Hanson: why the Democrats went crazy
Victor Davis Hanson attempts to answer this question: “What Made the Democratic Party Go Crazy?”
Before I read it, I’ll attempt two very quick answers: their antipathy to Donald Trump, and prior to that the electoral success of Barack Obama and the takeover of American cultural life in the wake of COVID lockdowns and the George Floyd death propaganda.
Maybe that’s more than two.
Except from Hanson’s piece:
There are four root causes …
Democrats became a utopian elite cadre of the very wealthy who would patronize and take care of the subsidized poor, both as psychological penance to assuage their guilt over their own newfound global riches and to solidify poorer voters with expansionary entitlements. …
From 2021 to 2025, 10 to 12 million illegal aliens had been added to the pool of some 20 million existing resident illegal aliens. The left sought to mainstream these immigrants—from mostly poor countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia—into Democratic constituents, either in the first or by the second generation. …
Ironically, however, the Frankenstein monster of massive illegal immigration and DEI pandering proved fatal to the old liberal Dr. Frankenstein. …
The Rise of the Guilt-Ridden Professional …
As the new degreed aristocracy, no longer was their time and money needed to address adequate housing, fuel, food prices, transportation, or health care. Instead, they were freed to worry globally, especially about whether red-state hoi polloi’s ignorance might endanger their own beatific lives. …
Elite universities have become fabulously rich and globalized. …
Universities with new multibillion-dollar endowments opened global campuses abroad, without worry over the anti-American or anti-liberal values of their overseas partners. They sought billions of dollars in foreign contributions.
Endowments soared to 30, 40, and 50 billion in the Ivy League and elite campuses. Administrators and their staff grew exponentially to rival the number of students, all to handle the new all-purpose university (“Center for…[fill in the blanks of the oppressed or climate change brand]) that was therapeutic, left-wing, and indoctrinating.
The goal was no longer impartial education but overt ideological bias. …
The Democrats abandoned the middle class because they saw it as a global loser and themselves as worldwide winners. They now had the institutions and the big money, along with the leverage of millions of high-paid coastal professionals in law, the media, the university, and the administrative state to win elections by outspending, out-broadcasting, and out-regulating their clueless opponents.
All of that is true, but what I offered is true too. And I think that the cultural issues (especially in higher education) have been going on for many many decades, and somehow Democrats were nowhere near so out of touch as they have become since Trump took office and especially since 2020.
There’s a diagram I’m trying to find showing vaguely how a LLM works where you have a process performing output, then a feedback mechanism to let the process know how it did so it could make changes.
Basically the Dems went nuts because they lost (or cut themselves off) any reasonable feedback. The Internet and social media didn’t help, but that was just gasoline being poured on the fire the media had begun. The more the media shielded and shilled for the Dems, the more the Dems lost any connection to accurate feedback.
Saw more than one mention in the right blogosphere, but here’s the source. It’s from Third Way and it’s how to get Democrats to talk like normal people.
They don’t intend anyone to give up any of these views of course, they just want people to avoid using the specific words activists and academics use. But if they translate these views into everyday language, voters are not going to like them better. For example, what are they going to replace “gender assigned at birth” with? It would give away the game right away.
The notion that the haut bourgeois twits who are the vanguard of the Democratic Party are the least-bit guilt-ridden doesn’t pass the smell test. You can find some dupes in the rank-and-file who might qualify, but I doubt many of those. Aggression, contempt, indignation, and vanity are their motors, not guilt.
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Neither has the Democratic Party ‘abandoned the middle class’. They’ve abandoned the non-exotic wage earner element (except for single mothers of whom they might make clients). They cannot be said to have abandoned small business because small business was never a Democratic constituency. They’re all for the professional-managerial stratum and for the general run salaried employees who work in the media, education, medical care, social services, the mental health trade, &c. Generic salaried employees who are on DEI patronage they favor as well.
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They’re out of touch with ordinary people. The thing is, they despise ordinary people and do not want to be in touch with them. Their electoral base is composed of people who also despise ordinary people, people who rationalize in re the the perversity, and people who pretend it isn’t happening.
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Our problem is that for north of 40% of the electorate, their cr!p program sells pretty well. Add in some terminally confused swing voters and a mess of harvested postal ballots, and you have the offices you want.
