What has happened?

What can be done?

We quote parts of a column by Thomas D. Klingenstein at American Greatness in which he describes what has happened as cold civil war, and looks for signs that our side might win.

We find ourselves in a cold civil war. But we have no real generals. A war without generals is no war at all. There is no liberty or death, only death, the death of our once cherished republic. …

This is a war not over the size of government or taxes, but over the American way of life. The war is between those who salute the flag, and those who take a knee. Those who believe that America is built on freedom, and those who believe America is built on racism. Those who are convinced that America is good, and those who are convinced America is bad. These differences are too large to bridge. This is what makes it a war. In this case, a cold civil war.

Winning a war requires two fundamental understandings. First, you must understand that you are, in fact, in a war. Wartime requires very different rhetoric, strategy, and people than peacetime. Trump is a wartime leader. Second, you must understand your enemy, what it wants and how it goes about getting what it wants. What our enemy wants is the destruction of the American way of life. It goes about it by trying to force everyone to say, “America is systemically racist.” If it can convince us of this falsehood, it will be well on its way to overturning the American way of life.

Every time Joe Biden accuses America of being systemically racist, he is, though he doesn’t know it, calling for the overthrow of the American way of life. In a war, you must play to win. But you cannot win against an enemy that has no name, or has many names—identity politics, multiculturalism, anti-racism, wokeism, and more. My entry for a name is Woke Communism, Woke Comm for short. Whatever the name, I think it should communicate totalitarianism because this is what the enemy seeks to impose.

In a traditional totalitarian regime, the government uses arbitrary violence to control every aspect of public and private life, all the way down to Little League. In America, the government does not control everything, but today, through the power of the purse and the courts, the government influences a lot. And where the government leaves off, the cultural business complex takes over.

Education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, and especially Big Tech, are to varying degrees aligned with the Democratic Party, which is now controlled by the Woke Comms. These institutions together with the government function as a totalitarian regime, crafting narratives that advance their agenda and suppressing those that do not. Instead of violence, there is canceling.

This may not look like a totalitarian regime, but it acts like one.

Last summer’s riots are a case in point. Woke Comm agitators sparked the flame that lit the riots. Their intellectual leaders justified the riots, their corporate donors gave billions to the Black Lives Matter network, their media looked the other way, and their politicians—from Joe Biden on down—fanned the flames.

What is Woke Communism? Like any regime, Woke Communism is built on a particular understanding of justice. For the Woke Coms justice is outcome equality. That is, the proportional representation of all identity groups in all aspects of American life. So for example, the Woke Communists believe that blacks, who count for about 13 percent of the population, should have 13 percent of the nation’s chief executive officers, prisoners, heart attacks, wealth, top test scores, homes, corporate board seats, school suspensions, and everything else you can think of. Equal everything is what Woke Comms call social justice. Any disparities, say the Woke Coms, are due to racism and nothing else.

If, as the Woke Communists contend, racism has insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of the American way of life, then quite obviously, it is necessary to throw out that way of life. This is why there simply can be no peace between Woke Communism and America. In a free society like America there will always be group outcome differences, particularly between men and women. Eliminating such group outcome differences, as the Woke Coms aim to do, can only be achieved at the expense of freedom. …

In totalitarian regimes, there can be no institutions of moral authority that compete with the state. Of course, the institution that the Woke Comms [as the state] must completely control is education. The Woke Comms must no longer teach our children about an America striving, however imperfectly, towards its noble ideals. Instead, they must teach about an America conceived in oppression and dedicated to racism. In short, Woke Communism will replace American justice with social justice, and destroy law and order, the rule of law, and both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Successful implementation of the Woke Communist agenda, above all, requires convincing American citizens of a series of lies. The first and most important lie, as I have said, is “America is racist”. That is the big lie. We hear it from every direction from morning to night, but endless repetition does not make it true. It isn’t true. The corollary to the big lie is another lie. America is about to be overrun by white supremacists. This is pure nonsense.

What the Woke Coms mean in perpetuating this lie is to suggest that anyone unwilling to kneel before Black Lives Matter is a white supremacist.

“Police target blacks.”  That is another lie. Blacks commit 50 percent of the violent crimes in America. Should we be surprised that the blacks account for about 25 percent of those killed by the police. Before we start talking about defunding the police, perhaps we should face the facts.

“Trump endorsed white culture.” This is a lie. Trump endorsed not white culture but American culture, which is open to anyone, of any color, willing to embrace it….

We are told that moderate Joe Biden is in charge. Biden is neither moderate nor in charge.

“Black Lives Matter care about black lives or righting past injustices.” These are among the biggest whoppers. But we should pay attention to BLM because, as we learned during the riots, BLM represents the leading edge of the Democratic Party. Any doubt about the prominence of BLM should have been dispelled by the Biden-Harris Administration encouraging American embassies to fly the BLM flag. Think about that. Our embassies, beacons of American freedom, are flying the flag of an organization committed to the destruction of American freedom.

“January 6 was an insurrection.” Every bit a lie. …

“Election fraud is baseless.” This is a lie repeated with such determination that it is forbidden to question it. But the fact is, there is enough evidence of fraud to warrant investigations and now enough obstruction of investigations to warrant further suspicion.

The Woke Coms also lie with language. Racism, they call “equity.” Anti-white, they call “diversity.” The 20th century is piled high with corpses from regimes that falsified language in just this way. 

In totalitarian regimes, it is necessary to silence those who challenge the lies. We see this with increasing regularity. American citizens getting canceled, fired, denied access to social media, even deprived of banking services. Woke corporations punish states that don’t comply with the woke agenda. Information unsanctioned by the regime is becoming increasingly difficult to find. Opinions that contradict Dr. Anthony Fauci, praise the police, or question sex changes or election integrity… don’t get past the tech censors.

More terrifying still, we’re getting used to censorship. Censorship has become a fact of life.

But there is much more than censorship. The rule of law is breaking down. Rioting is sanctioned. Immigration and other laws go unenforced. The Woke Coms said to the Derrick Chauvin jury, convict Chauvin of murder or we will give you a riot the likes of which you have never seen. This is mob rule. …

We are no longer a nation of laws.

Top scientists and airline pilots are now being hired based on skin color and gender.

Same with the United States military, which says it is looking not for warriors, but for women with two moms. Other than the Woke Communists, how many of our young men and women will be prepared to die for a country that puts diversity over life? Such a country has a death wish.

China is licking its chops, watching us commit suicide. Statues which help define and inspire us are being toppled. The Statue of Liberty is safe for the moment because the Woke Coms believe it stands for open immigration. But one day, the Woke Coms will discover that immigrants come to America not to be members of their ethnic group, but to be free individuals. When that day comes, Lady Liberty could find herself at the bottom of New York Harbor.

The election of 2020 was stolen. Leave aside fraud, last minute unconstitutional changes to election laws, bogus investigations, even the pandemic. Trump could have survived all these. But what he could not survive was four years of unrelenting, deliberately dishonest media slander. When the media takes pride in bringing down and silencing a sitting president, brace yourself for a long fall.

How should Republicans respond? What should we do about all this? The essential thing, as I’ve tried to stress, is for Republicans to understand we are in a war and then act accordingly. War is not a time for too much civility, compromise, or for imputing good motives to the enemy. Our generals must fight as if the choice were between liberty and death. This is no time for sunshine patriots.

We agree with all that, but ask –

Fight how? Tell us how, Mr. Klingenstein.

