The Progressive Race to the Bottom

 Victor Davis Hanson

The old Democratic party championed the working classes, wanted secure borders to protect middle-class union wage earners, and focused generous federal entitlement help on the citizen poor. Civil rights were defined as equality of opportunity for all. That party is long dead. An updated Hubert Humphrey or even Bill Clinton would not recognize any of the present “Democrats.” Even the old wing of elite liberals is mostly long gone, with its talk of legal immigration only, opposition to censorship, pro-Israel foreign policy, let-it-hang-out Sixties indulgence, and free speech. It was superseded by grim progressives who are not so much interested in a square, new, or fair deal for the middle classes, as an entirely different deal that redefines everything from the Bill of Rights and the very way we elect presidents and senators to an embrace of identity politics as its first principle. Indeed, we are currently witnessing a quite strange series of North Korean–like reeducation confessionals, from repenting erstwhile liberals and now presidential hopefuls such as Joe Biden, Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand. They and other would-be candidates parade before show cameras to apologize for their prior incorrect heresies, including their erstwhile support for drug laws, tough sentencing, and border enforcement. The subtext of these charades is that 28-year-old socialist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (who won her Democratic primary with 15,897 votes and with that victory an assured congressional seat in a gerrymandered Democratic district) is the new Robespierre — warning that the earth as we know it will end in twelve years, ICE must be disbanded, all student debt abolished, wealth taxes levied, and Medicare provided for all. And her political guillotine awaits any progressive with lingering stains of the Ancien Régime. Presidential elections are now to be seen by the Left not as the end of a four-year political cycle. Instead, they are the beginning of an any-means-necessary, existential effort to reverse the proverbial will of the people and to remove or delegitimize the president. From now on, if the Left loses, then everything is in theory on the table: seeking removal of the victor by warping the Electoral College vote; or suing under the Logan Act, the emoluments clause, or the 25th Amendment; or cherry-picking federal judges to block presidential orders; or using the Congress to impeach the president; or unleashing a special counsel for years of investigation. In other words, we are in a revolutionary cycle in which the old idea of Democrat or liberal is being superseded by progressivism — and then going well beyond even that. The new generation of Democrats no longer resents “socialist” as a right-wing slur...MORE