What binds the new Democratic Party to the new Democratic Socialists is a set of shared issues and values. That is, the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome — lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court and the filibuster — helped give birth to the socialists.
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. 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.
By 2021, it was time to destroy the southern border and welcome in some 10 million illegal immigrants — without audits, English proficiency, health checks or the ability to support themselves.
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.
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.
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.
If particular minorities statistically did not do as well on the SAT as Asians and whites did, 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.
Yet when the SAT was mostly abolished for four or five years, higher education thought it had solved the problem of minority underrepresentation.
But soon liberal professors learned that many of the newly admitted cohorts lacked the K-12 training necessary to do customary university coursework. Yet if professors maintained their regular courses, requirements and grading, they might soon be labeled racists once particular minorities were shown to do less well than Asians and whites.
So universities inflated grades. They introduced new remedial and gut courses. And they reduced the required coursework.
Soon employers noticed that the reading, writing and analytical skills of graduates from prestigious schools were proving dismal. Alumni complained both that the reputations of their almae matres were in decline and resting on the fumes of the past and that their own children, who had prepared diligently to ensure suitably competitive grades and SAT scores for admission, were being rejected solely on the basis of their race.
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. It also requires altering or destroying the system that had denied them power.
So communists, socialists and radical Democrats prefer moving the goalposts. When equality of opportunity was largely achieved, next they demanded a mandated equality of outcome.
With the ascendancy of a large, affluent middle class, the left, in its eternal search for a victimized class, pivoted and replaced class oppression with racial victimization.
And when there were not yet enough victimized minorities to guarantee a majority constituency of the aggrieved, the left redefined the victimized to include anyone who was not a white heterosexual male, regardless of income and privilege.
And when the people finally tired of the leftists’ totalitarian social engineering, the left sought to change the system by radically altering the way Americans vote, the manner in which government is formed and functions and, finally, the very demography of America.
The common denominator? Human nature revolts at forced statism, coercive redistribution and government-mandated equality of results. It instead yearns for liberty and freedom.
No matter how much deception, camouflage or brainwashing is employed, statism, socialism and communism can never sustain public support. Throughout history, the left has therefore begun by changing the rules and altering the demography — if not initially through changes to election rules, bureaucratic fiat and biased court orders, then eventually through sheer violence.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com.
