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.

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Uniparty update

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse calls the DC political elite the “Uniparty.” I’ve also come across the term “fusion party.” Robert Curry at American Greatness calls it the “biparty establishment”, and he puts recent political developments into perspective. 

Here’s a sample:

In 2016, the Republican party leadership looked on in disbelief as their voters stuck them with a candidate who had an excellent claim not to be a Republican. Meanwhile, the Democrats had a close call; their voters very nearly stuck them with a candidate who was not and had never been a Democrat. Republican voters rejected “their” party, and Democrat voters came close to rejecting “their” party, and they might have succeeded except for behind the scenes efforts by the party professionals to rig the system.

These were astonishing developments, but we need look no further than Barack Obama for the explanation.

For more than a century before the advent of Obama, the Left had adhered to a stealth strategy. They maintained a remarkable degree of party discipline over that long period, believing stealth was necessary and that it was the secret of their phenomenal success in overthrowing the Constitution incrementally, progressively. Instead of openly rejecting the Constitution, they had carefully installed in their voters a belief in what they called “the living Constitution.” A living Constitution is, of course, no Constitution at all; it is really a dying Constitution, a Constitution in the process of being murdered by a thousand cuts.

. . .

But Obama broke with tradition. To those paying attention on the Left, he did not hide his disdain for the Constitution, for America, or even for the flag—and the Left went wild. For the Left, Obama’s success meant the galling necessity for stealth was over, that they could let it all hang out because America was ready for a leftist revolution.  Many Democrat voters agreed. They were no longer willing to put up with a Democrat candidate mouthing platitudes neither they nor the candidate believed so that candidate could be elected.

Comes the hour, comes the man. [Bernie] Sanders was almost completely untainted by the strategy of stealth. Not only was he not a Democrat, but he had also honeymooned in the Soviet Union. In 2011, he wrote an op-ed in which he declared that the American dream is “more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Argentina” than in the United States. At the Democratic candidates’ forum in New Hampshire on Friday night, he said America is “a racist society from top to bottom.”

As for Trump, we can say of him what Lincoln said of Grant: “he fights.” Trump’s voters wanted a fighter, someone who would not be rolled by the biparty establishment.

Mr. Curry’s conclusion:

We now have an openly anti-American party and an openly pro-American party.

Read the rest here.

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