Whatever happened to the Democrats? Party of FDR, Kennedy and Clinton. Idealistic, moderate, gave a vague impression of actually liking the United States. That pragmatic, patriotic party is scarcely discernible from the hideous creature that stands before us. The far left has hollowed out the Democrats and now parades in their freshly flayed skin, like a keffiyeh-clad Buffalo Bill.
Overnight results from the Michigan senate primary are still coming in, but Congresswoman Haley Stevens, a mainstream liberal, is trailing Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and part of the leftist insurgency taking over the Democratic party. El-Sayed campaigned alongside Hasan Piker, a radical Twitch streamer who says ‘America deserved 9/11’, calls the actions of the Houthis ‘not only moral, but… just’, and states he ‘would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time’.
In one diatribe, he said: ‘[A]ny kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a fucking rabid neo-Nazi… You shouldn’t even let someone be the fucking local dog catcher… if they’ve ever exhibited any sort of… positive feelings about the state of Israel.’
Not so long ago, maybe a decade or so, association with someone like Piker would be career-ending for a Democratic politician. Today, it’s a vote-winner, an indication of how extremist the party’s base has grown.
And it’s not just El-Sayed. One state over in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong is the runaway favourite to win next week’s gubernatorial primary. Hong is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She has called on the United States to ‘cancel Thanksgiving’ and ‘stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx and women’.
She previously called for the abolition of the police because they ‘exist to uphold white supremacy’, and recounted the time she left a restaurant ‘on the verge of an anxiety attack’ because there were ‘too many old white people who didn’t think we spoke English’. Hong seems to be obsessed with race, and to a grim degree. Referring to her own son, who is half-white and half-Korean, Hong has said: ‘My proximity to whiteness continues.’ Her own son.
Progressive insurgencies and racial flashpoints aren’t exactly unheard of in the Democratic party, but they used to be the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps it’s Nineties nostalgia speaking but Clintonian liberalism, with its fiscal moderation and cultural centrism, made the Democrats a formidable force, the electoral home not only of customary constituencies (women and minorities) but also of white suburban men, tough-on-crime independents, and deficit hawks.
Today’s Democrats wouldn’t tarnish their karma by attempting to win the votes of white men. They are strictly the party of unmarried women, status-conscious graduates, identity- and victimhood-based groups, and the unfathomably aggrieved offspring of assimilated immigrants. Key Democrat priorities include decolonising education, abolishing prisons, medicating gender-confused kids, granting amnesty to illegal aliens and boycotting Israel. Barack Obama’s political platform would be out of place in this party.
It used to be said that Democrats were for acid, amnesty and abortion. Today, they are the party of Palestine, pronouns and police abolition. Who knows, maybe there are enough voters willing to pull the lever for a melange of hyper-progressivism, ethnic sectarianism and wealth redistribution, but it is a self-defeating programme that will leave the United States poorer, less safe and more divided. America needs a decent, patriotic, reality-based centre-left party, and that is no longer the Democrats.
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