…wo very quick answers: their antipathy to Donald Trump, and prior to that the electoral success of Barack Obama…
The left always always has antipathy to highly politically successful GOP politicians. (At least in my lifetime.) But you are correct to point out the shift to a higher gear with Obama’s successes. Actually, both Hillary Clinton and Obama were strongly influenced by Alinsky and I believe the extreme nature of the rhetoric began to advance in earnest with the Clintons. Even though I don’t think Bill Clinton was exactly an Alinsky acolyte.
I suspect the strategic people in the Dem leadership compare Trump to the near loss of the presidency in the FDR and Wendell Willkie contest. I don’t know that much about Willkie except that he had some corporate leadership skills. So the fear and the competition is between the usual rank populism devoid of any constructive substance on the Dem side, versus someone who has actual management and leadership skills. Add to that the idea that Trump is probably a much better populist and salesman than Willkie was. I’m sure many Dems are in a panic.
I think Neo’s 2 points are more valid than VDH’s. I think his contribute, but Neo’s are primary.
I doubt the Democrats in charge are panicking at all. They’re confident that their judges will gum up the works enough to prevent Trump from deporting much of their vote farm, that cyclical factors will induce enough voters to switch sides, that an actual crisis will benefit them as it did in 2020, and that laundered contributions from foreigners, embezzled public funds, and ballot harvesting will carry the day. Their apparent distress is derived from vociferous Democrats drawing heavily on the population of histrionic and borderline types.
I’m inclined to think that all of Hanson’s suggestions, and all of Neo’s, are correct — but that there’s a deeper pathology at work that underlies all the rational real-world explanations. I believe the Democratic Party has become consumed by its own hatred. Hatred hurts the person doing the hating more than the person being hated — it distorts perception, destroys compassion and poisons the soul. Starting decades ago — maybe with George Bush the elder, maybe with Bush the younger, maybe before that — hatred began to infect Democratic argument and campaigning. In the Obama years, Democrats reached the point where they actively hated half the country for disagreeing with them, and had no shame or hesitation in saying so. And then Trump came along, befuddling Dems who had no idea how to deal with him, and they doubled down on hatred. By now, their hatred is poisoning them all from within; negativity has hollowed them out or rotted them or whatever destructive metaphor you may prefer, so that they find themselves with nothing positive to say, nothing affirmative to build, and not much to hope for.
I suspect the strategic people in the Dem leadership compare Trump to the near loss of the presidency in the FDR and Wendell Willkie contest.
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Roosevelt never had a close election. The near loss was Truman’s in 1948. It is true there was a dramatic shift in favor of the Republicans in elections to the House of Representatives after 1936, but gerrymandering and perhaps other factors succeeded in blunting the impact of that.
Right after posting that, I ran into this quote from Goethe. It doesn’t make the same point that I was trying to make, but seems apropos nonetheless.
“None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.”
Mrs. Whatsit,
Agree as to “hate”. A couple of people I know are so consumed by TDS that their FB posts are so….stupid and counterfactual–that they should be embarrassing. But they’re presented with “Let that sink in.” And “think about it”. To be unpleasant about such things, I think they’re too dumb to make this stuff up themselves but they buy it when it’s presented to them.
Nothing matters but orangemanbad, Nothing, Getting to the point it would be uncomfortable to meet them in public.
Starting decades ago — maybe with George Bush the elder, maybe with Bush the younger, maybe before that — hatred began to infect Democratic argument and campaigning.
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Robert Bork, who was familiar with official Washington on a personal level, identified 1981 as a watershed year within that subculture. Among the media, you had a stupefying hostility to Richard Nixon. And you had the pro-Communist element among the noisy student population during the period running from 1965-72.
@neo: …the electoral success of Barack Obama…
I would like to underline that item. We’ve never seen a campaign like Obama 2008. JFK ran as a movie star. Obama ran as the messiah. And won.
Democrats have long had their utopian streak. But with Obama’s decisive victory and the prospect of an “Emerging Democratic Majority” with an FDR-style period of dominance, they fell victim to hubris.
They thought Obama’s “fundamental transformation of America” had occurred and the rest was just a matter of mopping up.Trump 45 was an unwelcome speed bump but they tied him up pretty well.
