those words have come out of my mouth many times while watching the news in recent years. I’m fairly sure you’ve said similar things. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, there will be moments where you find yourself confronted (and confounded) by the reality that other people frequently come to very, very different conclusions about the real meaning of justice, or democracy, or freedom. The means of enforcing the policies that align with those conclusions are also very different. Put simply, conservatives respond to ignorance with efforts to educate. Increasingly, progressives respond to perceived “ignorance” with efforts to eradicate.
This isn’t hyperbole. I wish it were! While applying outside pressure to politicians is nothing new — indeed, it is often how the system is supposed to work — the left has created a “Progressive Political Vise” that applies pressure to achieve their desired results by targeting ordinary citizens, rather than those in power. To name one example (there are many more), this vise worked to crush anyone who dared question the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The left mocks anyone who suggests the election was stolen — and yet, given the chance, the left gleefully admits what really happened that year:
“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. … Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.”
Those aren’t the words of a right-wing crackpot. They’re from a February 2021 Time magazine article by progressive journalist Molly Ball, best known for her worshipful, award-winning biography of Nancy Pelosi. Rather than deny the allegations that, at least in part, the 2020 elections were rigged, the left — like a criminal unable to resist boasting of his cleverness — gleefully admits the rigging. They changed the laws. They spent millions on ballot harvesting. They threw out decades of established practice for counting and securing ballots. Having achieved the desired outcome — the defeat of President Trump — the left swiftly pivoted to crushing those who challenged the result.
The ongoing persecution of the Jan. 6 “insurrectionists” is one very obvious example of politicians, the media, and wealthy influencers putting ordinary Americans in the Progressive Vise. It is not just average Americans. There is no living human being whom the Progressive Vise is more desperate to crush than Donald Trump. You do not have to agree with all of the president’s policies and pronouncements to recognize that the left is frantically eager to destroy him. The countless criminal and civil suits, the obscenely confiscatory judgments (particularly in New York), and the relentless “lawfare” against his person, his businesses, and his family offer the best possible example of the contemporary left’s ruthlessness.
Of course, it isn’t just President Trump and his supporters crushed in the Progressive Vise. It’s girls who just want to play sports — but whose trophies are stolen and whose bodies are injured by young men masquerading as women. It’s parents who demand to know why pornography is in the middle-school library. It’s the likes of Daniel Penny, who sought to protect his fellow subway riders and faced nearly two decades behind bars. And of course, it’s countless Americans who dared challenge the progressive regime’s insistence on locking down our society, closing schools, masking toddlers, and imposing vaccine mandates. Since 2020 — with that year’s triple crises of a pandemic, racial unrest, and a disputed election — the left has turned the handle of the Vise with ever-greater ruthlessness. These are only a handful of instances of the Progressive Vise in action. Each day’s news brings new and troubling examples of the progressive left’s relentless effort to transform American society by transforming the American people. Anyone who opposes the agenda is either crushed — or cowed into compliance.
It wasn’t always this way. In relatively recent history, the left successfully applied pressure in ways that were aimed at directly influencing politicians, rather than threatening citizens. Shortly after his re-election in 2004, President George W. Bush declared that his top domestic priority for his second term would be Social Security reform. In early 2005, he embarked on a national tour to advocate for a reimagined — and much more fiscally sound — Social Security system.
President Bush saw that, left unchanged, our nation’s most famous entitlement program could not be sustained. He wanted American workers to be able to invest “part of their Social Security contributions in private accounts,” thus betting both on themselves and on America. Despite the considerable political capital that came with a successful re-election, Bush’s reform effort bombed — or rather, it got squeezed in the Vise. The media and the influencers successfully portrayed the Bush plan as destroying, rather than preserving, Social Security. By September 2005, the president abandoned his reform efforts.
What happened with Social Security reform was disappointing. It was also an example of the traditional Political Vise operating as it has for decades. Since the 1930s, and the advent of New Deal social welfare programs, the left has deployed the Vise far more effectively than has the right. This isn’t new — it’s at the heart of what the late Senator Tom Coburn lamented to me nearly twenty years ago. What is new is that the traditional Political Vise has been almost entirely superseded by something far more sinister, and something far from the intent of the framers and the founders: the Progressive Political Vise.
In this new vise, it is the American people who are held accountable to the politicians, to the influencers, and to the media. It is ordinary citizens who are nudged, exhorted, cajoled, threatened, and squeezed. The Progressive Political Vise operates on the assumption that the American people are racist, ignorant, selfish, and stupid. It presumes that our deepest convictions are foolish superstitions. It sees government not as an instrument to serve the people, but a machine for transforming them. Resistance to that transformation will be punished.
“Progressive” shouldn’t be a bad word. We all welcome technological, medical, and scientific innovations that help human beings to live longer and more comfortable lives. We all dream of better lives for our children. In that sense, we are all progressives. Of course, that’s not how contemporary “progressives” understand the concept. Their goal isn’t to encourage innovation and invention. Their goal is to coerce and compel individual Americans to live according to a particular set of collectivist, secular values. For these elites, progress is defined not by human flourishing, but by human submission to an all-powerful, all-knowing state. It is not government by the people. It is government for the people as the government believes the people should be.
What we all need to know now is how we can retake the Vise, restore it to its intended use, and reclaim our country.
John Tillman is CEO of the Hall of Giants, an initiative focused on restoring durable centers of civic and cultural leadership in America.
