The Democrats Gave In to Radicals and Gave Up on Common Sense Trump’s personality and policies hastened the party’s leftward shift, but it was a long time coming. Joseph Epstein ****
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-gave-in-to-radicals-and-gave-up-on-common-sense-11581444825?mod=opinion_lead_pos6
George Orwell noted the nervousness of people on the left when confronted by those even further to the left. This nervousness stems from leftists’ fear that they will be taken for impure in their own leftism, that their thought and actions don’t go far enough, that they are, finally, not really on the bus. In America during the 1930s, Communists mocked liberals for their weakness, and liberals worried about not measuring up. Hence the phenomenon of the “fellow traveler,” someone who sympathized with the Communist Party but couldn’t bring himself to join it.
Orwell’s observation remains in play. In the mid-1960s, Stokely Carmichael and other young black militants pushed the American civil-rights movement leftward, and away from its goal of integration. Liberals, unable to face down this left-wing pull toward Black Power, knuckled under. A gloriously successful campaign for equal rights based on conscience and dignity devolved into an angry, incoherent movement based on guilt and victimhood. The last thing allowed was the concession of progress of any sort in racial matters. Impressive civil-rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and A. Philip Randolph were replaced by such dubious figures as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The movement never recovered.
The same phenomenon appeared in American universities. In faculty meetings everywhere, small groups of the most radical professors were able to get their way through political pressure. Liberals, generally in the majority, were worried (if not terrified) of seeming to be on the wrong side. When they didn’t give in completely, they sought compromises that invariably favored the radicals. Standards and intellectual authority in universities have given way to political correctness and identity politics.
The same scenario is playing out in the Democratic Party. Since nominating George McGovern in 1972, the party has moved progressively leftward. If the Democrats may by now be said to have a center, it cannot hold, as William Butler Yeats has it in his poem “The Second Coming.” Among today’s Democrats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
By ceding moral authority to the far left, the Democrats have lost the power to counter bizarre proposals with simple common sense. When a freshman congresswoman proposes a wildly improbable Green New Deal, instead of responding as Democrats of an earlier day would have—“Whaddya, kiddin’ me?”—they now take it seriously and several adopt it. When two other freshman Democrats make anti-Semitic pronouncements, no one in a party overwhelmingly the choice of Jewish voters has the authority to tell them to knock it off. When Democratic presidential candidates propose to provide free health care for all, or eliminate college tuition and college debt, or enlarge and pack the Supreme Court, or eliminate the Electoral College, all this is taken in earnest. And the Democratic Party is being held hostage to identity politics, so that no national ticket can ever again be without a black or female candidate.
Donald Trump’s aggressive personality has hastened the Democrats’ radicalization. Party members measure the intensity of their idealism by their hatred of Mr. Trump. The tone and temper of the contemporary Democratic Party encourages—indeed fully supports—this sad condition.
Consider Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A serious and skillful politician, she was finally pushed by her party’s left wing into permitting a hopeless impeachment proceeding that violated her own sensible criteria: that the reasons for impeachment be compelling, the evidence for it overwhelming, and the support for it bipartisan. When the impeachment failed in the Senate, as she had predicted it would, it drove her to the distinctly un-Pelosian act of tearing up her copy of the State of the Union address on national television.
What is to be done? No one has a good answer. Perhaps the only hope is that the Democrats put together a nightmare ticket— Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, say, or Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris —and the party is so crushingly defeated in November that it returns to its long-lost political seriousness.
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