The Democrat Party we grew up with

 

Ben Garrison cartoon

The Democrat Party that many of us grew up with in the 50’s and 60’s is long gone.  Long gone.  The Progressive left has taken it over.  At PJ Media, Victor Davis Hanson (VDH) explains why so many of our family and friends can’t see it:

President Joe Biden is now 80 years old. He will be 82 when he campaigns for the 2024 presidency — and a clearly debilitated 86 should he be elected and fill out his second term. He has been in government for over a half-century.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and current representative from California is 83.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the second-ranking Democratic House member behind Pelosi, was House majority leader until early this year. He is 83, and has been an elected official for nearly 60 years.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is 72, with 48 years in elected government.

Democratic luminary and former chairman of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is 89, and ailing — after 53 years as an elected official.

James Clyburn, D-S.C., is House minority whip and 82.

These are the official faces of the Democratic Party.

They came into power and maturity three decades ago during the Clinton years of 1993-1999.

Decades ago, they sometimes supported strong national defense, secure borders, gas and oil development, fully funding the police, and a few restrictions on partial-birth abortions.

Not now.

Their role has changed from that of liberals of the Clinton era to serving as the thin power-holding veneer that masks the new real Democratic Party.

The party has been changed beyond recognition by Senators Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the so-called Squad, the Congressional Black Caucus, newly elected senators like the Georgia duo of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock – and Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Yet Biden and company are still familiar American faces.

Their final role is to acculturate the electorate to the new Democratic Party.

Its radicals are breathing down their necks to get out of the way. Yet for a while longer they still need such an ossified veneer of respectability to ease the transition to what is now essentially a socialist-European green party. . . .

A socialist-European green party”.  That’s putting it nicely.  Some might say the “Progressive left” is completing the “fundamental change” of America’s constitutional republic into the New World Order.  Global communism.    

VDH concludes:

The new majority of radical Democrats allows the old fogies to bask in the limelight until they drop — exempt from counter-revolutionary criticism or inter-party primary challenges or demands to retire.

In return, the codgers reassure the nation that old faces like theirs cannot possibly be polyester revolutionary socialists — despite their role in airbrushing and photo-shopping the radical catastrophe unfolding before our eyes.

Read all about it here.

# # #

Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?

 

At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson asks what we’re all thinking:

Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?

In the next five years, either cities will seek new governance to reduce taxes, break up municipal unions, mandate charter schools, restore police funding and manpower, recalibrate pensions, and prosecute criminals and corrupt officials—or Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and a score of others will become Detroit.

One of the strangest phenomena amid our current debility are the millions of affluent leftists and liberals who have fled their unworkable, now unlivable blue-run, but naturally beautiful cities like San Francisco or Portland. They seem to lack an abstract recognition why they are leaving, or why and how their new chosen destinations are so different and therefore so inviting to them. Is their motto, “I am fleeing what I created, but I still hate those who created what I want”?

To have a “border problem,” one must have a border. The United States has no southern border. . . .

VDH concludes his essay on a sad note:

Election night is a mere construct. It is mostly meaningless. Local, state, and federal election results are stalled and descend into days, weeks, and sometimes even months of bickering, counter charges of ballot tampering and fraud, ballot harvesting and curing, and a loss of confidence in the integrity of the final result. Debates mean little anymore, once a large portion of the electorate has already voted. No wonder deceased candidates can win. Gaffes are now determined by whether they occur before or after the majority of voters has cast their ballots. 

There should be a national uniform standard that allows states to set their ballot procedures—as long as they result in 70 percent of the electorate voting in person on election day. 

America is in a similar position to where it was in 1861, 1929, 1941, and 1968—only perhaps worse, given in all those cases, there was at least a president and Congress that identified and reacted to the crisis, whereas today our elected government is what caused the crisis.

Read the full column here.

