How To Commit Democratic Party Suicide
Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness
The Democratic Party is polling about 31 percent approval, a near-historic low.
Despite enjoying a huge lead in fundraising, legacy media favoritism, and incumbency, in the 2024 election, Democrats lost the White House to Donald Trump. Ever since, they have offered nothing new, no novel agenda, no innovative policies—nothing other than screaming that they are loudly against everything and anything that the president is for.
In the past, what did they accomplish by following their prior two impeachments with attempts to de-ballot Trump? Who thought sending an FBI swat team to raid Trump’s home or waging five lawfare civil and criminal suits and issuing 91 felony indictments against him would win over the public?
Was conducting a media barrage of Hitler-Trump invectives, or lowering the bar of demonization that likely led to two assassination attempts of Trump a good way to win an election?
Apparently not, given the Democrats have now lost the presidency, the House, and the Senate. The Supreme Court is conservative. They have no power to subpoena anyone; they cannot block any nomination. Much of their old administrative state control is eroding. All the main issues—the economy, energy, border security, illegal immigration, crime, DEI/woke, and foreign policy—poll against the Democrats. The more they shouted that biological men must be able to compete as transgendered females in women’s sports, the more that 80% of the public disagreed, women were turned off, and the absurd idea was exploded by Trump.
The power of the administrative state, the legacy network news, print media, and Silicon Valley’s social media and search engines, the billions that poured into the Biden and Harris campaign all went for naught.
The efforts of moderators to warp debates, of network news to edit out unfavorable Harris or Biden comments, of leftists to cancel, deplatform, ostracize, censor, and shadow ban their enemies have failed. More likely to succeed now are numerous lawsuits against leftwing media for chronic defamation and censorship.
Given that collective meltdown, what would a sane Democratic Party do?
If they were stable, then they might renounce political suicide and perhaps return to something akin to the Clinton efforts of 1992 and 1996. Then the once self-destructive Democrats finally gave up on disastrous out-of-touch McGovernism, Carterism, an Dukakism. Instead, they began to embrace legal-only immigration, secure borders, balanced budgets, support for law enforcement, and meritocracy.
The result?
After twelve years in the wilderness (1980-1992), the Democrats regained power for the next 16 of 24 years—only in the second term of Barack Obama to go full radical Jacobin and soon lose it.
The current self-destructive obsessions with DEI/woke racialism, bi-coastal talk-down elitism, boutique transgenderism, and nonstop America Lastism all came to fruition during the Biden years. A shameless conspiracy to use an enfeebled John Biden as a prop to masque an otherwise unpalatable radical, neo-socialist agenda ensured the MAGA counterrevolution.
But instead of postmortem autopsy and introspection, since Election Day, the Democrats have doubled down on their veritable collective self-destruction.
On immigration, after wiping out the border and allowing in 12 million illegal aliens, including more than 500,000 suspected felons, they seem deliberately to be alienating public opinion even further.
So, thousands of leftists swarm and block the freeways of Los Angeles to protest the deportations of criminals. And how exactly?
By enraging middle-class commuters, while burning the flag of the country that they demand must allow them to stay, while chauvinistically waving the flag of the country to which under no circumstances they wish to return?
New Jersey Democratic governor Patrick Murphy idiotically virtue-signaled that he would defy the law, as he bragged that he was harboring an illegal alien living above his garage.
Then, when apprised that such performance-art showboating was a felony, in theory entailing a long prison sentence, the now buffoonish governor changed his narrative that the occupant of his garage was not really illegally living above his garage.
Democratic governors and mayors vie, bragging that they will be foremost in breaking the law by impeding the efforts of the federal immigration services to find and deport illegal aliens—for now, half a million criminals. Other activists are tipping off criminal illegal-alien gang leaders to avoid US government efforts to apprehend such dangerous criminals.
Is that the way to win back the working classes? By ensuring that the felons of M-13, Norteños, Sureños, and Tren de Aragua can flee and put in danger fellow American police officers?
Elon Musk has been appointed by Donald Trump to create a new government agency, DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), to find waste, fraud, and abuse in the government spending of taxpayers money.
He and his young team of tech standouts have exposed shocking waste and fraud, but mostly insanity, in the USAID’s $50 billion of foreign aid grants.
Why are Americans paying for overseas drag shows or gay and trans advocacy in culturally imperialist fashion in traditional and conservative societies abroad? Why are we paying eight percent of the budget of the hardcore left-wing BBC? Is that a way back to the White House?