He ends with this:

I am not without hope. There are many pockets of resistance bubbling up around the country. Parents are pushing back against “America is racist” curricula. Even San Francisco had a rare moment of sanity when it decided not to remove Abraham Lincoln’s name from a high school. The manly “don’t tread on me” ethos remains part of the American spirit. Many Americans still salute our flag, honor our military dead, and ask God to bless America.

Such citizens are part of the huge army that Trump has mobilized. This army is raring to go, but it needs direction.

If Republican leaders start speaking the truth, loudly and passionately, the army will follow.

Perhaps one of the people who voted to keep Lincoln’s name on that San Francisco High School remembered that Lincoln, at age 30, unknown beyond Central Illinois, wrote about an aspirational fantasy, which was, I suspect, inspired by his heroes, George Washington and Henry Clay. If ever I feel worthy, Lincoln once said,

It is when I contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world . . . and I standing up boldly and alone, . . . hurling defiance at [our] victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, . . . I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause . . . of the land of my life, my Liberty, and my love. . . . But if after all, we shall fail, be it so. We still shall have the proud consolation of saying to our consciences, . . . we never faltered.

We are, I think, in a perilous moment such as the one Lincoln imagines. It is time for our leaders, without contemplating consequences, to swear eternal fidelity to the just cause of the land of our liberty, and our love, the land which remains the last best hope of Earth. If after all, we shall fail, be it so. We shall have the proud consolation of saying that in defending America, we never faltered.

Those feeble Republican leaders need only to shout “the truth”? Resistance is “bubbling up”? Some parents are “pushing back” against racist indoctrination? Some citizens are asking “God” to “bless America”?  If we fail we can take pride in not faltering?

These are the remnants we can shore against our ruin?

Better look to Trump to be the general we need. To direct us – the army he mobilized.

If anyone can help us win this war, he can. That’s why the totalitarians fear and hate him.

The Democratic Party wanted and fought for slavery, secession, and segregation.

Why, in the name of common sense, doesn’t every Republican candidate for office, every Republican in office, and every Republican voter constantly tell this to the electorate, until the rotten reputation that the Democrats have earned, sticks to their party irremovably? Wouldn’t that be a good way to destroy it?

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch summarizes the horrible history of the Democratic Party so well, we quote his article almost in full:

The Democratic Party was founded in 1828 by the backers of General Andrew Jackson, a Southerner and ardent racist who owned slaves and thought nothing wrong with the practice. Jackson, who became the 8th president, earned his fortune in a cotton industry based entirely on slaveholding. 

“Old Hickory” as his troops called him, was one tough son of a bitch. Compromise was not in his lexicon. Aside from his attitudinal superiority over blacks, Jackson is also famous for the “Trail of Tears” which forced Native Americans off their ancestral lands. These are the seminal beginning roots of the Democratic Party tradition in America.

Leading up to the Civil War, the Democratic Party had only one platform: Keeping slavery and the plantation economy intact.

In an attempt to settle sectional conflicts about the expansion of slavery, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The Act stated that the residents of those states, rather than the federal government, would determine the legality of slavery in those territories. The Republican Party was created largely in response to the Act; their 1856 platform of “free labor, free land, free men” aimed to protect poor white farmers and laborers from competition with slave labor. In response, the Democratic Party took a position of non-interference with the institution of slavery, which they favored and defended.

The Democratic Party was founded in a racism that was intended to support the interests of the ruling class and its party grandees as its first political principle. It was the core tenant of their political philosophy, public policy, and actions for the better part of a century.

The Democrats controlled the South and fought the Civil War as “Confederates,” to protect and preserve slavery and their way of life. The Confederacy never had political parties because they were all Democrats. All of the governors, generals, and leaders of the South in its war of secession were, in fact, Democrats.

The Republican Party was formed to abolish slavery and maintain the Union. In Ripon, Wisconsin, former members of the Whig Party meet to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories. The Whig Party, which was formed in 1834 to oppose the “tyranny” of President Andrew Jackson, had shown itself incapable of coping with the national crisis over slavery.

With the successful introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, an act that dissolved the terms of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the territories, the Whigs disintegrated. When Lincoln, the first Republican president, was elected with a split vote in 1860, it took only three weeks for the states of the South, all Democratic, to secede from the Union and start the Civil War, the bloodiest tragedy in all of American history.

After the surrender of the Confederates, the Democrats were implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor, was a staunch supporter of slavery and the Southern Confederacy during America’s Civil War. On the night of April 14, 1865, three days after the war ended, he entered Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., and shot Lincoln. The assassin shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis! [Ever thus to tyrants!] The South is avenged,” as he jumped onto the stage and fled on horseback. Booth was funded  and supported by the Democratic Party and the Confederacy, and his known plan was to reignite the Civil War and keep slavery.

The turbulent era of Reconstruction (1865-77) following the Civil War saw an effort to reintegrate Southern states and four million newly freed black people into the United States. The Democrats had a different plan for Reconstruction  based on a reversion to their supremacist racist policies and ideology. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson (a Democrat from Tennessee) in 1866, new southern state legislatures passed highly restrictive and harsh “Black Codes” to control the labor and behavior of formerly enslaved people and other African Americans.

Outrage in the North over these racist measures eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 by Republicans, newly enfranchised black people gained an active voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces—primarily the Ku Klux Klan—would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in a South that was still totally Democrat controlled.

At the conclusion of the Civil War, six Confederate veterans, all Democrats, gathered in Pulaski, Tennessee, to create the Ku Klux Klan (Greek for circle), a vigilante group mobilizing a campaign of violence and terror against the progress of Reconstruction and the Republicans. As the group gained members from all strata of Southern white society, they used violent intimidation to prevent black people—and any white people who supported Reconstruction (namely, Republicans)—from voting and holding political office.

All of the members of the Klan were Democrats; participation in the Democratic Party was explicitly mandated by the Klan, and the linkage between that political party and its extremist, violent terrorist wing is well documented.

In an effort to maintain white hegemonic control of government, the Klan, joined by other white Southerners in the Democratic Party, engaged in a violent campaign of deadly voter intimidation during the 1868 presidential election. From Arkansas to Georgia, thousands of black people were killed. Similar campaigns of lynchings, tar-and-featherings, rapes and other violent attacks on those challenging white supremacy became a hallmark of the Klan for decades. Again, this was informally sanctioned by the Democratic Party.

Jim Crow [laws] … originated with Democrats and included these abhorrent practices. These laws enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. (Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine that mocked black people. The term came to be a derogatory epithet for all African Americans and a designation for their  segregated life.)

From the late 1870s, Southern state legislatures, totally controlled by the Democrats, passed laws requiring the separation of whites from “persons of color” in public transportation and schools. Segregation was extended to parks, cemeteries, theaters, and restaurants in an attempt to prevent any contact whatsoever between blacks and whites as equals. Although the U.S. Constitution forbade racial discrimination, every state of the former Confederacy, all with Democratic governors and state legislatures, moved to disenfranchise blacks by imposing biased reading requirements, stringent property qualifications, and complex poll taxes. Jim Crow laws were a Democratic invention and lasted until the 1960s.

Democratic leaders like the late Senator Robert “Sheets” Byrd (D-W.Va.), were high-ranking officials in the KKK. Byrd was himself a grand cyclops of the KKK. He actively recruited hundreds of members and bragged about it. He held political office as a Democratic leader for five decades and was the longest serving Democrat in Congress. In December 1944, Byrd wrote to segregationist Democrat Mississippi Senator Bilbo:

I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side . . .  Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

During the Civil Rights Movement Democrats did everything in their power to forestall the rights of minorities and continue the subjugation of black voters.

