The Democratic Party “as we have known it, is extinct for now,” historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson wrote.
The Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential field is “well beyond even the stark choices of 1972 and 1984 that remained within the parameters of the two parties,” Hanson wrote for American Greatness on Nov. 10.
The Democratic Party “has been replaced since 2016 by a radical progressive revolutionary movement that serves as a touchstone for a variety of auxiliary extremist causes, agendas, and cliques — almost all of them radically leftwing and nihilistic, and largely without majority popular support.”
Hanson continued: “Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. One side advocates a complete transformation not just of the American present but of the past as well. The Left is quite eager to change our very vocabulary and monitor our private behavior to ensure we are not just guilty of incorrect behavior but thought as well.”
Hanson asked who will speak up:
- When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a number of Democratic presidential candidates sympathize with the New York subway jumpers who openly threaten the police, then what or who exactly is the alternative to such chaos?
- When the media proves 90 percent partisan according to its own liberal watchdog institutions, or reports things as true that cannot be true but “should” be true, what are the forces behind that?
- When the violence of Antifa is quietly — or sometimes loudly — condoned, who are those who empower it and excuse it?
- If a late-term abortion results in a live baby exiting the birth canal only to be liquidated, who exactly would say that is amoral?
- If the leading Democratic presidential candidates openly embrace the Green New Deal, reparations, abolishing the Electoral College, welfare for illegal aliens, open borders, amnesties, wealth taxes, a 70-90 percent income tax code, Medicare for all, and legal infanticide — what is the alternative vision and who stands between all that and a targeted traditional America?
- Do the progressive masters of the Silicon Valley want to hand over millions per year in wealth taxes on money that has already been taxed — but which is considered by the Warrenites and Sandersites as veritable public property given their own past use of state roads and infrastructure to build their businesses? Do these billionaires really think conservative state policies encouraged tens of thousands of homeless people to sleep in cars and streets near their businesses?
In professional sports, “Colin Kaepernick’s circus of not standing up during the national anthem has transmogrified into something far more serious — the National Basketball Association’s wholesale appeasement of the dictatorial communist Chinese government, and the leveraging of U.S. free speech in return for access to the lucrative Chinese market. Who is more likely to speak out against that?”
U.S. universities “effectively have eroded the First Amendment and the due process protections of the Fifth in matters of sexual assault allegations,” Hanson wrote. “Higher education is now controlled by a revolutionary clique. It institutionalizes racially segregated dorms and safe spaces, matter of factly promotes censorship, and either cannot or will not prevent students from disrupting lecturers with whom they disagree. What or who exactly say not to all that? Who would dare say that America in its third century is not going to change its use of English pronouns or decide that there are not three and more biological genders?”
Hanson continued: “What or who created a landscape in which the highest echelons of the FBI, CIA, and Justice Department sought to surveil American citizens, undermine a presidential campaign, and abort a presidential transition and then a presidency? If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, would anyone have objected? Do any object today that she hired a foreign national to work with foreign sources to discredit and smear her political opponent?”
Who or what, Hanson asked, “is behind the constant remonstrations that the American people are racist, sexist, homophobic, nativist, xenophobic, and oppressing the transgendered? Who lodges such charges? Who believes them to be true?”
As for the other side? It, Hanson wrote, “believes America is far better than the alternative, that it never had to be perfect to be good, and that, all and all, its flawed past is a story of a moral nation’s constant struggle for moral improvement.”
Hanson concluded: “One side will say, ‘Just give us more power and we will create heaven on earth.’ The other says ‘Why would anyone wish to take their road to an Orwellian nightmare?’ The 2020 election is that simple.”
Free Press International
