What Happened To The Democrats?

Back in the day, Democrat politicians were not nearly as radical-left as they are now. What happened?

For example, John F. Kennedy was an ardent cold warrior. In the campaign of 1960, he accused the Eisenhower administration (including Nixon) of being soft on communism by allowing a “missile gap” to occur, following onto the Soviet P.R. triumph of Sputnik. In those days, neither Republicans nor Democrats wanted to be labeled as soft on communism.

Then came the Bay of Pigs — a major demonstration of Kennedy’s commitment to the Cold War. Not much of consequence resulted, except for the “zealots” caught in the squeeze — and then the Missile Crisis, which caused my algebra teacher to give up on assigning homework, since the world could end at any moment. Ultimately, an American communist, pro-Castro nut-bag murdered President Kennedy. Yeah, revisionist theories abound…but it still somehow happened.

Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency on Kennedy’s death, with a major stick up his (ahem) yin-yang. He had previously made his political bones by helping FDR capture the support of various socio-ethnic sub-groups. Now he was president, and communism was the common enemy around which to rally the shell-shocked American nation. Then came the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the word “escalation” entered the public narrative.

Prior to all of this, according to Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly, the Eisenhower administration was suckered into involvement in Vietnam. How so? Imagine the secretary of state and the director of the CIA being brothers who just happened to be named Dulles, John Foster and Allen. They were both seduced by the French plea that their empire in Indo-China was being threatened by communism, rather than by anti-colonialism. Thus began limited American involvement in Vietnam, in spite of Eisenhower’s wise military judgment to the contrary.

After Tonkin, America was then at war, and a whole generation of young men was being threatened with involuntary servitude and the possibility of gruesome death. All this without any direct threat to our nation’s security. Civil unrest? You think? Within this context, I can say that President Kennedy’s murder is thus far the worst thing that has ever happened to the United States in my lifetime.

As a natural consequence, radical leftist organizations began to flourish. Space does not permit a thorough roll call, but suffice it to say that all kinds of Marxist trolls crawled out from under their rocks — mostly because of the radicalization caused by the threat of conscription. The turmoil was so intense that Johnson declined running for a second full term, leaving Hubert Humphrey to oppose the resurrected Richard Nixon. Pop historians point to the turning point that occurred when CBS’s Walter Cronkite started dumping on Johnson. The 1968 Democrat convention in Chicago was an epic of historic importance. George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, and Mayor Richard Daley, in one way or another, all managed to stoke a televised riot.

Thus was unleashed a swarm of political radicals unknown since the Civil War. They have since found safe havens in academia, government, and the media. In an act of political brilliance, Nixon, to some degree, defused the threat of conscription by instituting the lottery system, so potential draftees then had a clearer idea of what kind of danger they faced individually.

Was the Obama presidency the pivotal event that established the durable ultra-left nature of the modern Democrat party? This is a chicken-or-egg type of question. There was already a substantial population of flaming radical leftists integrated into the power structure, and Obama was just the first one to reach the top of the food chain. But his success was not because of his politics. For starters, he was virtually unknown when he first got the nomination. He was a cipher with fairly good stage presence who rose up from community organizer to the U.S. Senate in the blink of an eye. But mostly he was a black person whose ancestors never lived in the South, so his language was much more mainstream.

It is often suggested that presidents are the antithesis of their immediate predecessors. Trump following Obama demonstrates this theory. It’s hard to imagine both presidents being chosen by the same electorate — but they were. And then came Biden. Though both are generationally similar, for his age, Mr. Trump is considerably more vital than Mr. Biden. The media are now pouncing on Trump because he “confused” Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, yet they deep-six any reference to Biden’s lengthy string of age-related embarrassments. It is perhaps valid to seriously consider the overall aging of the political establishment, but everybody ages differently, and modern science has extended life spans well beyond previous standards — which just happens to be a serious problem facing the solvency of Social Security.

Also, the Democrats have undergone a serious identity alteration for other reasons — from being the party of the “little guy” to being the benefactor of large corporations. Huh? Really? It all started with the vast expansion of government under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Numerous bureaucratic agencies have been lurching into micro-managing all sorts of aspects of commerce and even ordinary private life. In the business world, a mom-and-pop company has to go out and hire attorneys to assist it in dealing with government regulators. Large corporations already have legal departments. In spite of the economies of scale, small businesses can often be more efficient than large juggernauts. Problems with worker efficiency are more easily noticed on a small scale — and can be efficiently dealt with. Also, large corporations can have enormous internal bureaucracies that have no other purpose than their own survival.

True, some Republicans are still lapdogs of big business as well. But the reality of what might now be called the Trump-DeSantis era is that populism, meaning advocacy for just plain ordinary people, is steering the party away from “corporatism.” In DeSantis’s endorsement of Trump, he refers to Nikki Haley as a corporatist. What is also significant in DeSantis’s move is that it represents a closing of ranks among the scattered Republican field, much like the Democrats are typically more likely to do — in order to win.

A further blow to the influence of the Deep State is looming on the horizon. Relentless v. Dept. of Commerce is one of two cases before the Supreme Court that may well overturn the 1984 Chevron decision. Trump’s fortuitous impact on the SCOTUS is particularly important in that, should the plaintiffs prevail, government agencies will likely be stripped of much of their power to act capriciously while co-opting the authority vested by the Constitution in courts and legislatures.

There may, however, be a cloud underlying this silver lining. Should the Democrats be seriously weakened, then the Republicans may well become corrupted due to the lack of credible competition. The vitality of a democracy requires persistent political challenge. Governing is so complex — as to finding workable solutions for conflicting interests — that all of the players need to be compelled to do their homework rather than rely on deceit and demagoguery.