… Lose the Election 

In a new poll by the WSJ, more registered voters (1,500) looked unfavorably upon the Democratic Party than at any point in the last 35 years.

The new survey finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party—the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 percentage points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view.

Failed Visionaries

Democrats seem addicted to woke, accuses Victor Davis Hanson in American Greatness. The Democrat elites are reaping the whirlwind they created. Now is the time to relegate their suicidal policies to their graveyard of political misadventures, “the hallmark of failed visionaries of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.”

How/why did the Democratic Party alienate the middle class? After all, adds VDH, the Party once professed to be the sole protector of those in between. How did the Democratic Congress sink to a 16% approval rating in a current liberal Quinnipiac University poll? Could 63% of registered voters really view the Democrats unfavorably?

Odious to the Middle Class

Victor Davis Hanson echoes the thinking of the WSJ’s Kimberley Strassel in accusing the Democratic Party of embracing what has proved anathema to the middle class. Below, VDH enjoys answering his own questions before discussing the “suicidal policies” of Democrats.

• When the transgendered insisted on being defined as no different from their adopted biological kindred sex. Indeed, transgendered biological males began competing in women’s sports, though transgendered biological women rarely competed in men’s athletics.

• About the same time professors insisted and encouraged students to list their “preferred pronouns,” biological men began undressing in female locker rooms. Few cared that the trans-sports movement was antithetical to the landmark efforts of women to attain sports parity. “It was transphobic to object to sexually explicit transgender burlesque among audiences of teens and children,” continues VDH.

According to polls, 70-80% of respondents disapproved of biological men competing in women’s sports and drag shows with underage audiences.

As liberals morphed into workers, progressives and wokery crackpots, “critical legal theory” and “critical race theory,” left-wing criminology began digging in.

Today’s progressive party is home to the ultrarich (upscale professional class), and subsidized poor, notes Mr. Hanson. Its new initiatives reflect 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.

A Racist, Xenophobic Party 

Bill Clinton, a 1990s Democratic icon, encouraged the Party to embrace 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.

Demography Is Destiny 

The mainstream media, under the influence of Barack Obama, began pivoting to open borders when it realized that impoverished illegal aliens would soon become new progressive constituents who would replace the vanishing American working-class voters.

Compound Nouns, the New Norm 

Open border radicals controlled the Party in 2020. DEI became the Democrats’ obsession: white privilege, white rage, white guilt, white supremacy, without any consideration that poor whites have little or nothing in common with “elite white progressives.”

Immoral to Enforce the Law

In what bizarre world do Democrats live that they would assume that if an illegal alien from southern Mexico set foot into the U.S., then he/she was immediately branded as a “minority” with legitimate grievances deserving of reparatory treatment from a country he scarcely knows?

Simultaneously, colleges began granting reduced tuition to foreign nationals unlawfully residing in the state, while charging out-of-state American citizens the full costs.

President Joe Biden spearheaded open borders by allowing 10-12 million illegal entries, manifesting the embrace by Democrats of illegal immigration.

It was a suicidal party transformation—offending the middle classes and alienating minority Democrats who were left to cope in underserved communities with vast influxes of foreign nationals, half of whom originated outside of Mexico.

DEI quickly replaced the old relationship between class and race. DEI became an albatross around the New Democrat Party’s neck when the richest ethnic group in America (Indian Americans, such as Zohran Mamdani, the “African American” college applicant), professional women, upscale gays, and the transgendered were seen as making up the new victimized majority who had suffered from the victimizing minority of white males (many of whom were poor).

Not satisfied with DEI, the left transformed the ancient recognition of gender dysphoria (a rare biological condition by traditional medical accounts affecting about 0.1% of the population) into the new civil rights cause célèbre, continues VDH.

For the elites, the trans cause emerged as the unquestioned successor to civil rights, women’s lib, and gay marriage—as if to assume in Soviet style, “Give me a new liberal crusade, and then I’ll find an oppressed group.”

Incoherence is the new norm as transgendered biological males began competing in women’s sports. (Interesting, biological women rarely compete in men’s athletics.)

Advancing Left-Wing Criminology

Social construct was the new definition from big blue cities. As a “social construct,” it was illegal to shoplift sneakers or candy bars only because rich white men did not need to steal either; therefore, shoplifting itself was not really a crime.

Given that a violent, racist, and systemically unfair society itself was culpable for making them violent and career criminals in the first place, career criminals must not be indicted, convicted, and imprisoned for their most recent violent crimes.

Oh yes, crime waves hit Big Blue Cities, exacerbated by COVID and George Floyd’s death. Four months of rioting evolved into “Defund the Police,” until it threatened to wreck the party and alienate the minority base itself.

Remember when Democrats talked about “ecology” and “conservation?” when Democrats were noted for “recycling,” saving “endangered species,” spearheading “anti-pollution efforts,” and ensuring “open spaces?” You’re right, it was long ago.

From the Obama era to the end of the Biden administration, all that prior stewardship was seen as little more than boring, so-so half measures. Now that civilization is near extinction, Democrats are promising to save the planet.

Easy to forget: “global warming” was changed into “climate change,” pollution redefined not as “noxious fumes” but as heat itself, and the release of natural carbon dioxide?

“Climate change” demanded that the middle classes … curb their appetites, transition to costly wind and solar “renewables,” and forgo the formerly bountiful and cheap power from natural gas, nuclear, and coal generation.

“Everyone Else” Elites

It was as if their big SUVs, private jets, 5,000-square-foot homes, heated pools, and air-conditioned estates were necessary accoutrements enabling our left-wing elite to hammer out a new era of “limits” for everyone else.

The high-flying multimillionaire Al Gore and billionaire John Kerry, along with the usual Hollywood celebrities and nepo babies, needed the old perks of affluence … to better reduce affluence for everyone else.

How odd that the most iconic pontificators about rising oceans and a sizzling planet were the most likely to own a seafront estate or an air-conditioned mansion?

• The bastions of liberal ideology (America’s universities) became extensions of the new progressive Democrat woke project.

• Civil rights legislation and eventual Supreme Court decisions were simply ignored as race and gender now defined the identities of students, staff, and faculty.

• SATs and comparative ranking of high school GPAs were deemed inherently racist and unfair.

• Racially segregated dorms were the offspring of “theme houses.”

• “Affinity” graduations, notes VDH, “were unapologetically racially separated.”

• Israel, no longer a liberal Democrat’s admirable oasis in a sea of Middle East autocracy, terrorism, and religious fundamentalism, became an oppressor (aka, settler colonist).

Jews on campus were harassed with impunity and became inseparable from demonized “Zionists,” who themselves were no longer immigrant generations escaping the trauma of the Holocaust to the biblical land of the Jews but Western colonial interlopers and oppressors.

As Palestine terrorists transformed themselves into “freedom fighters,” a million strong foreign students—mostly left-wing and the majority from illiberal regimes, like Communist China and Middle East autocracies—often as much as 20-30% of top college enrollments, reports VDH. Campuses often required them to pay 110% of costs.

Don’t Democrats realize how anathema their issues are to the middle class? Democrats’ progressive policies have bankrupted the country, hopelessly divided it, and left it unworkable, notes VDH. “Being talked down to by neurotic and dysfunctional elites only made the messengers force multipliers of their toxic messages.”