Then in 2020 Biden won decisively, Trump was being lawfared to death, and Dem utopia looked back in the bag.
As it turned out — more hubris.
“Those the gods would destroy, they first make mad”.
Mrs. Whatsit: “I believe the Democratic Party has become consumed by its own hatred.”
And many or most of them don’t even recognize that they hate. I’m still puzzled and amazed by a moment a couple of years ago when I mentioned in passing on a Facebook post that the Democrats really hate Trump. A progressive acquaintance was highly offended: “We don’t hate anybody!” I didn’t bother to respond. They really don’t have any self-awareness.
huxley: You’re saying something close to what I’ve always thought: that one reason Trump’s 2016 victory broke so many Democratic brains is that they really believed that with Obama’s election their progressive vision had triumphed once and for all. The messianic qualities attributed to him made the turn to Trump an intolerable obscenity.
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2025/08/26/foot-meet-rake-raskin-crime-just-part-of-american-history-n2193251
I’ve come across another type: the liberal Christian. The ones who call themselves that don’t really attend church but certainly wrap themselves up in their piety. Their real target are conservative Christians. Like all leftists they claim the moral highground by stating that if conservative Christians were really following scripture, then those people would be for all those wonderful leftist positions. The fact that they don’t, to the left, just shows how hypocritical any religious conservative is, and how THEY are the true Christians.
Insufferable arrogance at its finest.
This thread is a most worthy one. Many thanks to the one and only VDH , and to Neo and to Mrs. Whatsit in particular.
huxley: You’re saying something close to what I’ve always thought: that one reason Trump’s 2016 victory broke so many Democratic brains is that they really believed that with Obama’s election their progressive vision had triumphed once and for all.
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Not seen any evidence of that. I would think the Congressional midterms in 2010 would have been the salient event had they believed that.
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There is a strand of thought among partisan Democrats who see Republicans in office as ipso facto illegitimate. Although as time passes you see less of it, the ‘Southern Strategy’ discourse of which an older generation of liberals was so fond made zero sense unless you began with the assumption that white Southerners should not be permitted to vote in elections (or were obligated to vote for Democrats if they did). Democrats have a proprietary attitude toward public institutions, so it is regarded as an act of piracy for Republican officials to give orders to Democrats in the permanent government.
#HateLovesAbortion
Political congruence (“=”)
Albinophobic pride and prejudice
DEIsm
Ethnic Springs
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Immigration Reform
Sanctuaries that are accessories before the fact
Levine’s Dreams of Herr Mengele
Redistributive change schemes
Transhumanism
Pathological progressions.
Then they knee capped the tea party with lois lerner sent fusion gps after some of romneys donors like melaleucas ceo pretending it was their tech skills that had saved the day.
Off course romney was the perfect possum who was nearly silent while had gone on at great length against the populist wing and the likes of rove and company deprived us of a majority again
The rump establishment thought more amnesty was the solution hence their animus to trump and cruz
One thing that I suspect deeply upset the media and many partisan Democrats is that Trump could not be badgered into making concessions or issuing canned apologies in the face of contrived media sh!tstorms and he continued to prosper electorally even as he told them to pound sand. That distinguished him from the ordinary run of Republican politician.
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One thing that gets you is that Trump has a contingent and uneven commitment to a starboard agenda. He is very much an individual. He also likes to cut deals. See Mitch Daniels on George W. Bush’s dispositions and dealings with Congress. He was not interested in confrontations with the rest of the political class and was disposed to split differences and cut deals. The issues on which he was most insistent were prosecuting the Iraq War, amnesty for illegal aliens, and private accounts for Social Security.
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Now we turn to his father. The man was never a conviction politician. . As a businessman active in Republican politics, there was a perimeter outside of which he was disinclined to travel, but for the most part he was a competitive man for whom issues were fungible. Richard Nixon was not too different, just operating in a different matrix. To the extent he had policy preferences, he was more in tune with Nelson Rockefeller than Ronald Reagan.
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I can understand some of the antagonism to Ronald Reagan, whose political life had incorporated a critique of the Democratic Party’s political economy and the historical narrative justifying it. The antagonism to Nixon, Bush II, and Trump is wild.
