By Victor Davis Hanson April 16, 2019 6:30 AM<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2008 \ndespite, not because of, his most partisan voting record in the Senate. \nThey were once willing to look past his earlier dubious associations \nwith abject anti-Semites such as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, former \nterrorists like Bill Ayers, and unhinged characters such as Father \nPfleger. They also averted their eyes from Obama\u2019s often quite offensive\n commentary, in his autobiography and during the 2008 campaign (e.g., \n\u201ctypical white person\u201d and \u201cthey<\/em> cling to\u2026\u201d speech).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, voters were tired of the Iraq War (which was over for all \npractical purposes by the time of the November 2008 election).<\/p>\n\n\n\n They were, of course, terrified by the September 2008 financial \nmeltdown (which had been mostly stabilized four months later by the time\n of the inauguration) and irate at the kid-gloves treatment accorded \noften conniving banks and investors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They were convinced that Obama might be healing and transformative as\n the first African-American president, supposedly only slightly to the \nleft of a far steadier and more qualified Condoleezza Rice or Colin \nPowell. And half the Democrats were already becoming sick of Hillary \nClinton once they became reacquainted with her on the 2008 \nprimary-campaign trail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As is typical of American politics, voters in 2008 also wanted to \nchange the party in power after it had been in the lead for eight years,\n and the lame-duck president fell out of favor. Voters certainly were \nunderwhelmed by an uninspiring, herky-jerky, mostly incompetent John \nMcCain campaign, notable for his \u201cthat\u2019s not who we are\u201d comments and \nhis willingness to \u201close nobly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such was the na\u00efve dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reality by 2013 was that voters got an increasing hard-core \nliberal-progressive revolution that, after Obama\u2019s 2012 reelection, \nincreasingly polarized America over the reach of the federal government,\n immigration, and race. Scandals at the DOJ and IRS were often political\n in nature. By summer 2016, the Obama administration had weaponized the \nintelligence agencies and his own justice department to such a degree \nthat unleashed bureaucrats and appointees actively sought to intervene \nin a presidential campaign to undermine the opposition candidate and to \nlay the foundation for sabotaging the incoming president\u2019s transition \nand administration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An overregulated economy stagnated, requiring ever more federal \nintervention and borrowing. Students on campuses lost constitutional \nprotections, especially under the First and Fifth Amendments, as \nuniversities finalized their long transformation into indoctrination \ncenters. Obama recalibrated American foreign policy in neutralist \nfashion, and in a way that made Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia more \nsuspect than Iran, Turkey, or Cuba.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Culturally, diversity replaced affirmative action, on the principle \nthat formerly documented grievances or class status no longer mattered, \nat least compared with skin color. The real divide was now between a \nnon-white, far greater collective that harbored purported grievances \nagainst a reconstituted and much smaller white majority and its \n\u201cprivilege and \u201csupremacy.\u201d When feminists and gays were included in the\n diverse intersectional bloc of Asians, Latinos, blacks, and immigrants,\n a supposed new majority of \u201cwoke\u201d Americans now would have electoral \ncontrol over a culpable and soon to become irrelevant minority. The \n\u201ccontent of our character\u201d and all that became \u201cinoperative.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n All this was largely the legacy of an otherwise mostly unsuccessful \nObama administration whose record was one of massive debt, an ossified \neconomy, decreased sovereignty, increased ethnic and racial tensions, \nand a confused foreign policy perceived abroad as apologetic and \ncontrite, and therefore useful to rivals and enemies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Socialist-Progressive Takeover<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet Obama had hit on something in his move to the hard left. After he\n left office, unapologetic leftists were less coy (the old smear of \n\u201csocialist\u201d was now a term of endearment) and began to extinguish what \nlittle was left of Bill Clinton\u2019s old, occasionally moderate Democratic \nparty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reelection of Obama had convinced progressives that he had \ndiscovered electoral magic: record voter registration, turnout, and \nblock voting of \u201cminorities\u201d that could overcome the old Perot, Reagan \nDemocrat, silent majority, and tea-party dinosaurs in the critical swing\n states. This chemistry, they thought, would be inherently transferrable\n even to multimillionaire white establishmentarians like Hillary Clinton\n or Joe Biden (but only if<\/em> they were reeducated and thus made \nthe necessary confessionals about their own white privilege and shared \ndisdain for \u201cdeplorables\u201d and \u201cthe dregs of society\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Suddenly, everything seemed possible as woke activists, \u00e0 la French Revolution, accelerated the possible into the already pass\u00e9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In just a few years, mere acceptance (rather than endorsement) of gay\n marriage was veritable homophobia. Assimilation and integration were \nseen as tantamount to cultural appropriation and imperialism. \nConservation and market-based encouragement of alternative energy were \nthe appeasement of \u201cclimate deniers\u201d and showed a cowardly reluctance to\n go the full green mile and eventually ban the internal combustion \nengine. The Kavanaugh hearing, the Covington-kids fiasco, and the Jussie\n Smollett farce made clear that the Left was no longer liberal but \nhard-left and fact-free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Secure borders and deportation of illegal aliens who had committed \ncrimes were themselves humanitarian \u201ccrimes.\u201d Building the wall went to \nstopping the wall to promoting the tearing down of the wall. The notions\n of affirmation action and disparate impact became Sixties\u2019 relics, when\n \u201creparation\u201d was the real goal. Prior street-theater groups such as \nOccupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter seemed timid anachronisms \ncompared with Antifa and its masked hoodlums who torched and beat up \nanything in their path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLegal but rare\u201d abortion became a sellout position, given that any \nwoman had a right to partial-birth abortion and even infanticide if she \nso chose. A dream of a 50 percent income-tax rate on top incomes went to\n talk of 70 percent then to 90 percent and then to a wealth tax as just \ndeserts. To enlarge the electorate, illegal aliens should vote first in \nlocal elections, but then why not everywhere? Sixteen-years olds could \ntoo, and so why not ex-felons as well? About a $1.5 trillion in student \ndebt should be forgiven \u2014 but then tuition should be free for all (as \nshould Medicare).