When all of their efforts to enslave blacks, keep them enslaved, and then keep them from voting failed, the Democrats came up with a new strategy: If black people are going to vote, they might as well vote for Democrats. As President Lyndon Johnson was heard to have said about the Civil Rights Act, “I’ll have them n—–s voting Democrat for 200 years.”

So now the Democratic Party prospers on the votes of the very people it has spent much of its history oppressing. And the names of those oppressors are well known.

Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor was an American politician and dedicated member of the Democratic Party who served as Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, for more than two decades. He strongly opposed the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and was famous for his racist rhetoric and use of police dogs against protestors. He came to typify the Democratic attitude against equality and the 13th Amendment.

George Wallace, the fiery Democrat governor of Alabama was infamous for standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama to block integration in 1963. He attempted to keep his inaugural promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and stop the desegregation of schools and society. He came to personify the Democratic attitude to race relations and later went on to mount a losing run for the presidency.

Dixiecrat Democrats, formed in 1948, were opposed to civil rights, and bolted when Harry Truman took the Democratic nomination. Southern Democrats tried to forestall the signing of both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964. If Republicans had not sided with certain Northern Democrats to end the longest filibuster in history by then-Democrat Senator Strom Thurmond (D-S.C.), the Act would not have become law.

People like then-Senator Joe Biden, (D-Del.) from the border slaveholding state, Delaware, below the Mason-Dixon line, got elected on a segregationist banner and opposed integration and school busing throughout the 1970s and 80s. Biden worked closely for years with Democratic Mississippi Senator James Eastland and Democratic Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge, two demonstrably racist Democrats, who opposed civil rights legislation and all integration efforts.

The tortuous history, when actually read and studied, demonstrates one abundantly clear fact; America has long had a racist political party.

They are called Democrats.

Their obsession with race is as intense now as it has ever been.

But there has been a change in the party. Though still predominantly white, the Democrats are now viciously anti-white!

And their favorite term of abuse to fling at others who do not share their obsession, is “Racist!”

They must not be allowed to conceal their anti-black history.

Capitalists are lavishly funding the Communist revolution now underway in America.

Black Lives Matter, a Marxist revolutionary movement whose goal is to overthrow the free constitutional republic of the United States, has been given/promised well over a billion dollars “so far” by American businesses to help it realize its aim.

The Federalist reports:

At least seven “Fortune 500” companies donated funds to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation despite its Marxist roots and anti-capitalistic views.

According to Axios, “the 100 largest U.S. companies have so far committed $1.63 billion to organizations fighting racism and inequality”. Analysis of social media posts, blogs, and public statements … shows that Deckers Uggs, Amazon, Pepsi’s Gatorade, Microsoft, Warner Records, Intel, Bungie of Xbox and Microsoft Games, and Mondelez International’s Nabisco all specifically pledged money to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation following the death of George Floyd. …

The article includes a (non-exhaustive) list of of donating companies.

The beneficiaries complain:

What is surprising is the paucity of corporations and the stinginess of the donations. [!]

One of the BLM co-founders, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, explained the foundation of the movement, inspired by her and co-founders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, in an interview [with The Real News] in 2015:

We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.

So of course was Obama, who stated proudly that he was a “community organizer”, which means, in blunt terms, a red revolutionary rabble-rouser.

The riots – no doubt joined by many “useful idiots” who are simply bored with being kept from work and confined to their homes by the quarantine regulations – have a purpose, a point, a meaning far beyond expressing indignation for the fatal police mistreatment of George Floyd, the petty criminal and historic international martyr.

BLM is the latest vanguard of Communist revolution in America, aimed –  as one African immigrant, leading revolutionary, and elected member of Congress, Ilhan Omar, says – at “dismantling the system”, meaning the overthrow of the free constitutional republic.

The movement and its entire agenda is supported by the Democratic Party, and if the Democrats are elected to power in November, the Communist Revolution of the USA will have been accomplished.

*

Reminded by Liz, we add:

Soros, the most evil of all anti-capitalism capitalists, uses his billions to employ legions of demons – these days he prefers them to be black and female – to promote crime and cripple law and order. His money gets them into powerful positions, notably the office of State or District Attorney. Then at his command they proceed to corrupt the criminal justice system.

The Democratic Party has a racist past. Could it shake off its history by changing its name?

No.

What if it stopped being racist? And – and – and then changed its name? Could it then be considered morally clean?

That would be a good thing in  itself but  – no. It  will go on smelling bad because of its history no matter what it does. What happened, happened. Nothing that happens can ever be undone.

But a name-change would indicate that it regrets its past, wouldn’t it?

It could indicate that – or it could be seen as trying to conceal its past. Either way, it’s past will still be there, tied to its tail with imperishable bonds.

The Western Journal reports and comments:

Democrats who’ve spent the past month salivating as mobs attacked symbols of American history might want to think about the rocks heading for their own glass house. …

And a resolution Monday night by the Republican Party of Connecticut’s central committee is calling them on it.

The resolution came the same day that a Christopher Columbus statue in (Connecticut’s capital) Hartford was removed … “as a symbol of white supremacy”.

But as the Connecticut GOP’s resolution made abundantly clear, as symbols of white supremacy go, Columbus had nothing on the American Democratic Party. In a long and historically accurate recitation, the resolution noted that it was the Democratic Party that:

• • Was the driving force behind the Confederacy’s secession from the Union — to protect the institution of slavery;
  • Tried desperately to block the “Reconstruction Amendments” to the Constitution, which were written to ensure the slaves freed by the Civil War had full rights of citizenship;
  • Were behind the organized terror of the Ku Klux Klan in the Civil War’s aftermath and instituted the rigid segregation of the Jim Crow era.
  • Was opposed to the civil rights movement even into post-World War II America.

… [Yet] the party that truly represents centuries of literal “systemic racism” — racism written into law and enforced with the lash — has managed to cast its political opponents, the party literally founded on abolishing slavery, as the enemies of equality. …

It’s about time the [Democratic Party] gets called to account for its own past.

Democrats wanted to keep the institution of slavery while Republicans wanted to abolish it and succeeded in doing so.

Having lost the battle to keep Blacks as slaves, the next best thing for democrats was to keep them subservient with the Jim Crow laws.

When they failed with that too, they decided at least to keep blacks poor, badly educated, and dependent on government. Which means in effect to keep them enslaved.

Democrats have controlled the nation’s largest cities for decades, and the results of their misrule are apparent for anyone to see.

Inner-city public schools are the creatures of Democrat-supporting teachers’ unions, and disasters for educating students — many, sometimes most, of them black.

Unwed motherhood, a virtual guarantee of poverty … is [common] in the black community after decades of Democratic government programs. (According to a Center for Immigration Studies report in 2017, an astounding 77 percent of American black babies were born to unmarried women).

Even Democratic claims about being concerned about “police brutality” ring hollow [in the light of the fact] that the police departments where incidents take place are almost always run by Democratic officials (who infuriate police with their backstabbing).

If summer 2020 is a time when progressives are going to demand the country answer for its past problems, it’s well past time for Democrats to start answering for their own hypocrisy.

And they could start by dropping a name that’s been irredeemably disgraced.

The mobs on the streets have been hitting symbols of America’s past while Democrats cheered.

One of these days, those same mobs might get around to the Democrats’ disgraceful past too, as well as the party’s disgraceful present.

To what might the Democratic Party change its name?

An accurate name would be “the Racist Party”. But no Democrat is likely to acknowledge that to be true.

Same goes for “the Hypocritical Party”.

It would be good enough if the Democrats tacitly acknowledged their hypocrisy and intolerance by laughably calling themselves the Freedom and Truth Party. 

