A car in front of me recently at a traffic light had a political sticker on its rear bumper that read, “Leave no one behind — vote Democrat .” The message isn’t new, and I’ve seen the sticker before, but I found it freshly notable because it has surely never been more obviously false than it is today.

It expressed the quintessence of the party’s message that Democrats are for the masses, the millions of little guys, rather than the big guys who have too much power already. The Blue party supposedly considers everyone and ensures that all stragglers are given a helping hand.

In one form or another, that’s the core of almost any Democratic slogan you read or debating point you hear expressed by their legion of TV pundits. It is the justification for every item on the Left’s agenda — we’re making sure no one is stranded, hurt, forgotten, or dismissed.

But the reality is that there is an adamantine vein of contempt in Left-liberal politics for the opinions and concerns of ordinary people, who are regarded as too stupid or selfish to know what is good for them. In theory, it may be that no tiny niche is neglected, no outré caste is too small or unworthy of the Democrats’ balkanizing attention. But the great and sensible majority will, almost as a matter of principle, be ignored.

The inflation that President Joe Biden and the Democrats unleashed with two years of spending that added more than $5 trillion to the national debt, for example, has left everyone behind who hasn’t received an 18% pay increase since he took office. That would be most people.

The Left’s response to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down racial affirmative action in college admissions is another case in point. More than twice as many members of the public oppose racial preferences in admissions than support, and a clear majority (52%-32%) support the justices ruling.

Yet the Left responded angrily to it as though the party commanded the moral high ground on behalf of enlightened and majority opinion in its opposition. Vice President Kamala Harris said the decision was “about being blind to history, being blind to data, being blind to empirical evidence about disparities, being blind to the strength that diversity brings to classrooms and boardrooms.”

Likewise, college administrators from Harvard on down promised to side-step the spirit of the court’s landmark reaffirmation of the 14th Amendment by finding new ways of achieving race quotas in their student bodies. Their attitude toward the constitutional judgment of the court and the moral compass of the majority is one of disdain.

Leave no one behind except most Americans — vote Democrat.

The public also wants school choice in K-12 education. This is hardly surprising, given that most people are not wealthy enough to pay for their children to be privately educated at fee-paying schools. The numbers are not even close. By a margin of 62%-22%, people want parents and children to be able to escape the throttling clutches of failing traditional public schools that operate for the benefit of the teachers’ unions and their political client, the Democratic Party. This vested Big Labor interest and the party that is its financial beneficiary are only too willing to leave behind all the children who attend these sinkholes of insouciant ignorance.

And Democratic governors — you know, the chief executives of the party that won’t leave anyone behind — are finding all sorts of ruses to bypass the wishes of the people who elected them and do the bidding of the teachers’ unions who back them so handsomely with money and time during election campaigns.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) double-crossed voters, winning office last November promising school choice and then going back on his word, saying he’d use a line-item veto to nix his state’s $100 million school voucher program. Sorry, you kids in failing schools, we’ll leave you behind because your teachers, who are betraying you, also have me in a financial armlock.

Two other Democratic governors used risible chicanery to defeat popular moves in education. In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers used his line-item veto to extend per-pupil spending by 400 years — yes, 400 — and to prevent the sacking of 188 bureaucrats wasting money on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper , almost unbelievably, used his power to declare a state of emergency to block the Republican-majority legislature from passing a law to widen the state’s school choice program.

For Democrats, it’s an emergency if the will of the people seems likely to be acted on. The party that boasts that it leaves no one behind will leave anyone and everyone behind when it is expedient to do so in the pursuit of power.