# # #

Fiddling America Away

 

So where are we now?  One of this blog's favorites, Victor Davis Hanson (VDH), looks at the big picture, and his column “Fiddling America Away” at American Greatness is not encouraging.  He begins:

The last few weeks, the world had been writing off the United States as either crazy or irrelevant as it watches America cannibalize itself. 

Friends tremble at our sudden decline. Enemies rejoice. Neutrals make the necessary adjustments to join the ascendant non-American side.

The symptoms of our decline abroad appear everywhere. The more Joe Biden brags about the crippling oil sanctions on Russia, friends like India and allies like Japan ignore them. And why not, when Biden has no idea how long the war in Ukraine will last, or how much wherewithal the United States can, should, or will give Kyiv, or how its on-to-Red-Square blank check will finally end?

Big Biden talks about more solar and wind farms, and green new deals won’t fill the gas tanks in Munich or heat the homes of Kyoto, or lower the price of imported oil in the United Kingdom. Claiming the Afghanistan mess was a success fools no one.

Allies ask who are our leaders. An impaired Joe Biden who never is quite sure where he is, what he is doing, or whom he is with?

And VDH concludes:

So America suffers the sins of omission—squabbling over the nonessential—and commission—losing wars, going broke, ruining its economy, flirting with civil war. We know these are all self-inflicted wounds. But apparently, we believe their remedies are worse than the original maladies. And so we fixate only on the irrelevant that we think we can address while ignoring the existential we know we no longer can solve.

The world is terrified and stunned at the result—and increasingly looking elsewhere to non-American solutions.

VDH’s full column is here.

RELATED:  Just the News reports that “President Joe Biden promised that he would bring back the "good old days" in international relations, but instead Europe and much of the world seem to be leaving America behind to move forward to the China days.” 

# # #

Hillsdale College and government funding

 

In the wake of the Stanford University debacle, Victor Davis Hanson (VDH) scores again with “Who Owns The University?”  The entire column (at American Greatness) is, as usual, full of excellent insights, but these paragraphs particularly caught my eye:

. . . After all, Stanford, and thousands of private universities like it, are not Hillsdale College. Hillsdale long ago lost trust in federal and state government due to their efforts to use their partial funding as a means of politically leveraging the college. And therefore, it has refused all public monies ever since. 

Left-wing major colleges or universities have not done the same because they rightly assume the federal government shares their commitment to radical progressive change. And thus, Washington gives them free rein to discriminate in admission, housing, and hiring, as well as to suspend constitutional protections for faculty and staff—if in service to progressive-regressive agendas. 

But that was then, and this is now. If Stanford’s sordid law school psychodrama taught us anything, it was that the law school mob felt they could threaten, smear, scream, disrupt and shut down a public speaker and do so with complete impunity. And they were right on all counts. . . .

Hillsdale College has stood out for years as dedicated to offering a classical liberal arts education, including American history!  They can do so because they refuse all state and federal funding.  Our household subscribes to their newsletter Imprimus, which always contains a modified version of a recent lecture by a recognized conservative, such as VDH.  Read his column here.

# # #

Victor Davis Hanson: “The Nihilism of the Left”

 

Victor Davis Hanson posted “The Nihilism of the Left” at American Greatness, and he concludes:  

The Left got what it wanted and now controls academia, the media, the internet, K-12 education, corporate boardrooms, the Pentagon, Wall Street, and Hollywood. And they more or less have turned each of these into versions of Pravda. The sermons, arrogance, and narcissism of these woke cultural imperialists now explain why they are disliked as much abroad as they are at home. 

In sum, we are watching a rare laboratory experiment in which the traditional American fringe is now in control of the government. In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it. The result is an unmitigated disaster that not only has tarred the Democratic Party, corrupted once-revered agencies, and alienated half the country from our cultural institutions, but now endangers the very health and security of the United States. 

VDH’s full article is here.  Let us hope that what we are witnessing is indeed “a rare laboratory experiment” that can fail and be replaced by experiments that have worked – you know, a constitutional republic.

# # #