The 100 year old international movement towards collectivism, world government, wealth redistribution, anti-individualism, elitist rule over equalized serf populations – in two words, Left Progressivism – is coming to an end.

In an age when ever more people everywhere are literate, have access to information, can communicate with others anywhere, communal subjugation becomes ever less possible.

Sure there are a few countries where populations still suffer under communist tyranny, notably North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela – and China. It is because China is so badly governed that coronavirus, a new killing disease, has emerged from it and is spreading through the world. The harm will last for decades, but Left Progressivism is slowly but surely, and at an accelerating pace, failing and dying, coming to an end.

It has gone about as far as it can go. Victor Davis Hanson writes about its reaching its peak in America; a point from which its only further advance can be to oblivion:

In 2020 we have finally hit peak progressivism …

By that I mean the hard-left takeover of the Democratic Party and the accompanying progressive agenda now have reached an extreme—beyond which will only result in the steady erosion of radical ideology altogether. …

From 2009 through 2016, Barack Obama recalibrated the Democratic Party’s liberalism into progressive radicalism. He opened the border and all but dismantled existing immigration law. Sanctuary cities sprang up with impunity. Executive orders bypassed the Congress. The Iran Deal ignored the Senate’s treaty-making responsibilities. Obama sought to nationalize healthcare. The concept of “diversity” replaced affirmative action, by redefining racial oppression as distinct from historical grievance and economic disparity and instead lumping together 30 percent of the population as nonwhite, and thus antithetical to the new buzz construct of “white privilege”. Fast and Furious, the surveillance of the Associated Press reporters, Benghazi, the weaponization of the IRS, and the use of CIA, FBI, and DOJ to seed the spurious Steele dossier were all written off as proof of the “most scandal free” administration in memory.

But today Obamaism has been figuratively guillotined by the New Jacobins. It is found guilty of crimes of insufficient revolutionary zeal, as well as compromises with the U.S. Constitution and capitalism.

Once considered a crank socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) now leads in many Democratic primary polls. Arriving with him at this moment in our politics is peak progressivism.

First-term socialists—House representatives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her fellow “squad” members, inspired by Sanders—now set the new Democratic agenda. And it is one that is more radical than anything seen in modern American history and largely unsustainable: calls to level a wealth tax and new top income-tax rates of 70-90 percent, to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service, all student debt, an enforceable southern border, the internal combustion engine, and most Second Amendment rights, and to enact multi-trillion dollar new entitlements as outlined in the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, free healthcare for illegal aliens, and reparations.

Identity politics so rules the rhetoric of the new progressive party that all of its—exclusively white—primary finalists vie to be most vocal in the ritual damning of their own country (that has ironically ensured their own influence, power, success and wealth) as inherently “racist”.

Outside of the political sphere, peak progressivism had reinvented the university, rejecting Martin Luther King, Jr’s vision of racial integration and assimilation, by demanding racially obsessed dorms, safe spaces, and applications.

There is hardly a First Amendment on campuses anymore. Speakers with unpopular views are shouted down with impunity by student activists. “Trigger warnings” seek to censor required texts. The mere accusation of sexual harassment on campus is synonymous with the suspension of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments. Skepticism over abortion, “climate change”, or identity politics can cancel out a faculty career.

It is hard to imagine where universities go after peak progressivism, since it would be the pure nihilism of abolishing grades, admissions standards, and student fees.

Peak progressivism calls for the abolition of the constitutionally mandated Electoral College. Radicals now fault past failed schemes to pack the federal and Supreme Court with left-wing justices only because they failed, and thus advance ways to make court-packing work in the present. The bolder among them wants to reconfigure the U.S. Senate into a proportionally representational house or abolish it altogether.

All that would be left after that would be the formal abolition of the U.S. Constitution itself.

Primary candidates compete with one another to water down voting laws, variously demanding that 16-year-olds, felons, and illegal aliens should be given the franchise.

The now far-Left Democrats fail to see that when their hopes for election lie, as they do, with criminals, lunatics, illegal aliens and the immature, there is something wrong with their policies.

Gay marriage, which Obama opposed in 2008 and later promoted after reelection, is now passé. The new civil rights cause celebre is transgenderism, an ancient syndrome known in the past under a variety of clinical definitions that affects less than half of one percent of the population. Who, after these peak progressive ideas, would be left as ineligible to vote—12-year-olds, those on death row, the rest of the earth’s population?

All moderate Democratic presidential candidates long ago dropped out. Those who have not, such as Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg, are in virtual reeducation camps, as they promise to progressive rivals and the media to renounce most of their past positions, effusively apologizing for prior incorrect thinking and failure to become sufficiently “woke”. …

The much-discussed “intersectionality” is a construct, a myth. The history of ideological extremism is instead a war of all factions against one another.

We see just that in the peak progressive primaries. Michael Bloomberg is deemed a racist and sexist. But then so is Joe Biden. Bernie Sanders supposedly hires racists and sexists and won’t honor minimum wage laws. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) thinks Bernie is condescending to women and minorities. Pete Buttigieg thinks he is the victim of Joe Biden’s subtle anti-gay political adds, and feels, but does not articulate, that the black community is inherently anti-homosexual. The race to tag others as victimizers and selves as victimized is endless.

Radicals also vie to make rivals look counter-revolutionary, as they advance ever more incoherent and unhinged schemes without a clue that they are losing not just moderate support but even liberal followers. The more Warren feels she must become the purest peak progressive on the debate stage and the most radical in the U.S. Senate, the more her former supporters feel she is either a conniving opportunist or nuts or both. …

Peak progressives cannot possibly live up to their rhetoric fantasies and so suffer from rank hypocrisies. Redistributionists like Warren and Sanders either fly on private jets or choose non-egalitarian first-class commercial. Hollywood stars who mouth crazy [socialist, egalitarian] Oscar and Grammy ceremony platitudes vie with each other to wear multi-thousand-dollar clothes, live in mansions, and own yachts—as they drive down ratings to historic lows.

Not long ago, progressive pundits on CNN and MSNBC declared the current indicted lawyer Michael Avenatti presidential material for his fabrications and lies that were used to smear Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Where does a network go after that? …

It is not only “hard to imagine where universities go after peak progressivism”, or where the networks can “go after that”; it is impossible to see a destination for the Left itself, in America or anywhere else in the world.

Except to extinction.   

First, a few dogmatic assertions:

The Democratic Party is nothing but a menace and a nuisance.

Adam Schiff is the most loathsome and despicable politician in America.

Donald Trump is one of the greatest presidents in US history.

All of which is so obvious, we see no need for a crumb of supporting evidence.

But now, to encourage an admirable spirit of brazen triumphalism in the nation, we quote a survey of just one week (Sunday October 27 to Friday November 1, 2019) of President Trump’s achievements.

Kimberly Guilfoyle writes at Townhall:

Last week was one for the record books, not just for President Donald J. Trump, but for the entire country, which witnessed major economic, domestic policy, and national security accomplishments packed into a single calendar week. Now, with 365 days until election day 2020, these are the kind of weeks that will be remembered by voters as they consider their choices — and that’s bad news for Democrats up and down the ballot.

The week started in the morning of Sunday, October 27th, as President Trump took to the podium in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room to announce that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed in an American-led military operation in northwest Syria. Al-Baghdadi was not just any bad guy — he was rivaled only by Osama bin Laden. He was a mass murdering serial rapist who enslaved millions of innocent people in ISIS-controlled territories that once included parts of 20 countries on two different continents.

The president’s decision to deliver justice through swift and deadly force has made the world a better, safer place.