Well Nixon had revealed the establishments error in admitting alger hiss into their most august circles reading the wise men some 40 years after the revelation they still resented him w was sort of a heretic to their class who affected western mannerisms
I think their true deep hatred began with the Bush/Gore fiasco. It has gotten progressively worse, and then Donald J. Trump, a businessman, not a politician had the unmitigated gall to run and win against Hillary! The outrage, the deep hatred was they only way they could go after that.
Mrs. Whatsit – I agree with you on the hate; but, I think I am older than you (no offense intended) as I remember the hatred starting with Reagan (or Ronny Ray-gun as some of their campaign posters called him. These posters showed Reagan holding a science-fiction ray gun suggesting that he was a warmonger who was going to start WW3).
I had a friend whose roommate had a bottle of Champaign chilled in their fridge just waiting for the day Reagan died. I remember at the time thinking “who looks forward to celebrating the death of an American president?” That came across to me as just plain sick. Oh boy, was I naive! That was just a minor sampling of the hatred that was to come!
Mrs Whatsit…I do believe…has found the nib of the issue in that Goethe quote.
The left, & in the US that of course means the Ds & their adjacents, have cast their lot upon a bedrock of lies & in the ’60’s-’70’s subverted a wide sweep of establishment churches such that they to gave up on the God revealed in the canonical Scriptures & invented a god of their own making. Every fundamental truth that built Western Civilization has been subverted, but the subversions aren’t playing out very well, or as long as they had hoped & folks are fighting back.
We’re seeing Psalm 2 in real time:
Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
2 The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
3 “Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”
4 He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision…
Rage is all they have. The lies have failed to hold sway.
But I have hand!
And your going to need it.
Can’t-stand-ya.
The Trumpians are conducting a campaign of destruction against the donks power centers. One after another. The advantage of military experience among his cabinet, I suppose. The smart donks see Stalingrad and they are panicking. The stupid ones think they are going to cheat their way back in.
physicsguy wrote:
“Like all leftists they claim the moral highground by stating that if conservative Christians were really following scripture, then those people would be for all those wonderful leftist positions.”
I’m also offended when non-Christians accuse any professing Christians as being “unchristian.”
Like the old joke about the Pope and birth control, “He no play-a the game, he no make-a the rules.”
Lots of good comments above. Perhaps the hate started with the Alinskyites, including Watergate prosecution participant Hillary Clinton. There sure was a lot of hate for Nixon, aggravated by young men being drafted and sent to Viet Nam.
The Democrats tried the Alinsky tactic on Reagan, but it didn’t work too well, maybe because of his avuncular persona and also because he reversed the malaise he inherited from Carter. Trump can be avuncular and charming, but he lacks Reagan’s gentle touch.
It’s been said that Bill Clinton, the first Boomer president, initiated the gangsterization of politics. Then came The McLaughlin Group, cable news, the Internet, social media…and the rest is history.
@Selfy:I’m also offended when non-Christians accuse any professing Christians as being “unchristian.”
My favorite commentary on this tactic is a line drawing of Pajama Boy captioned “I don’t actually believe this argument myself. I just thought it might work on you.”
I think their true deep hatred began with the Bush/Gore fiasco.
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Disagree. The fiasco was predictable given the culture of the Democratic Party at the time. See Michael Kelly’s commentary on it.
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IMO, the Starr investigations went off the rails and should have limited their attention to the Whitewater matter. There was in that era a certain amount of avoidable resentment from partisan Democrats which arose from that. For those who think like Edward Feser and commenter ‘Variant’, please note that the Independent Counsel law was permitted to expire after it had been turned on a Democrat.
It’s been said that Bill Clinton, the first Boomer president, initiated the gangsterization of politics. Then came The McLaughlin Group, cable news, the Internet, social media…and the rest is history.
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The McLaughlin Group went on the air in 1982. It was stylistically different from Agronsky & Company (no cross talk, no raised voices, a lower ratio of identifiable Republicans to others). The format was not an innovation per se.
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The Clintons were very unscrupulous people in comparison with the Democratic Party’s congressional leadership of that era or with other figures in Presidential politics (e.g. Jerry Brown, Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerrey, Michael Dukakis, the younger Albert Gore, Paul Simon, Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart, and Walter Mondale). What distinguished them as well was their shamelessness – what Ann Coulter called the art of concealing the muck by hiding it behind a bigger pile of muck They had the co-operation of the major media in this regard. Brent Bozell’s assessment was that the print media maintained some measure of professional detachment, but the broadcast media was by 1998 functioning as an auxilliary of the Clinton’s PR operation.
