Consider the Marxist revolutionary slogan, By any means necessary, or BAMN.  The average person can be forgiven if he naïvely assumes that by any means necessary and the cliché all's fair in love and war are predicated on a similar ethical hierarchy.  However, there is a huge problem with that view, and it resides solely with the Democrats.   

For Democrats, by any means necessary has no limits.  It doesn't matter how corrupt, how illegal, or how violent political acts become; it is intentionally how the Democrats operate.  Antifa and BLM thugs burn down American cities and ambush police, and then Kamala Harris and Hollywood provide get-out-of-jail-free cards via bail money.  All is permitted and excused because, in their minds, their cause is perfect.  I single out Democrats because of their Marxist lineage. 

By any means necessary was introduced into popular culture by Malcolm X.  It is, at heart, a teleologic expression of a branch of ethics called "consequentialism."  Simply stated, something we do is right if in the end the equiposition of good and evil consequently balances in favor of the good.  Sounds pretty cut and dried, except, as always, who decides whether an action advances the "good" and whether the "good" is even real?  Who supplies the underpinnings of "self-evident"?  We think we agree on what's good until we don't.

The Russian civil war of 1917 spawned mass killings by the Red Terror.  Peasants unable to meet crop quotas or in opposition to Lenin and the Bolsheviks were slaughtered en masse.  The mass slaughters were the by any means necessary part explained away by Lenin and his apologists as "casualties" of war.  Russia's remoteness was in Lenin's favor.  Its remoteness also allowed for an idealized moral vision of his Marxist/socialist goals.  We almost never hear about the nine Rolls-Royces Lenin owned.

If the "necessary" accepts all comers as in "any means," then the "good" can be whatever is "necessary" to bend the arc of history, perhaps for selfish reasons.  If one looks back at Israel in the Book of Judges, its wayward version of by any means necessary is succinctly captured in chapter 21, verse 25.  "In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes."  It's a perfect setting for a George Soros's "Open Society."

It is easy to understand how Democrats, seeing only what's right in their own eyes, are currently in extreme negative territory when it comes to moral authority.  The problem for the Democrats and the left is Joe Biden and the Democrats.  They have less than zero moral authority.  Kamala Harris doesn't even rate an imaginary number.  It is the same for the in-the-tank media and all the left's apologists.  Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan is more morally repugnant than Lt. William Calley's two-hundred-body-count My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam war.  Biden's inflation is creating vast food deserts, employee deserts, empty shelves, zooming housing prices, above-sticker car prices, and zero guarantees that furniture you order will ever show up.

So when you hear the Democrats speak earnestly about "the right thing to do," realize they have no way of knowing what that might be, and it shows.

Spruce Fontaine is an artist and retired college art instructor.

Image: JMacPherson via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.