Victor Davis Hanson has some insightful thoughts on how the radical left has destroyed the Democrats.
“They don’t have any political power. They’ve lost the House. They’ve lost the Senate. They do not have the White House and they don’t have the Supreme Court. They do have the lower courts, but they can ultimately be overturned by the Supreme Court.”
“And more importantly, they set certain precedents, Obama’s use of executive orders, for example, that are very convenient for a powerful Republican president like Trump.”
“So, they’re frustrated that they can’t affect anything politically. And then they thought they could use extra legal methods.”
“So they raided Mar-a-Largo. They had 93 criminal indictments in, if you count E. Jean Carroll’s crazy suit. Five different courtrooms. 25 states were trying to get him off the ballot. They impeached him twice his first term. They tried him as a private citizen. Two assassination attempts and he’s a Nietzschean character that it just made him stronger. The more they tried to destroy him, the stronger.”
“They tried to destroy him and in the process they destroyed institutions. They were willing to do that by waging lawfare. We’ve never seen any of those things I just mentioned, raiding a president’s house, ex-president’s house, or trying to remove a major candidate of one of the parties from the ballot, but it all failed and now they have no political power.”
“So then the question is why are they why did they get in this position? And I think the answer is that they became the party of the subsidized poor, and the very upper upper middle class professional classes and the billionaire class, 9 trillion market capitalization in Silicon Valley. The Zuckerbergs, Soros, all those people and Bloomberg, all of them. And the reason was, I think, they thought that globalization, that enriched the two coasts, who had global skills, you know they had a market suddenly of 6 billion people, with media, law, investment, hedge funds, universities.”
“And then the people in the middle, who were muscular, and lost out on manufacturing assembly, resource exploitation, oil, gas, those type of workers [were] offshored or outsourced. They they created a kind of a narrative: ‘We’re the smart people. That’s why we’re wealthy. That’s why San Francisco and LA in the ’90s and the early century of the, 21st are so much better than you people.'”
“‘And that’s why the people in the East Coast are so much better. And you people are clinging and deplorables and irredeemables and chumps and drags and most lately garbage, because we’re the winners.'”
“‘And now that we’ve won and we’re affluent, we’re not subject to the consequences of our ideology, we can use you as lab rats. So we’ll try transgender on you. We’ll try the New Green Deal. We’ll have solar, wind mandates. We don’t care what the kilowatt price is. We don’t care what gas prices are because we’re protected by our wealth and our degrees and our zip codes.’ And that changed the Democratic party.”
“If you go back in ’92 and ’96 and look at their convention statements under Clinton, my God, they’re to the right almost of Republicans. ‘We’ve got to close the border. Illegal immigration has to end. We have to deport people. Juveniles who commit crime should be tried as adult. We need more police officers. We need to balance the budget.’ That was the Clinton response to McGovernism and Carterism.”
“What I’m getting at is that this demographic change, or this economic or financial change, made it a party of, ‘Well, we don’t have any popular middle class anymore. We don’t want them. All we need to do is open the borders, subsidize the poor, subsidize the non-white, and concentrate on the power of money to influence the media. And the order of your Google searches will be affected. We have insidious ways of retaining power without popularity.'”
“And somebody came along and beat them at their own game. And that was Trump, who was a master of the media, who was a master of alternate media, popular culture. And that creates a lot of frustration on their part as well. They thought that they were transforming to NetZero world, Green New Deal, DEI. It wasn’t just DEI or affirmative action. There was a new, vitriolic, anti-white [ideology].”
“And all of that was going to be institutionalized, and that was part of the new Democratic Party, and Trump came along and said ‘I don’t think most people like this stuff, and I’m going to find out who they are that don’t like it. I’m going to get him out to vote.’ And it was very hard in 2016 and 2020, but he learned.”
“And final thing is maybe the best thing was that he did lose 2020, because he learned in those wilderness years exactly how the the left got power and how to neutralize it. And then when he came back in, he said, ‘I’m going to appoint people on my ideological turf. It’s not going to be any more of these first term people. And I’m going to actually appoint people who have been victims of the very agency they’re going to run like a Kash Patel or Tulsi Gabbard or Jay Bhattacharya, so I can trust them.'”
“And it’s been a remarkable first 8 months how effective he’s been. And I thought by now he’d be pulling 30%, given the magnitude of the counterrevolution. But it’s just amazing what he’s been doing.”
“It reminds me so much of the Thermidorian Reaction to the Jacobans. You know the Robespierre brothers were put out of business by a counterrevolution, and they were exactly like the left. We have 1619, they had Year Zero. Our people are secularist or atheist or agnostics; Vatio* was going to be their Supreme Deity, Reason.”
Trump is much better prepared for his second term than his first. “They must have studied the left, chapter and verse, because they really know how to push their buttons. And maybe one of the legacies of Donald Trump, besides his positive contributions, will be he had an unique, uncanny ability to make the Democrats expose themselves in a way that they really are. And it’s very repulsive and off-putting to the public.”
As usual, VDH is succinct, insightful and accurate.
*Not sure YouTube’s automatic translation has this one quite right.