I lean more towards Hanson’s explanation than neo’s. The reason is that I voted Democrat for most of my life, and left the party in the early 2000s *before* the rise of Obama – though *just* before – because of my perception that not only had the hard left captured the party from the “nice moderate liberals” but that the party elders, formerly responsive to the NMLs, were going along with it for political reasons. Symbolically Dan Moynihan, representative of old line Dems who were New Deal liberals but sensible and took national security seriously, passed away in 2003. The two most prominent remaining members, Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman, were drummed out of the party.
But I certainly agree that the dramatic rise of Obama and the equally dramatic Trump backlash have galvanized the hard left and their opponents, contributing hugely to the current situation. The leftists were going to pursue their agenda regardless but Obama’s two electoral victories gave them a sense of invulnerability and entitlement that amplified the ideological arrogance already inherent in the left. And then of course the success of Trump has driven them completely insane, batshit crazy … the words fail to convey …
I remember when Pelosi announced the Democrats would from now on be the party of money and power.
I wonder if some of the Big Dems’ descent into hugely insulting insanity, which is to say so bad it’s counterproductive, was deliberately playing to a presumed audience “out there”.
Someplace, they may have thought, is a politically useful number of people who will love to hear this and eat up with a shovel.
If so, those folks were already dem permanently and, however much they loved the new approach, the needle didn’t move. But others, some who might have listened to dems being reasonable or were looking around for a party they could stand, were a much larger number than, effectively, zero. And repubs were energized,
Starr was too noble a creature for the likes of razorback and his toves carville and begala an appellate lawyer who saw an intellectual exercises, but they saw as mma clinton made some concessions like welfare reform but note how he groveled to arafat and then deng ziaoping oh there was the matter with the troubles which empowered sinn fein i recall all the ridiculous little virtue signals that the late david halberstam had in his last book (ive given you the skinny on halberstam)
Bin laden was but a foot note, note how his first reaction to 9/11 was to reference the crusades the long road to the caucasus started with the installation of the oligarchs and their partners the bratva the solnetnvo and tambov moscow and st petersburg and their rivalry with the chechens which was the pretext for the new chapter of the old wars
But the new party represented by obama was already allergic to reality being ‘broken windows’ theory and welfare reform, they wanted crime and a larger one they disdained the first amendment but until the tech giants arose they didnt have the tools
Under peretz the new republic was still liberal but sane under chris hughes not
My diagnosis: They went crazy because they’re nuts,
My recommendation. Stop it. Right now.
their antipathy to Donald Trump
Which in itself is bizarre and begs explanation. I think we have Obama and Hilary at the root of that peculiar obsession, not just because they cooked up the Russian election interference fraud, but because Hilary sold herself as the first women President, capping the term of Obama as the first black president.
That said, the turn to crazy was already there with the election of Clinton. I recall Democrats celebrating the end of the evil Reagan era. It was exacerbated by Gore in the 2000 election controversy, and kicked into high gear shortly after 9/11. The Democrats sought power by any means. Why? I think it was a reflection of a split in the boomers, a generation that had just come to power, but still divided along lines that had become apparent in the 60’s. The new left was not interested in labor and was academic at its core. Indeed, the proletariat was regarded as reactionary. We have been in an intra-generational class war ever since.
Mass ego collapse
I wonder whether Democrat leadership actually hates Trump at all. He is definitely a super-useful and effective Emmanuel Goldstein, focusing the anger, frustration, and bewilderment of hoi polloi, which suggests to me that the leadership doesn’t (or at least doesn’t have to) give a hoot about him – only how they can use him to maintain their very loose and crumbling coalition of people with very different interests and priorities.
And then add to that the short-circuited feedback loop mentioned in the first comment on this thread, wherein ordinary Democrats no longer question how Trump (/Goldstein) could possibly be responsible for every single terrible thing in their lives; he must be, because every day they spend two minutes screaming at his image, and why else would they do that if he weren’t the root of all evil? Totally circular, because the feedback loop has been short-circuited.