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The appearance and success of the polarizing Donald Trump \nsupercharged the ongoing progressive revolution. The rallying cries of \n\u201ccollusion,\u201d \u201ctreason,\u201d and the new \u201cManchurian candidate\u201d won over any \nholdout Democrat and seduced the emasculated Never Trump right into \nbecoming useful colluding idiots. The 2018 Democratic midterm victory in\n the House was not seen in historical context: Trump in fact had fared \nmuch better in both the House and Senate in his first midterm than had \neither Bill Clinton or Barack Obama at that point in their presidencies,\n both of whom were easily reelected, while mostly centrist candidates \nhad given the Democrats the new House majority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By spring 2019, we were light years beyond the revolution\u2019s beginning\n in summer 2008 \u2014 and heading into hard-socialist territory and beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, the once edgy community-organizing Obama himself had become a\n tragicomical figure. He spent a bit of his post-presidency warning \nagainst a \u201ccircular firing squad\u201d of Democratic cannibalism but \notherwise was hell-bent on becoming worth $100 million in \u201cI built that \nfashion\u201d\u2014and was never again heard uttering another \u201cI do think at a \ncertain point you\u2019ve made enough money\u201d sermon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Socialism and Beyond<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Conventional wisdom would warn Democrats that their surrender to pied\n pipers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Al \nSharpton, Linda Sasour, and other assorted fakers, con artists, \nanti-Semites, and street actors would lead them all over the proverbial \nGeorge McGovern and Walter Mondale cliff into the abyss. But such \ncaution is unlikely for a variety of reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One, Democratic candidates now sound a lot more like Bernie Sanders \nthan he ever sounded like them. The new socialists believe that they \nhave altered the nature of the electorate and the manner in which \nelections are conducted, and that they will continue to do so at an \naccelerating pace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Preemptory charges of \u201cvoter suppression\u201d have made required prior \nregistration and voter IDs veritable racist crimes, as voter harvesting \nand fluid same-day registration and voting are the hallmarks of the \nfuture, even as open borders change the demography of the nation. Youth,\n not experience or tenure, is the requisite for progressive revolution, \nas brontosauruses like Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer struggle to \nsputter a few shrill socialist platitudes to maintain minimal relevance.\n Anti-Semitism is not called out by Democrats, because party leaders \nfear that Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib are not aberrations but now \nrepresent 51 percent of the new Democratic party on both Israel and \nAmerican Jewry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two, few leftist revolutionary cycles ever halt in mid course, \nwhether in 1789 France, 1917 Russia, 1946 China, or 1960 Cuba. The \nphilosophy is always that today\u2019s radical is yesterday\u2019s sell-out to be \nreplaced by tomorrow\u2019s genuine far harder leftist \u2014 until the limits of \nreality are reached and the movement either implodes or leads to an \nauthoritarian Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, or Fidel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The current socialist trajectory is divorced from reality, whether \nreality mean the critical role of fossil fuels in maintaining \ncivilization, or the historical record of tribalism destroying nations \nfrom Rwanda to the Balkans, or the usual story of soft socialism \ninevitably turning hard and ending in the mass poverty of a North Korea,\n Venezuela, or Cuba.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The End Game<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Socialists and hard progressives believe that they already have won \nabout three-fifths of America, defined not by population, polls, or \npolitical office, but by cultural clout. They assume that such control \nwill inevitably end in final victory in the Congress and presidency, the\n same way that that there\u2019s no longer a Republican party to speak of in \nCalifornia and not a single statewide officeholder who is not a \nDemocrat. Seven of 53 House seats are Republican in the California of \nRonald Reagan and Pete Wilson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Entertainment and Hollywood are mostly all left-wing and missionary \nin their progressive zeal. The network news, PBS, NPR, CNN, and MSNBC \noutnumber talk radio and Fox News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of the major newspapers are progressive. Silicon Valley is \nharder left still and more audacious in baking ideology into its \nproducts from Twitter and Facebook, which censor conservatives, to \nGoogle, with its progressive bias in formatting and searches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The biggest foundations that most fund activists and academics are \nmostly left-wing. No one believes that the campuses are balanced or even\n disinterested. Most academics believe that they can be legitimately \nbiased leftward to balance the supposed prejudices of the family, \ncommunity, and church \u2014 noisome cargo that too many of their na\u00efve \nstudents bring with them on arrival, which is why they need \u201ccleansing\u201d \nand \u201cawakening.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sports events and reporting are liberal and increasingly avenues to \npeddle political messages. Corporate America tries to emulate popular \nculture and thus must adopt left-wing tropes, so it\u2019s trigger-happy in \nits readiness to shoot down conservatives who are deemed hostile to our \nshared fated progressive future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What we are seeing in the Democratic party\u2019s movement to the hard left is not the beginning but the end of a long march. Socialists and progressives believe that control of the Congress, the presidency, and courts is the final missing tessera from their already expansive socialist mosaic. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n They believe that the future is theirs. They no longer need to apologize for pushing government-sanctioned redistribution. And with an administrative state that nearly pulled off a coup in the past two years, with 21 trillion dollars in national debt and the courts as de facto progressive legislators, and with an open 2,000-mile border, they may well be right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Victor Davis Hanson<\/a> is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump<\/em>. @vdhanson <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Reprinted with permissions..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"