Oddly though, some in the media seemed disoriented by the news, grasping for a way to spin the death in a way that doesn’t look like a foreign policy success for President Trump. The failing Washington Post went so far as to title their obituary, “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.” As Donald Trump Jr. recently put it, that’s like an obituary of cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer reading, “Dahmer, connoisseur of exotic and locally-sourced meats, dies at 34.

However, even more disappointing then the media twisting themselves in knots to avoid saying anything that might be interpreted as praise for President Trump was the deafening silence from Democrats. They were seemingly unable to acknowledge that the Commander-in-Chief — even in this just one specific instance — made the world safer.

However, undeterred by his constant and incessant detractors, the president went immediately from celebrating a major national security victory on Sunday to visiting Chicago on Monday to honor law enforcement at the annual International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Through the coordinated efforts of local, state, and federal law enforcement, America has reversed the tide of violent crime that spiked from 2014 to 2016 under former President Obama. The violent crime rate has fallen in each of the last two years, resulting in 50,000 fewer robberies and 286,000 fewer burglaries.

And while the president was in Chicago Monday, the stock market was hitting record highs. Although Democrats — and the typical cast of media talking heads — continue to predict impending economic turmoil, the market is once again outperforming expectations at historic levels. The S&P 500 hit a new record high four times this week, while the Nasdaq reached a new record high for the first time since July.

On Tuesday, the president’s Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons delivered a new report detailing the success the administration has had in combating the scourge of human and sex trafficking. Convictions of human traffickers have doubled, and the number of defendants charged has increased by 75 percent. This is one of the most underreported issues plaguing America today, but President Trump has committed substantial resources to addressing it, which is having a meaningful and immediate impact in communities around America.

On Wednesday, President Trump’s administration took an important step to help Americans suffering from substance abuse by launching FindTreatment.gov, a website that will enable visitors to access a database tailored to addressing their specific needs and treatments. Addiction can affect anyone, so it’s important to have a platform that supports everyone.

And while the week ended on another high note Friday, with a major jobs report showing the unemployment rate hovering near the lowest level since 1969, a new record-low for black unemployment, and 128,000 new jobs, the Democrats used Thursday to advance their singular political objective: impeachment.

Although two Democrats joined with Republicans to oppose Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s next step in the impeachment sham — an encouraging bi-partisan move — the Democrat majority …

Led by loathsome despicable Adam Schiff  …

… was still able to pass the resolution establishing Pelosi’s rigged rules. While the vote has little actual effect on anything — other than being another embarrassing spectacle out of a power-hungry party — it highlighted the stark contrast between the agendas of each party.

In an almost tiring week of winning for America, the Democrats had to sully our enjoyment of America’s greatness with a meaningless, partisan charade on the floor of the House of Representatives.

The talking heads in the media may fixate on polls, fundraising numbers, and the empty promises of politicians, but voters are looking for results. And while it may not be every week that President Trump orders an operation that successfully eliminates one of the most dangerous terrorist masterminds in world history, the rest of his accomplishments in this last week were exactly what we’ve come to expect from President Donald J. Trump.

Yesterday ( November 4, 2019), Donald Trump, addressing a typically vast and passionately enthusiastic crowd at a rally in Lexington, Kentucky, repeated exultantly what Fox News political commentator Lou Dobbs said of him – …

… that I was the greatest president since Ronald Reagan. Then he said, “No, no. Trump is an even better president than Ronald Reagan. And now he’s got me down as the greatest president in the history of our country, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”

Lou Dobbs was exulting in his own foresight when he said it. He had made this prediction in 2016:

I will not pretend objectivity in this at all, I think that Donald Trump is going to be one of the greatest presidents this country has ever had.

And that is how it is.

The Democratic Party has become officially and doctrinally authoritarian and cruel.

Another word for it is fascist.

Karin McQuillan, writing at American Greatness, explains why “fascist” is the right word to use for what the Democrats have become. We quote her article almost in full:

The Democrats have no shame.

Liberals watch their politicians, celebrities, and media leaders attack individuals, even children, and our precious civil liberties. Instead of recoiling, they immediately parrot the vicious talking point of the day. The few exceptions of public protest, the exemplary Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, and last week, Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), makes the ominous acquiescence of other Democrats all the more noticeable.

The mobbing of the Covington boys, and the feeble excuse-apologies—and continued attacks—that followed, join what is now a long series of hate-filled words and acts by leftists that cause regular Democrats no shame, no dark night of the soul, no revulsion towards what they are becoming as people and as a party.

Everything America has ever stood for must go. Being colorblind is attacked as racist. Equality before the law is attacked as sexist. The list of Democrat doublespeak becomes a tedious rant, and what’s the point? Democrats are not listening and if forced to listen, plug their ears and scream at the top of the lungs that it is Trump, Trump, Trump who is ruining everything.

Meanwhile, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom to bear arms, freedom to organize politically (for conservatives), the right to life for a baby about to be born — have all been redefined as violence against blacks, women or gays. A religious teenager standing still in a MAGA hat is an attempt to “erase” minorities that justifies violence to wipe the smile off his face.

#TheResistance is an attack on the right of Republicans to win a perfectly normal, hard fought, fairly won, national election. Democrats are resisting American democracy itself—and their previously normal voters cheer.

Americans never accepted attacking children, mobbing anyone, making political opposition a thought crime — now Democrats do.

The attempt to defame and destroy youngsters should trigger revulsion across the political spectrum. Instead, we heard a chorus of lame excuses that the original Covington video clip could well have been the boys mobbing an Indian. Reality check: even the short clip did not show a boy disrespecting an Indian, let alone mobbing an Indian. The short clip was a video of a boy smiling at an Indian. That’s it. The long clip showed black adults and an Indian being aggressive and disrespectful to a group of youngsters, followed by the Indian trying to frame the kids in a lying, hostile interview with the national media.

Democratic professional journalists tried to ruin that child’s life. A hysterical Twitter mob wanted to dismember and kill him. His real crime was going to a right to life rally and wearing a MAGA hat. They tell us so. I keep thinking of Mao’s Red Guards, who would stuff a neighbor in a sack for thought crimes and beat her to death.

We have black shirts, in America, beating conservatives with chains. It’s OK with leftists, including Obama and Clinton, because they name themselves Antifa. It’s hard to believe it’s really happening.

One by one, the post-Obama Democratic party is breaking down all civilized norms in America. That’s understandable. They are being led by professional activists, following the cultural Marxist playbook of identity politics. It is a well published, albeit ignored playbook, which Obama learned at the American Socialist conferences he attended, taught in Chicago as a paid agitator and law school lecturer, and instituted from the White House.

We’re following the leftist blueprint for destruction. Their weapon of choice is to set the races at each other’s throats. Obama stoked racial grievances leading to race riots and a mass shooting of cops, cynically using the corpses of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Social justice warrior’s grievance studies departments, racial quotas and attacks on white privilege daily rub race relations raw.

Community organizers purposely inflame grievances into societal breakdown. They get money by shaking down corporations with accusations of racism (now add sexism and homophobia). They take over public schools and texts that teach kids to hate America. When they get enough power, they corrupt and subvert our institutions—IRS, FBI, DOJ. They delegitimize the constitutional safeguards against tyranny of the mob, such as the electoral college.

The left is tearing America apart on purpose, because they want a revolution. It’s normal for them.

What is not normal is for regular Democrats, once sincere liberals, to follow their leaders down into the sewer of cultural Marxism, pretending it doesn’t smell. Once normal Democrat politicians, journalists, Hollywood and sports celebrities are leading a revolting break down of civility and decency.

In each and every case, normal, decent Democrats choose not to look. If forced by too many headlines to notice the odious behavior, they justify it.

