“We had to destroy the village in order to save it” was a quote popularized during the Vietnam War. Today’s Democrats, along with their allies in Hollywood, academia, Big Tech, and media, believe it is their solemn duty to take the country back from the “dregs of society” and their “ally in the White House,” even if our republic is destroyed.

And they’re increasingly embracing totalitarianism as the means to their end.

“I don’t use the ‘T’-word lightly,” writes columnist Sohrab Ahmari. “I’ve spent years pushing back against those who fling it about in free societies like ours. But totalitarianism doesn’t require cartoonish, 1984-style secret police and Big Brother. The classical definition is a society where everything — ethical norms and moral principles and truth itself — is subjugated to political ends.”

Political ends Democrats are willing to trash the Constitution to achieve. Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Mark Warner (D-VA), and Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) are demanding that the intelligence community, the FBI, and the Justice Department defy President Donald Trump’s order to release unredacted documents to Congress until they are vetted by the so-called Gang of Eight, calling it a “brazen abuse of power.” Former CIA Director John Brennan insisted deep-state officials — unelected and publicly unaccountable officials — were obligated to “push back” against the order as well.

Congress has lawfully subpoenaed the documents, yet a defiant deep state has refused to release them for months, citing “national security concerns.” Those concerns have already been debunked on two separate occasions, including the wiretap warrant applications presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that ultimately revealed the warrant to spy on Carter Page was based on the Hillary Clinton/DNC-funded Steele dossier. Moreover, redactions made by the FBI removed critical exchanges such as this: Lisa Page: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Peter Strzok: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”

Trump initially ordered “immediate declassification,” but now wants the inspector general to review documents on an “expedited basis,” due to concerns about how it would impact the Russia investigation. Yet in a tweet he noted that he can still “declassify if it proves necessary. Speed is very important to me — and everyone!”

Indeed. The 2018 election is “not going to be just about economic growth and running on the economy,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) explains. “It’s going be about what the other side did to play dirty, to dirty up a campaign … by corrupting the FBI and the DOJ. That is important for the American people to know as we have to deliver that message going into October.”

Who’s going to deliver it? The New York Times reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein secretly proposed recording Trump’s Oval Office conversations and discussed the idea of Cabinet officials removing him via the 25th Amendment. Rosenstein insists he was joking. Times reporter Adam Goldman says otherwise.

The far bigger story? Rosenstein’s statements were reportedly corroborated in memos written by Andrew McCabe and given to Robert Mueller and kept at the FBI, according to the Times. Yet they were kept from Inspector General Michael Horowitz — while he conducted his investigation of McCabe? If Horowitz is corrupt, “expedited basis” becomes a meaningless term with regard to deep-state corruption impacting the midterm election.

Unfortunately, our law-enforcement agencies aren’t the only government departments where rank partisanship — bordering on sedition — exists. Last week Project Veritas released a trio of damning videos. One featured State Department employee and Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Stuart Karaffa bragging about drafting DSA communications at work, and stating his mission with regard to Trump administration policies. “Resist everything … Every level. F—k s—t up,” he declared.

The second video showed DOJ paralegal and DSA member Allison Hrabar, part of the DSA group that harassed DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a DC restaurant, bragging about using the department’s Lexis Nexis account to access home addresses of government officials DSA sought as protest targets. DOJ employee Jessica Schubel, former chief of staff for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is also shown discussing her efforts to resist the administration as well.

In the third video, Government Accountability Office auditor and DSA member Natarajan Subramanian admits he breaks rules “every day.” He boasted, “If you’re in an executive branch agency, you can slow-ball things to a degree.”

Three of these subversives expressed one common belief best stated by Karaffa: “I have nothing to lose. It’s impossible to fire federal employees.”

The DOJ, the State Department, and the GAO are conducting investigations, but if history is any indication, Karaffa’s right. At best it takes on average from 170 to 370 days to fire a government employee according to the GAO. Appeals can drag the process out for years.

Columnist James Simpson optimistically notes there are bills being contemplated in both chambers of Congress that would “greatly streamline the process for firing employees who are poor performers, insubordinate, or otherwise engaged in misconduct.” Will they pass?

Perhaps Simpson hasn’t noticed that some of the nation’s worst government employees are members of Congress.

In fact, it’s impossible to imagine how much lower Democrats can sink than their Stalin-esque treatment of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanugh, or how much more spineless Republicans can get acquiescing to their contemptuously orchestrated delay. Sentient Americans know this spectacle has nothing to do with Kavanaugh or the increasingly dubious charges leveled against him. “From abortion to gay marriage, plus a host of less titillating issues, modern liberalism has lived by the Court,” Ahmari explains. “And liberals fear their cause will die by the Court.”

Thus, force-feeding their agenda to the American public — by any means necessary — has become the American Left’s modus operandi. Can’t win elections? Insist Russian collusion was to blame and demand an investigation, call voter ID requirements “racist,” or simply grant illegals the right to vote. Don’t like the current administration’s foreign policy? Undermine it, like John Kerry is doing with Iran. Can’t persuade an American public to embrace your ideology? Have your progressive tech allies censor opposing viewpoints or manipulate searches; transform college campuses and public schools into citadels of progressive indoctrination that breed contempt for the nation’s history, traditions, Constitution and its exceptionalism; and turn everything from entertainment venues to corporate business operations into platforms for progressive virtue-signaling.

It’s become clear that virtually every aspect of modern-day progressivism is driven by the same despicable delusions that have animated every totalitarian movement since the dawn of time:

Our cause is “noble” and thus, the ends justify the means.

The 2018 election will likely be one of the most clarifying moments in the nation’s history. Either an American Left whose “win by any means necessary,” Constitution-crushing proclivities — never more exposed than right now — will be rejected by the electorate, or the number of Americans poisoned by a corrupt education system has reached critical mass, and a majority of voters will embrace totalitarianism, destroying America in order to “save” it. Save from whom?

Themselves.