Opinion with comments by Victor Davis Hanson.
There are no moderate Democrats. The media wants you to believe there are. Many are acclimated to the Democrat Party’s radicalism. As a result, they have lost sight of what is normal. The outgrowth of the DSA is a natural outcome of the Party since about 2007.
Barack Obama engaged in ad hominem politics. He constantly insulted the GOP with extreme language on his trips overseas. It was the beginning of what we see now. Joe Biden went even further. He used vile language, and people like Chuck Schumer claimed the GOP was a threat to democracy. This was while they were themselves trying to tear down democracy with open borders.
Now, we have people who want to abolish the entire system. That includes the three branches of government, the police, and prisons. If Democrats can’t win, they plan to blame the system and burn it all down. You see some Democrats concerned about DSA, but only because they see the old guard losing positions of power, in my humble opinion.
Victor Davis Hanson summarized it well in American Greatness. Deny them power, and they will destroy it all. Democrats have long wanted to destroy the system. Now, they have people – communists – who are being honest about it.
But the overriding commonality among those on the new Left is that if they do not get their way, they blame the “system.” Then they seek to change the rules, no matter how hallowed those laws and conventions may have been or how much they themselves benefited from them in the past.
When the Left lost the White House, Congress, and, for the most part, the Supreme Court, it began clamoring to change the system. For left-wing Democrats, that angst also translated into calls to bring in two new blue states, weaponize the FBI and DOJ, ally with social media to suppress the news, and spy on congressional representatives.
Democrats are trying to destroy the country with open borders. That is enough in itself, but they also gave us so-called justice reform of letting criminals roam free. Then they waged war against much-needed fossil fuels. That was before DSA. Democrats gave us DSA.
All the socialists and communists did was up the ante in destroying norms by calling for the end of the presidency, the Senate, the border, the police, and the Pentagon….
This neo-Marxist-driven demand to mandate equality—albeit now substituting racial and gender consciousness for class consciousness—requires the destruction of established traditions, laws, and norms.
The radical Left’s key agendas—defunding the police, destroying the border, granting mass amnesties to illegal aliens, subsidizing wind and solar energy while waging a war on fossil fuels, and expanding racial essentialism in hiring and admissions—have never won more than 30 to 40 percent support among the general public. Yet the solution was not to ask why, then reflect, reboot, and recalibrate to discover how the Left had lost public support. Instead, the solution was to alter or destroy the system that had denied them power.
The hardcore left decided they didn’t want to deal, negotiate, or even listen to alternative opinions. So they filled up the country with uneducated and even criminal foreigners. They protect them and redistribute our wealth to them. More from VDH…
In this regard, the Left sees California as our most liberal—and most ideal—state, and perhaps concludes that the reason is that 28 percent of its resident population is now foreign-born, with the majority arriving with vast needs for health, education, housing, and food subsidies.
Today, 50 percent of all births in California are paid for by Medi-Cal, which serves 40 percent of the population. When second-generation immigrants are added to the foreign-born population, the two groups together comprise roughly 45 percent of California’s current population. This demographic transformation is one of the most profound in American history and came at a time when traditional civic education stressing assimilation, acculturation, integration, and knowledge of American traditions, history, and values was nearly nonexistent in California public schools.
They brought in criminals, radicals, and people who have no desire to be American- from foreign lands. Then they offered them freebies and sanctuary. DEI came along and made them feel entitled. DEI teaches that white people are lesser human beings.
So one way of achieving radical change was to alter the demography and welcome as many immigrants as possible who, in the first or second generation, might follow the examples of Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
They represent an entirely new sort of immigrant who arrives—or is born to immigrant parents—with both complaints against and dependence on their host country. They can see only the sins of America, never the catastrophes of their homeland that drove them or their parents here. This strange demand to change the rules whenever they do not bode well for angry and aggrieved parties permeates every possible manifestation of the Left, but is especially egregious when demanded by immigrants who came originally as uninvited guests but almost immediately damned their magnanimous host.
It is so strange that so many people hate their own country.
It is strange for so many new immigrants to act on an elemental desire to reach America—only on arrival to profess that it is full of toxic, sinful people, living and dead. Yet the damned hosts have inexplicably welcomed total strangers like themselves, and have allowed them to share in the freedom, security, and prosperity created by the dead whom the newcomers nonetheless endlessly slander and smear.
They even dropped standards in colleges and universities so people who didn’t belong there could get in.
If particular minorities statistically did not do as well on the SAT as Asians and whites did on average, the solution was certainly not SAT tutorials in the inner city or K–12 SAT outreach, demands for tougher classes in grammar, math, and analytics, or a return to the melting pot rather than the current salad-bowl tribalist model.
Instead, after the George Floyd riots, the call went out to abolish the SAT entirely—as if there had never been a purpose behind its creation. In fact, merit-based SAT exams were designed in the 1920s and 1930s to allow anyone, regardless of race, gender, region, or class, to enter college through meritorious performance on the tests—and, in particular, to overcome old-boy insider preferences and regional and ethnic prejudices.
They could improve the schools in the inner cities, but that would be difficult. I worked with poor Black children and they learn as well as anyone.
Now, the professors want the standards back and are being slapped down for saying it. The problem isn’t just the DSA. It’s the entire party that opened our borders, and they will do it again.