The stench of their hypocrisy is in all our nostrils.

In the case of the Covington boys, their own high school and bishop in Kentucky — people who knew the boys and their milieu and should have assumed their decency absent overwhelming evidence to the contrary — automatically and swiftly joined the accusers of the innocent boys.

Liberal Catholic and Christian clergy have long been turning a blind eye to the intense bigotry of Democrats against their own religions. Liberal Jews are tolerating their party’s anti-semitism, since it is integral to identity politics and multiculturalism. This seems freakish, but it is all too human. 

Liberals cannot admit what is in front of their eyes: conservatives represent traditionally liberal values. Conservatives are the party of inclusiveness, in which we are all Americans, colorblind and equal, while their identity politics is something foreign to America that encourages hatred of whites and men, pitting race against race and women against men. Conservatives want to raise people up, and their party wants people to be dysfunctional victims, seething masses of self-destructive grievance, envy, and revenge.

None of this is subtle or confusing. It’s just impossible for liberals to admit. The price of being honest is too high.

Everyone they know is liberal. Their spouses, their children, their relatives, their neighbors, their bosses, their colleagues. Liberals don’t tolerate dissent.

Dissent, and you will be treated like the Covington boys. …

Liberals have no escape from their party’s embrace of hate. For a liberal to criticize Democrat’s hatefulness towards whites, men, Jews, Christians, Catholics — it can’t be done. It would destroy a liberal’s career, perhaps his or her marriage, in an instant. Dissent is punished swiftly and ruthlessly by liberals. Apple’s black, female vice president of diversity and inclusion was fired after six months in her new position (she was a 20-year veteran at Apple, on the leadership team expanding retail worldwide). Her crime? She said twelve white men from diverse backgrounds with different life experiences and perspectives also provide “diversity”.

All of this is impossible for liberals to face. Their own betrayal of American values, their hypocrisy, the danger of dissent—all are awful things to admit. So they don’t admit them. Instead, they double down on denial and displacement. They tell themselves Republicans are truly evil and must be destroyed. They insist they are the party of love.

Liberals aren’t uneasy that the two freshmen congresswomen from Muslim districts are anti-Semites. Their papers simply don’t report on it. Instead, they scream over and over that President Trump is KKK, ignoring his stellar record of helping blacks with jobs and safe neighborhoods and school choice and incarceration reform, his healing words that color doesn’t matter, and we are all American.

Tearing the country apart with false accusations of racism is bad for America, but for the individual liberal, it is totally safe. It is required. It is good.

Wanting to torture, beat and murder the Catholic boys from Covington High carries no penalty in their social circles. Showing those boys respect even though they are right to life? That’s dangerous. Really dangerous.

It’s easy to keep liberal blinders on. Limit your reading to the propaganda press, so you will not learn any disturbing information. Read the New York Times and listen to NPR, and “poof”—all the potential cognitive dissonance is gone.

To stay in the fold, liberals are being forced to jettison liberalism. They have already jettisoned American values. No more Bill of Rights. No patriotism allowed. No common sense on borders. No Martin Luther King’s dream of colorblind fairness. No equality before the law. No respect for a two- party system.

Adopting fascism is entirely comfortable. Everyone they know is doing it. They’re the good people. Everyone they know says so.
 
 

In fact, those “liberals” have not been liberal for a very long time, if ever they were. They are Democrats. The Democratic Party supported slavery, segregation, secession and the KKK, and now it supports infanticide. One of the two major political parties of America, commanding roughly half the votes of the American people, has become the Party of Death!

A number of professors (particularly foolish types generally speaking) question whether the human race should continue to exist – and mostly argue that it should not. (See here, here, here and here.) Whether they are Democrats or not, whether they are all on the Left or not, we don’t know, but they certainly aren’t conservatives.

The government’s factory of official lies in Orwell’s novel 1984 is named The Ministry of Truth. It is a shining example and inspiration to the EU’s unelected government.

The Big Brothers of the EU – in fact very largely, and wholly in aura, a Sisterhood – declare they will defend DEMOCRACY by crushing POPULISM.

They will defend government by the people by ignoring the will of the people, and prevent expression of it. Because, they say, the will of the people is “far-Right, neo-Nazi, bigoted, racist, xenophobic, imperialist, neo-colonialist, white-supremacist, Islamophobic” and would overheat the planet.

They, the Rulers of Europe, all of them Socialists and many of them erstwhile members of one or another Communist organization, aim for universal EQUALITY.

Women must be equal with men. All races and religions must be equal with each other.

(Except the Jews, of course.)

(And the Muslims must be privileged because colonialism.)

All must be equal in material goods.

Except themselves, the bureaucrats, the Councillors and Commissioners, the Big Brothers-and-Sisters, the mighty rulers. They can be richer.

Today they rule Europe; tomorrow, the world.  They will dissolve all national borders. And that will be the end of nation-states.

Do they understand that their ambition to rule the world will bring them into rivalry with Islam, whose similar ambition they are encouraging? Apparently not.

Christine Douglass-Williams reports and comments at Jihad Watch:

The European Union is becoming more brazenly Marxist in its advocacy for open borders (enabling the hijrah), which is the biggest threat to democracy today. The EU has already been attempting to bully sovereign states such as Poland and Hungary with threats of sanctions for not accepting its imposed quotas of migrants. Now it’s becoming even more aggressive, accusing so-called “populist” states that seek to keep their countries safe and societies free of being anti-democratic….

Economic affairs chief of the EU’s unelected executive arm, Pierre Moscovici, said that “more progress in European integration” is required to head off populism, which he described as “a major threat for our democracies, for liberal democracies, for the rule of law and for European values”.

Europe has seen the worst breaches of the rule of law since flinging its doors open to indiscriminate immigration. No-go zones (some war-like) have proliferated, as well as jihad attacks, random stabbings, anti-Semitism, and sex assaults.

“Populism” is actually the rise of reason among the people, seeking safety and protection in the face of corrupted politicians who have opted to reshape Europe via the hijrah, as jihadists have also infiltrated the refugee stream. Mosques preaching jihad have proliferated everywhere; many are foreign-funded. Still, the EU openly spreads its propaganda in the hope of keeping its citizens blind.

The audacious extent of its falsehoods is well encapsulated by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations website, which declares that “the threat to Liberal Democracy” is “from the backlash against immigration and refugees”. 

George Soros’s “Open Society Foundation” is named according to the Orwellian principle. Its entire purpose is to create a global, closed, totalitarian society.

Virginia Hale writes at Breitbart:

The European Union (EU) must bring an end to national sovereignty over finance with the creation of a “eurozone budget” in order to kill off populist politics within the euro region, according to the Commission.

“Having a eurozone budget is absolutely decisive if we want to address the populist challenge, the burning question of inequalities,” he told an interview with Euractiv.

Speaking after a talk at New York’s European American Chamber of Commerce, Moscovici said: “The European crisis is no more an economic crisis. It is an inequality crisis. It is a political crisis. It is a crisis of delivery. We need to deliver more. That is what eurozone reform is about. It is not technical. It is highly political.”

Turning to talk of Italy, where citizens elected a coalition between the Eurosceptic, anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the anti-mass migration League earlier this year, Moscovici warned against the government’s defiance of EU diktats demanding a steep curb to public spending.

The Paris-born Commissioner, who began his political career in France’s Revolutionary Communist League, stated: “My message is that their interest, not only their duty but their interest, is to reduce the structural deficit and in turn their public debt so they can develop investment in the economy.”

They are so ordered. And if they don’t obey they will be penalized with fines and sanctions.