But then again – I think the leadership do hate him both personally and ideologically because we are supposed to be beyond the End of History now, and his stubborn and continued presence belies that expectation.
The campaign of Newt Gingrich to impeach President Clinton is the greatest strategic miscalculation in American political history. Only Andrew Johnson had been actually impeached before that. To think that he could get the votes required in the Senate to remove Clinton, looking back, seems ridiculously naive on Gingrich’s part. Clinton was popular with Democrats and voting to convict would have been political suicide for Dem Senators. There was never going to be a “for the good of the country” calculation on their parts.
And the result was that the Democrats felt completely justified in taking the gloves off. Impeachment was on the table from then on. The inchoate hatred generated by the Republicans’ half-baked attempt poisoned the “Contract with America,” cut unity after 9/11 short, led to the revived anti-war movement (because W provided them with a war to be against), got Obama elected, etc.
Now with Trump, they have their perfect bete noire. Gingrich’s well-documented arrogance is the cause. Of all the times to keep one’s powder dry, that was it.
Democrats have long had a Demonization Strategy, to make Dem voters really believe the Republican is evil: Nixon, Reagan, Bush43, Palin. Trump & Kavanaugh. But the Trump style lends itself to Dem misquoting & taking his wild exaggerations literally, while being morally & socially superior.
The domination of Dems in top 100 universities, which has been increasing since the 1972 Roe decision, has gone along with Dem domination and the acceptance of Political Correctness as actually true, rather than social falsehoods.
Finally, smart phone pushing performative outrage, the woke mind virus which infects young Dem conformists, but causes them to be unhappy, daily.
Partial solution—take away govt tax benefits to those partisan colleges who falsely claim to be non-partisan. Congress should define non-partisan as at least 30% Rep & 30% Dem.
@Mitchell Strand
You don’t think the attempted impeachment of Nixon didn’t have a role to play? That is where this all started. Politics has always been dirty, it is its nature, but getting Nixon to resign was a big step, and it made the Democrats feel they were were blessed. Woodward and Bernstein were made heroes, which in itself corrupted the media.
All of these are factors, and there’s another. Political parties aren’t just people with common interests or ideologies; from a certain POV they’re also businesses which compete for donations.
If you want donations you need to appeal to potential donors. Potential donors have disposable income (IOW the economic elite) and strong opinions (IOW fanatics). So the “narrative” is tailored to appeal to those people.
It isn’t just TDS – it’s marketing.
I think that this analysis is too America centered. This craziness is a phenomenon both in the United States but also in Western Europe, They have destroyed their economies in the name of climate change. They are importing millions of Muslims, who are fundamentally opposed to their way of life. They buy into the transgender craziness, although their medical societies are somewhat more rational about mutilating children.
There are of course differences. They do not have a Trump, although some of their politicians like Farage and Wilders are close but less successful. They do not have the protections of our constitution so the left is able to come down harder on dissent.
Other parts of the western world are interesting for the contrast. I do not know too much about it, but Eastern Europe seems to have avoided some of the craziness. Why? Mexico is a corrupt narco state. Millei seems to be still popular in Argentina, but they will probably find a way to screw it up.
Tell me the fundamental question is not why but how to defeat the Left.
I just finished the VDH piece and most of the comments there, and one commenter opined that gay marriage was a factor as well.
I think it was a symptom, not a factor in itself, but that commenter did point up one important thing that differentiated gay marriage activism from abortion activism: the decision of the gay marriage activist leadership to attempt (successfully, as it turned out) to deny any shred of respectability to their opposition. The opposition was to be demonized and ostracized BAMN – cancelled, made socially unacceptable.
I don’t know whether that decision was the first of its kind on the Democrat side, but whenever that first decision to use cancellation as a tactic in service of the strategy of demoralizing any opposition came about, I think it led directly to the short-circuited feedback loop I and the first commenter here mentioned – and that, in turn, allowed Democrats to go crazy instead of being usefully checked by their own more level-headed peers, much less by an opposition with whom they disagree but who they reluctantly acknowledge to be acting in good faith.
So… not what MADE Democrats go crazy, but what enabled the crazy to take hold.
FOAF:
Let us remember that Barack Hussein marketed his blackness to a receptive voter base in a most glib way. His seeds were planted on well-prepared soil, and it is that fact that most troubles me.