Do Politico, the New York Times, or the Wuhan gain-in-function virology lab and birthplace of COVID-19 really need millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars?
Do Democrats really think the middle class will hate Elon Musk for exposing that their government may well have handed the communist Chinese the necessary cash to birth a manufactured killer virus that took one million American lives?
Is that a winning strategy—to scream in Congress that Musk is a Nazi, a dictator for showing that Biden’s USAID under leftist Samantha Power was a clearing house to enrich and empower well-off leftist organizations that only weakened their own country abroad?
Do we really wish to spend $20 million to bequeath a woke Sesame Street to Middle East television?
Is it smart to gin up hatred of Elon Musk, who revolutionized space travel, the auto industry, and social media?
Is the Democrats’ message something like “We hate Elon Musk and will stop his free internet service to Americans ruined by fires and hurricanes and abandoned by their government?”
Or do Democrats despise Musk for providing free internet to Ukrainians battling for their lives against Russians?
Or is the key strategy to loathe Musk for crafting a risky rescue mission to save the lives of American astronauts virtually abandoned by the incompetent Biden government space program?
For Democratic officials to scream that Musk has no right to ferret out fraud is historically ignorant. He was selected by the president with the same powers that such appointees enjoy that are by statute not required to be approved by the Senate. The DOGE head is as legitimate as the National Security Advisor, who likewise needs no confirmation but also serves at the wishes of an elected president and likewise can do nothing without his approval.
Is Musk’s position in the Trump administration new?
Hardly.
Musk certainly has more legitimate legal authority via his DOGE position than that of FDR’s in-house informal advisors—such as Harry Hopkins—who from within the White House directed much of World War II foreign policy with the Soviets.
Financier Bernard Baruch held no major position for years under Woodrow Wilson and FDR and yet rebooted America’s wartime economy in two wars.
DOGE head Musk is more akin to FDR’s appointed war production board—similar to the likes of the unelected and unconfirmed Henery Ford, Henery Kaiser, and William Knudson, with the caveat that the latter three exercised far more power than does Musk.
During the confirmation hearings on Trump’s cabinet and agency nominations, Democratic senators did not question nominees like Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and Kash Patel so much as scream, interrupt, and insult them on live television.
Rather than ask the nominees questions about their policies and agendas, almost all the interrogatives were ad hominem.
All this came from a party that oversaw the greatest weaponization of our government in modern history while leaving us with two theater wars abroad, a scary and dangerous DEI/woke destruction of meritocracy, hyperinflation, $7 trillion more in debt, 12 million illegal aliens, the erasure of the border, and a vast shortfall in military recruitment.
During the recent Democrat Party convention elections, the voting turned into a virtual DEI tutorial on why the public is repulsed by Democrats.
The Party’s carnival-like elections were overseen by race/gender/orientation censors. In incomprehensible, jargon-filled lectures, they droned on about the correct quotas—trans, non-binary, female, black, Hispanic, Native American—that would override simple democratic voting.
When one looks for sanity among the Democrat Senate and House leaders, there is only madness to be found. Sen. Corey “Spartacus” Booker is back again, now screaming and playacting as if he were Winston Churchill willing to fight Trump-Hitler on the beaches, hills, fields, etc.
Rep. Al Green was wheeled out on spec to bellow and bluster that he was introducing articles of impeachment—is it for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time against Trump?
House Minority Leader Hakim Jefferies boasts he will fight Trump “in the streets”—alongside whom? The despised Antifa? The utterly corrupt and discredited BLM?
I doubt Rep. Jefferies himself will replay the 2020 summer of destruction. More likely he will parrot Kamala Harris’s 2020 bragging of the then ongoing four months of violent protests: “They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day, and they should not.”
Maxine Waters is back, trying to trump her earlier threats to birddog and harass Trump supporters in her usual racialist fashion.
AOC—the supposed future of the Jacobins—drones that Musk is “one of the most unintelligent billionaires” she has met. This putdown comes from the nincompoop who claimed Trump’s low unemployment rate was due only to people holding two jobs.
Does AOC think catching a rocket with a mechanical arm is proof of dumbness, and the rants of Mazie Hirono and Elizabeth Warren display wisdom?
What the Democrats don’t realize is that they staged a French-style cultural, political, and economic revolution and tried to destroy their enemies by weaponizing government and the media—and they have now lost.
This current counter-revolution is a return to centrist normalcy and just beginning. It is deemed wild only by feral Democrats, whose high crimes and misdemeanors, and various conspiracy theories over the years of their madcap rule are now being revealed every day. |
