Democrats Surrender to the Radical Left

Watching the Democratic primaries unfold, I’m reminded of author George Orwell’s observation that nothing makes a leftist more nervous than someone farther left.

Seemingly rational Democrats have found themselves outflanked on the left by evermore audacious – and I dare say irrational – positions. Unwilling to appear less than committed, all of today’s Democratic presidential candidates have become “fellow travelers” with their socialist icon’s fondest dreams.

Orwell’s observation explains how extremists have overcome sensible Democratic policies and politics in recent decades.

Radicalizing the Civil Rights Movement

The 1960s civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, and others, focused on dignity and integrating African-Americans into mainstream society. The movement lost its way when it was high-jacked by radicals including Stokely Carmichael, the originator of the phrase “black power.”  More recently, that divisive theme has been picked up by Black Lives Matter.

Today, progressive darling author Ta-Nehisi Coates castigates America as systemically racist. The New York Times says forget 1776, claiming that the arrival of the first slaves in North America in 1619 was racist America’s founding event.

Nervous liberals, unable to defend 50 years of racial progress and the concomitant reduction in crime that has saved black lives, gave way. Today’s Democratic presidential candidates, like puppets on strings, have adopted identity politics and angry claims of systemic racism and victimhood.

Commandeering Colleges

College faculties have long tended toward liberal ideals. But like civil rights leaders of the past, professors who compare and teach varying political and social constructs have found themselves unable to respond to the demands of far-left professors and their students.

Far-left identity politics first infused the humanities, then social sciences, and now even the hard sciences have been corrupted. Race, gender, class and sexual orientation are campus preoccupations and “celebrated” in coursework. Students find “micro-aggressions” at every turn, especially in classic literature and art created by “dead, white males.”

With a self-righteousness drummed in by left-wing professors, too many students have become political activists and social-justice warriors, shouting down speakers they oppose and rioting to enforce their views.

So much for academic freedom and the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly.

Antipathy to Capitalism and Markets

Democratic candidates tell us that capitalism and markets are irredeemable failures. Inequality has replaced growth as their top economic policy concern. Occupy Wall Street was praised by President Obama.

As a result, we’re getting proposals for 60 percent marginal tax rates, wealth taxes and equating business success with “corruption” and “oppression.” All when the economy is better than ever and wages are rising fastest for low-income workers.

Climate Change as Religion

An entire generation of students has been taught that climate change doom is just around the corner. Dissenters are castigated and radical solutions must be implemented immediately, regardless of practicality and cost. The fact that all previous temperature and sea-level forecasts have been wrong is ignored.

 Democrats’ Predicament

Pragmatic Democrats today, those looking for workable solutions to society’s problems and – horror of horrors – who are willing to compromise with Republicans to get something done, find themselves increasingly isolated in a party that requires strict adherence to a single worldview.

Deviations from that view are not tolerated. Witness how pro-life Democrats are defrocked.

Democrats who are focused on defeating President Trump next fall – derisively called the “Democratic establishment” by the radical left – are at wit’s end. They see the party-throwing away what they believe is a winnable race.

“We’re losing our damn minds,” says James Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton’s two successful runs for the presidency. “We’ve got to be a majoritarian party. The urban core is not gonna get it done.”

Whether he’s nominated or not, Bernie Sanders has been the most influential person in the Democratic Party over the last four years. All other candidates have nervously looked to their left and fretted about appearing weak in their commitment to radical left principles. Across the board, they essentially are telling voters “me too,” varying only in degree, not substance.

George McGovern’s landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972 gave rise to a more pragmatic and realistic Democratic Party, culminating in Bill Clinton’s 1992 win. Would Sander’s loss to a flawed Donald Trump repeat the process?

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