Posted on 07/28/2025 5:09:46 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Progressive overreach alienated the middle class, replacing working-class roots with elite dogmas—and now the Democrats are reaping the whirlwind they sowed.
Sometime after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the American Left began exploring, then embracing, and finally enacting agendas that proved not only unhinged and unworkable but also fatal to the left-wing project itself.
How did the party so alienate the middle classes when it once professed it was the sole party and protector of those in-between? How did the Democratic Congress sink to a 16 percent approval rating in a current liberal Quinnipiac University poll? How could 63 percent of registered voters view the Democrats unfavorably in a recent Wall Street Journal poll?
In sum: despise the middle class, then lose elections.
At the turn of the millennium, globalization generated massive wealth by opening a 6-billion-person consumer market to the rising global powers of Silicon Valley, media, academia, law, finance, and transnational corporations. The result was a Democrat Party increasingly dominated by a new and different sort of “committed” left-wing billionaire.
The Democrat Party, by the turn of the century, had become a home for the ultra-rich, the upscale professional classes, and the subsidized poor. And its new initiatives reflected the values, ideas—and pretensions—of the globalized bicoastal elites, from reimagining a sustainable green economy to “diversity” and apologetics for America’s culpability abroad.
In the ancient days of the 1990s, Bill Clinton ensured that the Democrat party was for strong borders, legal-only immigration, and protection of union jobs from cheap imported labor. Abortion was to be safe, legal—and “rare.” Now, abortion is often praised and worshipped by the left, as if it is integral to saving a warming planet.
It assumed that impoverished illegal aliens would soon become new progressive constituents to replace vanishing American working-class voters.
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
Many democrats are deciding that they don’t want to side with the open borders radicals.
VDH Ping
Nor the trans insanity, supporting illegals and criminals, grifting, lying, taxpayer money theft, lawfare, attempting assassinations, etc etc etc
What a way with words. VDH is correct that drag queen shows really were "burlesque" style shows, once sequestered for just adult audiences. That and much of the rest of the article is VDH saying that the left alienated the middle class.
I also thought this statement was profound about who most of the poor are:
Suddenly, an entire array of racialist compound nouns appeared—white privilege, white rage, white guilt, white supremacy—without any consideration that whites, in total numbers, comprise the largest group of poor people, or that poor white people usually have zero in common with elite white progressives.
BTTT
The question in my mind is....... do Democrats think they are still Democrats. They know they are not. What was not only isn’t but is never going to be.
There is mental pain....... what to do? How to do it? Must I do anything?
Awesomeness, as usual, from VDH.
Bfl
ON THE ALTER OF UKRAINE
The Prog’s were destroyed by THE PERFECT STORM, of their own creation.
Progressive Elites, beginning with Clinton, but since Obama pivoted from the PeaceNicks of 58/59 (and the Riot Party), to a Party of War, Inc.
Using NATO filled the coffers of the politically connected as they moved in and out of government, into the MIC. Both parties were engaged in lurtative foreign enterprises using NATO as the Big Stick.
Obama pushed the Homosexual Agenda diplomatically using LGBT demands written into every State Department document with other nations.
Obama took a MIC that had been entact since the origins of the Cold War and purged the General Officer Corps, replacing them with Purfumed Princes more adept to facism than to maintianing a cohesive military force.
Obama moved forward with PROJECT UKRAINE. However, his purfumed prices in the Pentagon were no longer capable of Real World Operations, but had transitions into a political operation incapable of executing Military Operations; the types of DNC friendly Officer Corps were incompetent and the USA TOO BIG TO FAIL.
Biden got the war NATO desired with Russia.
The Woke AMIC was incapable of executing the plans written pre-2008 for capture of Ukraine and defeat of Russia.
The PERFECT STORM was in Ukraine.
ON THE ALTER OF UKRAINE PROGRESSIVISM AND LIBERALISM (AMERICA COMMUNISM) WAS SACRIFICED.
*Trump prosecuted and rules disregarded, laws broken in the short cut ridden operations to make PROJECT UKRAINE both happen and continue.
Read Romans 1 and you will see exactly what happens when a people reject the existence of God and God as the Creator. The Democrats took God out of their platform in 2012, but God has been absent from their hearts and minds well before that.
This is such a far cry from the all time Democrat, progressive hero FDR. I don’t think most contemporary Democrats could conceive that FDR delivered a very moving speech that was really an appeal to Heaven and Almighty God for the protection of Allied soldiers invading Normandy in 1944. I’m no fan of FDR’s economic policies, but his sentiment and belief in God was genuine.
The result of unbelief is a reprobate mind, darkening of hearts. This leads to all the sins listed in Romans 1. They’re immoral, that’s easy to see, but now they’re illogical and irrational. I pray that soon they’ll be irrelevant.
Romans 1:28-30
“28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; 29Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 30Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents”
All rhetorical questions to which [most] all of us know the answers.
But - in contrast to this childish piece by the author - centrists will always be centrists (turncoats), the left will always be hypocrites and progressives will always hate anything to do with freedom except for themselves.
Clarity: I write 'childish' due to the fact that the author seems to be trying to sway the centrists and/or the left. 'Fool's errand' fails to adequately label such a task.
The borders were wide open under Clinton, too. Anchor babies galore.
Agreed. Romans 1:16 starts out well (not ashamed of the gospel of Christ). But after that Paul describes the decline of civilization and it read exactly like American civilization after we started pulling away from the improvements of the great awakenings. It became “enlightened” to deny the existence of God even though His existence is evident. Then the sexual revolution came, just like in Romans 1. Followed by homosexual tendencies (again in Romans 1). And the Dims pushed all of that.
Nonsense. Russia and her Stalinists as well as Obama the New Party Chicago communists, and Russia’s ally Iran, and the communist Chinese were and are peas in a pod. Always have been.
Black Lives Matter and Antifa activists went to training sessions in Cuba, just as Obama’s WUO pals trained in Cuba under Russian KGB agents. BLM was welcomed in Moscow, just as is Hamas and Hezbollah and the PFLP.
The first thing Obama did was set up Ukraine and eastern Europe by screwing up the antimissile defense deal previously negotiated, and by thwarting any effort to bolster European defenses against the rapidly growing pressure of Russian imperialism.
He then set about cutting the legs off our forces in Iraq, giving ISIS a lifeline.
The left undermined NATO and US National defense policy by imposing demoralizing rules and programs, and milked its capacities by diverting defense funds to NGOs and socialist enterprises. They are subversive, and corrupted, not at all true “hawks” except in their support for everything that would benefit Russia, especially in feeding Russia national resources and assisting Russia by refusing to build refineries here in the US and hamstringing pipelines and cutting off access to coal and vital minerals with lawfare and legislation. Nothing they did strengthened alliances or bolstered defense capability; everything they did emboldened and strengthened Russia and China.
Good points.
In sum, almost every new issue the new Democrat Party embraced proved an anathema to the middle class. Yet the party seemed almost uniquely prescient in foreseeing that progressive policies would bankrupt the country, hopelessly divide it, and leave it unworkable. Being talked down to by neurotic and dysfunctional elites only made the messengers force multipliers of their toxic messages.
An excellent article worthy of your time to finish at American Greatness!
FR Index of his articles: Victor Davis Hanson on FR
Town Hall: Victor Davis Hanson on Town Hall
American Greatness: Victor Davis Hanson on American Greatness
His website: Victor Davis Hanson The Sword of Perseus
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I hear your BTTT, and raise you to a BTTTT for this great essay.
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