In American civic life, disagreements between political factions are as old as the Republic. But until recently, one principle stood above the fray: despite the passions of the moment, the legitimacy of lawful authority was never up for partisan reinterpretation. Today, that restraint is eroding. Taken in toto, the message increasingly conveyed by national Democrats is that political disagreement is now a sufficient basis to ignore orders, sidestep laws, and defy institutional norms.

Democrats have willfully opened Pandora’s Box, creating a cascading crisis of legitimacy that challenges everything from local elections to the legitimacy of the commander-in-chief.

If you don’t like it, it isn’t legitimate — that’s the message. They have created the ultimate permission structure for emotional reasoning to override reality. In the style of the assassins Luigi Mangione and Tyler Robinson, it is permissible, laudable even, to murder Brian Thompson, an insurance company CEO, in cold blood because you don’t like his company’s policies or to assassinate Charlie Kirk because you don’t like his message.

For decades, the American Left has framed itself as the bulwark against any hint of military politicization. But when political advantage beckons, that commitment seems negotiable. The recent interventions by Democrat lawmakers on behalf of service members who may disagree with chain-of-command directives mark a watershed moment. Their message to the ranks could not be clearer: if you oppose the elected leadership’s politics — particularly when those leaders are Republicans — you have the tacit permission of one of the country’s major parties to resist enforcement of rules that have bound the U.S. military for centuries.

This is not ordinary dissent. It is an attempt to redefine obedience to lawful authority as conditional and partisan. The consequences for a disciplined military culture are profound. Armies do not function when troops are told that orders can be evaluated through ideological filters, or that disobedience is noble if it aligns with the political preferences of powerful patrons in Congress.

The rot extends beyond the Armed Forces. Across agencies, schools, bureaucracies, cultural institutions — and even our law enforcement and judiciary — we increasingly see a double standard in the enforcement of rules. Progressive leaders routinely signal that laws are binding only upon those who lack political favor. Immigration statutes, drug laws, public-order rules, and campus regulations are selectively applied or openly defied, and left-wing judges interfere in legitimate government functions and overturn legitimate jury verdicts. In each case, the logic is the same: Legitimacy flows not from the law but from ideological conformity. Compliance becomes optional; resistance becomes heroic.

This mindset inevitably produces institutional fragility. A nation cannot maintain coherence when entire constituencies are encouraged to believe they may disregard laws enacted by elected leaders whenever those laws fail an ideological purity test. Nor can democratic institutions survive when a major political party implicitly assures its allies that they will be protected from consequences so long as their disobedience advances the right narrative.

What makes this trend particularly corrosive is that it masquerades as a defense of democracy. Americans have always understood that we have the right to resist bad law. Dissent, we are told, is patriotic — an admirable sentiment, until it hardens into a doctrine that undermines the Rule of Law itself. True democratic stability requires more than elections; it requires a shared commitment to respect lawful authority even when political winds shift.

But bereft of power and facing a president they loathe, Democrats are simply inventing issues, creating hypotheticals, and making up straw men to fight.

The message now being broadcast is the reverse of how our constitutional, representative republic has functioned: that simple partisan disagreement is enough to justify nullification. Once that principle takes hold, society ceases to be governed by laws and begins to be governed by factions.

History shows where that path leads, and it is not toward a more stable republic.

Let’s be clear, when taken in toto, the message being sent by Democrats across institutions — and most emphatically by the Seditious Six to our military — is that political disagreement with elected leadership now entitles you to ignore lawful orders, disregard statutes, and reject any policy you find objectionable. It implies that open defiance of legitimate governmental authority is not only acceptable but justified.

That is, unmistakably, an invitation to insurrection.

And they know it.

They have decided that to save America, they must destroy it, and they seem hell bent on burning America to the ground to rule over the ashes.