In the US, one of the two major parties is rapidly shedding its old dry “Democratic” skin and emerging in a glistening new “Democratic Socialist” skin. A political ecdysis.

It too wants to enforce EQUALITY. Except for its own elite who can be richer.

It too wants to abolish borders and end the nation-state.

It too encourages the spread of Islam. And sees no rivalry with it.

It too wants to “defend democracy” by suppressing the will of the people, silencing dissent and criticism, punishing disobedience.

Expect it, if it is put in power, to abolish elections. To tear up the Constitution. To disarm the people.

And to call the new order “DEMOCRACY”.

Left-leaning Time, taking a view from the left – so a softer one than would a cold observer from Mars – diagnoses causes of morbidity in the Democratic Party. And prescribes no cure. 

In its habitual irritating style, packing in irrelevant detail, it narrates and asserts:

Like virtually all Democrats, Tim Ryan is no fan of Donald Trump. But as he [Tim Ryan] speeds through his northeastern Ohio district in a silver Chevy Suburban, the eight-term Congressman sounds almost as frustrated with his own party. Popping fistfuls of almonds in the backseat, Ryan gripes about its fixation on divisive issues and its “demonization” of business owners. Ryan, 44, was briefly considered for the role of Hillary Clinton’s running mate last year. Now he sounds ready to brawl with his political kin. “We’re going to have a fight,” Ryan says. “There’s no question about it.”

That fight has already begun, though you’d be forgiven for missing it. On the surface, the Democratic Party has been united and energized by its shared disgust for Trump. But dig an inch deeper and it’s clear that the party is divided, split on issues including free trade, health care, foreign affairs and Wall Street. They even disagree over the political wisdom of doing deals with Trump.

Every party cast out of power endures a period of soul-searching. But the Democrats’ dilemma was unimaginable even a year ago, when Clinton seemed to be coasting toward the White House and demographic change fueled dreams of a permanent national majority. Now, eight months into the Trump presidency, the party looks to face its toughest odds since Ronald Reagan won 49 states in 1984.

The Democrats are in their deepest congressional rut since the class of 1946 was elected, and hold the fewest governors’ mansions–15–since 1922. Of the 98 partisan legislatures in the U.S., Republicans control 67. During Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats lost 970 seats in state legislatures, leaving the party’s bench almost bare. The median age of their congressional leadership is 67, and many of the obvious early presidential front runners will be in their 70s by the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, there’s still no sign the Democrats have learned the lessons of the last one. “I’ve tried to learn from my own mistakes. There are plenty,” Clinton writes in her campaign memoir What Happened. The book, released on Sept. 12, casts blame on Russia, the FBI and the candidate herself, but never quite finds a satisfying answer to the titular question. Even if it did, these days the party seems to prize ideological purity over Clintonian pragmatism. “There is no confusion about what we Democrats are against. The only disagreement,” says strategist Neil Sroka, “is what we’re for.”

Which leaves the party confronting a puzzle. The momentum may be on the left, but picking up the 24 seats required to retake the House, and the three states needed for control of the Senate, will mean luring back blue collar workers in places like Ryan’s Mahoning Valley district, where the steel plants are shells of their former selves, small businesses are boarded up and payday lenders seem to be on every corner. This used to be a Democratic stronghold, but Trump won three of the five counties in Ryan’s district. If Democrats don’t refine their pitch to alienated white voters, Trump could win re-election with ease. “The resistance can only be part of it,” Ryan says. “We have to be on the offense too.”

It’s not clear who has the influence or inclination to spearhead that shift. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi are seasoned dealmakers who can raise Brink’s trucks full of cash. Their Sept. 6 pact with Trump, which pushed back a pair of fiscal showdowns and delivered hurricane relief money to storm-stricken southeastern Texas, was hailed as a fleecing by the Democrats. After a dinner of Chinese food in the Blue Room of the White House a week later, the pair said they had reached a tentative agreement with Trump to sidestep the Justice Department’s rollback of an Obama-era program that helped young immigrants who were in the country illegally. But among the grassroots, any agreement with the President is viewed as cause for suspicion. When Schumer dared to back a handful of Trump’s Cabinet picks earlier this year, activists protested outside his Brooklyn apartment, hoisting signs with slogans like Grow a spine, Chuck. In her San Francisco district on Sept. 18, Pelosi was shouted down by activists who were angry that her proposed immigration deal with Trump did not cover more people.

For all these challenges, the party’s time in the wilderness could prove to be an opportunity. … But before the party comes together, first it has to banish the furies that threaten to tear it apart.

The counterpoint to Ryan’s call for moderation could be found onstage in August in a Hyatt ballroom in Atlanta. Senator Elizabeth Warren, the former Harvard Law School professor and consumer advocate, had come to deliver a battle cry to 1,000 grassroots activists. “The Democratic Party isn’t going back to the days of welfare reform and the crime bill,” she said in not-at-all-veiled criticism of President Bill Clinton’s mid-’90s strategy to peel off Republican votes. “We are not a wing of today’s Democratic Party,” Warren declared to her fellow liberals. “We are the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party.”

Warren is clearly thinking of running for President in 2020. If she does, a crowd will be waiting to cheer her on: a year ago, under pressure from supporters of insurgent Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democrats adopted the most progressive platform in their history, which called for free college for families earning $125,000 or less and Medicare options for Americans as young as 55. This march to the left has become a sprint since Clinton’s defeat.

Groups that support abortion rights have stopped offering polite silence to Democrats who disagree. Others are demanding jail time for bank executives. Small-dollar donors are goading progressive groups to advance liberal policies and challenge lawmakers who balk. A group of prominent liberal Democrats, including some 2020 hopefuls, are pushing a national single-payer health care plan – even though its strongest backers acknowledge that it has zero chance of becoming law in this Republican-controlled Congress. Representative Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois threatened on Sept. 8 that Democrats may shut down the government in December if Congress doesn’t provide a pathway for undocumented immigrants to become citizens. “Running on progressive values,” strategist Adam Green told a candidates’ training session in Washington this summer, “is how Democrats will win.” …

Efforts to mend the rifts of the 2016 election have fallen flat. Earlier this year, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) launched a national tour with Sanders and newly minted party chairman Tom Perez, who was elected in February. Things didn’t go well. When Sanders thanked Perez at rallies, his so-called Bernie bros heckled the new chairman. The attempt at unity was a footnote within a month. “The current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure,” declared Sanders, who plans to seek a third term in the Senate next year as an independent.

Activists aligned with Sanders are working to mount primary challenges against centrist Democrats. Our Revolution, a group that rose from the ashes of Sanders’ presidential campaign, led a protest in August outside the DNC, demanding a more liberal platform. Party staffers tried handing out snacks and bottles of water, but the hospitality did little to defuse the tension. “They tried to seduce us with doughnuts,” said former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, a protest organizer.

Some of the grievances hinge on strategy as much as substance. Kamala Harris, the popular junior Senator from California, backs Sanders’ health plan and won an endorsement from Warren during her election last year. But as California’s former top cop, Harris declined to prosecute bankers, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, for their role in the 2008 financial crisis. She also spent part of her summer raising cash in the tony precincts of the Hamptons. As a result, Sanders allies say she’s a Wall Street shill. “Follow the money,” says Nomiki Konst, a Sanders supporter who serves on the DNC panel tasked with forging postelection unity.