And the large majority of federal workers today are unelected, tenured for life, Democrats. They remain to rule us. Gramsci has been proven right.
It isn’t just TDS – it’s marketing.
That’s kind of what I was getting at with my first comment, about Trump as Emmanuel Goldstein. If he didn’t exist, they’d have to invent him – he’s so very useful in giving the Democrat leadership a focus for the generalized bad feelings of their disparate “coalition.”
I was talking about ginning up votes rather than soliciting donations, but I think the same principle applies: it’s easier to point urgently at an opposition that must be… um… opposed, than at policies of your own that will provide benefits (especially when each part of your coalition might define “benefits” differently – take for instance Democrat rich-people opposition to the carried-interest exemption, which I’m pretty sure impoverished Democrats don’t see as benefiting them in the slightest).
Mitchell Strand:
Agreed. I didn’t support the Clinton impeachment back when it happened, although of course I was a Democrat then. I am consistent, however, and I have never supported it since.
The campaign of Newt Gingrich to impeach President Clinton is the greatest strategic miscalculation in American political history.
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Put the bong down.
The biggest mistake with the Clinton impeachment was making it all about Monica and the blue dress when it should have been about his (and his party’s) actual corruption and malfeasance — things which we’re only getting into now thanks to Trump.
But even so, the Democrats in Congress would have had trouble voting to convict him without also convicting themselves.
Chuck on August 27, 2025 at 10:25 am:
“I think it was a reflection of a split in the boomers, a generation that had just come to power, but still divided along lines that had become apparent in the 60’s. … We have been in an intra-generational class war ever since.’
I think there is a lot of merit to this. We should also remember that it would have been the older siblings, parents, or grandparents of the Boomers who elected JFK, LBJ, and the Congresses that passed the Great Society, 1964 Civil Rights Act, and 1965 Voting Rights Act. Boomers could not vote until (46+21=) 1967 or so. [The 26th Amendment reduced the voting age to 18 in 1971].
A lot of the “no heart at age 25 vs. no head at age 35” element to this as well.
[Quite a few additional good comments in this thread following Chuck’s as well.]
“Put the bong down”
When Art is right he’s right.
Jamie, I’m not sure either about the role of gay marriage though it does symbolize the dramatic shift on cultural issues. In 2008 California passed an initiative, Proposition 8*, that would have banned gay marriage in the same election where Obama was carrying the state in a landslide. I remember seeing a pro-prop 8 demonstration in Silicon Valley. None of the participants were white – not black so much as Hispanic/Asian/Pacific Islander. Of course that demonstration itself may have foreshadowed some of the changes that later took place under Trump.
*Prop 8 was later declared “unconstitutional” by the state supreme court.
As physicsguy wrote above, the arrogant left believe “if conservative Christians were really following scripture, then those people would be for all those wonderful leftist positions”
That brought to mind a short clip shown on a fox news segment yesterday from the ongoing DNC meeting (– conference?).
A minister claimed that Jesus was all about embracing DEI, thus our rejection of DEI proves how lost conservative Christians are.
I nearly cried!
— Mitchel Strand
Gingrich never wanted to impeach. The Republicans in Congress flipped and flopped and struggled to avoid impeaching. But tremendous pressure to do so came from the base voters, and Clinton kept rubbing salt in it.
The reason the GOP lost seats in the 1998 election was not that they tried to impeach Clinton, it was that they tried to back away from it. Congressman Hyde made statements a few days before the election that indicated that they had decided to let Clinton slide, and as a result formerly motivated base voters threw up their hands and stayed home.
It’s the same dynamic on both sides, the party bases detest each other and want their opposites crushed and their ideas marginalized. They’re not much interested in coexistence with people they regard as being evil.
After the election, the impeachment idea was dead until Bill Clinton himself revived it again with an insulting response to an inquiry from the Congress.
No, it didn’t start there, but that’s where it both ratcheted up seriously and stalled. The Nixon impeachment worked as a partisan tool, but it also made future impeachments harder once it became clear that the motives had been low.
We should keep in mind that the upper-class lefties hated Nixon even before he was elected, because of Alger Hiss. There was a strong desire to punish Nixon for that.