The Radicalization of the Democrat Party

[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]

As the 2024 presidential election illustrated in abundance, both leftists and those who oppose them are increasingly inclined to issue dark warnings these days about how our freedom, our democracy (a favored leftist locution; it’s actually a republic), and our very way of life are hanging in the balance. That is absolutely true. However, on one side there are Americans who are trying to preserve the nation as a republic that respects the freedom of its citizens, while on the other side, there are powerful forces telling Americans that their very freedoms are the problem, and that the nation and the world at large need to be radically remade.

Those who wish to remake it are a deeply entrenched elite class made up of leftists who have contempt for America’s traditions and heritage, and who are bent on imposing their agenda upon the nation and the world. They are pursuing the implementation of that agenda even at the expense of carrying out the responsibilities they have been given, and even at the expense of the republic itself, for they are engaged in nothing less than an effort to criminalize their opposition and allow only their viewpoint to be aired in the United States. Trump won the election, but patriots would be naïve to think that this effort has ended.

The war against American freedom has been a long time coming. As the Alger Hiss case confirms, the far left had operatives at the top levels of the American government as far back as the 1930s. Hiss was a State Department official in the 1930s and 1940s who was unmasked as a Communist operative in the late ’40s. Despite all the evidence against him, which earned him a jail stint for perjury (the statute of limitations had run out for espionage charges), Hiss and his defenders, including people of the stature of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, continued to insist that Hiss was innocent—the victim of a frame-up by an unscrupulous and ambitious young congressman named Richard M. Nixon.

While that case in itself shows that leftists have suffered setbacks, as they did again in the 2024 election, they were never entirely removed from positions of power, and patiently, gradually extended their influence. The Vietnam War in the 1960s made open anti-Americanism fashionable and mainstream on the American Left and became the impetus for a general cynicism toward patriotism and any attachment to American values to be imparted to the wider culture.

The radicalization of the Democratic Party began with William Jennings Bryan, its candidate for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908 (he lost all three times), and the linchpin of its transformation from a party defending the states’ rights against the federal government into a party of big government and ever-increasing federal power. Bryan was also largely responsible for being one of the first to advance the now near-ubiquitous conflation of charity for the downtrodden with government action ostensibly to aid them. This became U.S. government policy—and the Democratic Party mainstream—with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal beginning in 1933. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s further mainstreamed the idea that it was the government’s right, and indeed its responsibility, to provide a massive welfare safety net that went way beyond providing aid to those in desperate financial straits.

Then the nomination of a far-left antiwar candidate, South Dakota senator George McGovern, for president in 1972 represented the legitimization and mainstreaming of Vietnam-era anti-Americanism in the Democratic Party. When McGovern suffered a catastrophic defeat, the party appeared to tack to the right, nominating a supposedly centrist Southerner, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, in 1976, but the far left had captured the party, and has never let it go since. The Democrats’ rhetoric became increasingly shrill: Those who opposed its big-government program were racists, bigots, xenophobes, and worse. Over time, this became more than a talking point; it became the entirety of the Democrats’ response to their opponents.

By the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, leading Democrats such as Vermont senator and perennial presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat of New York) were openly socialist, and contempt for the flag and American principles was mainstreamed as a rejection of the “systemic racism” that supposedly permeates American society. And now the tables have been turned: The antipatriots are accusing the patriots of antipatriotism. It is a common view of mainstream Democrats today that this systemic racism must be dismantled, and that the purveyors of this “hate speech” must be forcibly silenced. They are, we are told, “insurrectionists” who are threatening the very foundations of our existence as a free society, or as Democrats like to refer to it, “our democracy.”

These accusations progressed in earnest with the January 6 “insurrection,” the subject of protracted and multifaceted investigations that have done nothing beyond confirming that there was no insurrection at all. There was no ringleader, no plan, no weaponry, and no goal. But the left nevertheless launched a large-scale effort to use the events of January 6, 2021, to portray essentially all supporters of Donald Trump as “insurrectionists,” and to exclude them from the political process as a result.

A key element of this effort was the smearing of Trump’s supporters, portraying them as terrorists on par with al-Qaeda and ISIS. As a result, innocent people are still languishing in prison for their role in an insurrection that never actually took place. And despite Trump’s 2024 victory, if leftists can pull it off, there will be much more of this sort of thing.