No one waits on the horizon to broker a peace. The DNC has been hollowed out, first by Obama’s neglect and then by a Clinton campaign that raided its talent. Now it is trying to play catch-up, sending $10,000 a month to each state party to help add bodies and channel activists’ energy into permanent organizations. But the party is still $3.5 million in the red, and Republicans are outraising it by a margin of roughly 2 to 1. Meanwhile, Perez is serving as a visiting fellow at Brown University, where he teaches a course called Governance and Leadership in Challenging Times.

Schumer says the party lost the White House in 2016 because it had a “namby-pamby” message on the economy. He’s not risking that again, working with members from both chambers on an aggressive, worker-focused message. The blueprint, dubbed “A Better Deal”, has Warren’s fingerprints all over it, calling for a national $15-per-hour minimum wage and cheaper drugs, colleges and child care. “The focus starts on economic issues,” Schumer said. “That’s where the American people are hurting.” …

Governing in Washington these days is “the most frustrating thing I’ve ever done,” complains Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat. “Most of my life, there was about 20% on the right fringe and the left fringe, but 60% in the middle, where common sense would prevail. Now I’m thinking 40% on each fringe.”

Part of the problem is that red states are getting redder, while blue states are growing ever more blue. Consider West Virginia, where Manchin is still popular from his days as governor. When Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, he carried 42 of the state’s 55 counties. That number climbed to 43 four years later. But by 2000, West Virginia residents were sour on Democratic trade policies that many saw as costing them coal and steel jobs. Al Gore won 13 counties that year, and John Kerry took just nine in 2004. It’s little wonder that during Manchin’s first campaign for Senate, in 2010, he cut an ad that showed him firing a rifle at an Obama-backed environmental bill. Obama would go on to lose all 55 counties in 2012–a feat Hillary Clinton repeated.

Democrats still outnumber Republicans in West Virginia by 12 percentage points [according to heavily Democrat-weighted polls -ed].  These Democrats, however, don’t want to hear about NFL players protesting during the national anthem or the latest in the ongoing investigation into Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow. They care far less about Black Lives Matter than keeping their checking accounts in the black. Add in the 21% of West Virginians who say they don’t identify with either party, and it’s a dangerous proposition for candidates like Manchin to parrot talking points from MSNBC. It’s not that he’s a squish on cultural issues; it’s that he’d rather talk about lifting the economy in his state, where 18% live in poverty.

The Democrats’ focus on identity politics is one reason Manchin suggested, half-heartedly, that he doesn’t care if he wins another term next year. “The Washington Democrats’ mentality has been more urban,” he says. “They forgot about rural America and rural states. They don’t want you to tell them about their bathrooms or their bedrooms or all this other stuff we’re trying to control.”

Some say another problem is Pelosi. The first female House speaker and a legendary vote wrangler, she was widely, if wrongly, blamed for a series of special-election defeats in the spring, even though Democrats fared far better than usual in places like Kansas and Georgia. A special election in June became less about the candidates than about the specter of Pelosi, whom Republicans cast as a puppet mistress for the Democratic nominee. … [Tim] Ryan’s long-shot bid to replace her as House Democratic leader won [only] 63 votes last year.

Part of Ryan’s pitch has been to put away the pitchforks and modulate the tone. “We cannot be a party that is hostile to business. We need those businesspeople to hire our people, who just want a shot,” Ryan fumes. “We can be business-friendly and still be progressive.” And while it puts him at odds with some peers, such arguments have also won him some unlikely fans. “The smart guys in the Democratic Party, they understand what’s going on. [Ohio Democratic Senator] Sherrod Brown gets this. Tim Ryan gets this.” Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen Bannon told 60 Minutes’ Charlie Rose in an interview that aired on Sept. 10. “The only question before us: Is it going to be a left-wing populism or a right-wing populism?” …

One only needs to look at the shuttered mom-and-pop businesses dotting Ryan’s district to see why voters were inclined to listen to Trump’s promises. Which is why Ryan is pushing plans to bring high-speed Internet to the farming communities and to recruit tech giants to the cheap real estate in local cities and towns.

On a Friday in late July, Ryan was padding through the Basilica of Our Lady of Mount Carmel’s annual Italian festival in Youngstown. Simmering red sauce was heaped on polenta, and elephant ears layered with powdered sugar were matched with mostaccioli showered with ground Parmesan from plastic tubes. It was a throwback to a time when church socials defined communities. “These are my peeps,” Ryan says to no one in particular as voters swarm him. …

If Ryan has bigger ambitions to lead, he is not alone. A shadow campaign for the 2020 nomination is quietly taking shape in early-nominating states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Some of the most interesting names are unfamiliar ones. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., visited Iowa in early September to check in. Jason Kander, the former Missouri secretary of state who is viewed as a rising party star, recruited a Sanders aide to stake out territory in Iowa and has announced plans to open offices for his voting-rights group in five states. …

“We have the next generation of Democratic leaders. We need to lift them up in the public eye,” says Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, a group dedicated to electing women who support abortion rights. “This is not a party of one leader. It’s just not.”

Back in Youngstown, you can see the wheels spinning in Ryan’s head. He sees a role for a Midwesterner who can connect with the working-class voters who took comfort in Trump’s rage. Indeed, he thinks the Democrats’ future depends on it. “We can get the party back on track,” Ryan says as his SUV rolls away from a meeting with Ohio union chiefs. “Someone’s going to figure this out. Someone needs to.”

Now to take a view – not from disinterested Mars but – from the conservative Right.

What we see is a party riven by irreconcilable contradictions.

Its leaders are not just old but out of touch with the rising generation of “progressives”. Who will represent the women in pink pussy hats who cheer Hamas-supporting Linda Sarsour more enthusiastically than they did Hillary Clinton? The thousands of possible voters of all colors and ethnicities who march with Black Lives Matter and call for the killing of cops? The black students who are demanding black-only living quarters and graduation ceremonies in their colleges? And those – mostly white – who appear in black clothes and hoods and masks to set fires and smash windows and clobber Trump supporters in the name of “anti-fascism”?  The opponents of free speech?  The loud decriers – black brown and white – of “white privilege”? The SJWs – social justice warriors – who want guaranteed free everything from housing and meals to surgery and university, from condoms and marijuana to Teslas and abortions?

How will the lions of feminism lie down with the lambs of the burkha?

How will the Muslims who hate the Jews even more than they hate everyone else reconcile with Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Bernie Sanders?

How will those rising “progressives” who want free stuff but hate whitey, accept the leadership of the only one offering it: Bernie? Whether as Democrat or Independent, would he be voted for by the free-goodies multitude who remain uncontaminated by knowledge of economics  – as an old white man?

How will the Congressional Party thrive when its House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, has declined all the way into her rapidly advancing senile dementia?

What store of riches will it plunder when it has taxed the rich into poverty?

How will it light, cool, warm, transport the people and keep their iPhones active on wind-power?

How will it use, and to what end, a House, a Senate, a White House, or any seat of government if it concedes to its strengthening lobby for the abolition of national borders?

How will it survive long enough to say “I told you so” when breathing driving manufacturing humans and flatulent cows heat up the planet to an unbearable extra degree or two in a hundred years’ time, if it allows Iran to become a nuclear power in a mere ten years or so?

Speed on, Tim Ryan, in your silver Chevy Suburban, popping fistfuls of almonds, to your Italian festivals; pad through basilicas; heap simmering red sauce on polenta, match elephant ears layered with powdered sugar with mostaccioli showered with ground Parmesan from plastic tubes!

Way to go – to political oblivion?

The Democrats were the party of slavery and segregation.

The Republicans were the party of freedom and integration.

The Democrats were and are the racist party.

The Republicans were and are the anti-racist party.

The Democrats’ claim that the two parties switched their positions on race, is a myth.

In this excellent video, Professor Carol Swain explains: