Victor Davis Hanson:
“…The hearing confirmed that the traditional JFK/Hubert Humphrey Democrat party, as once envisioned by a Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, or Jim Webb, is long kaput. In its place is being birthed a hard-left progressive movement that absorbs the ideologies and methodologies of its base and that now incorporates all sorts, from Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist hipsters to Black Lives Matters, Antifa, and Occupy Wall Street protestors.
The new progressives recently have come to believe that they gain traction by the theater of disrupting senate hearings, cornering senators in elevators, stalking them on the way to work, doxing their opponents on the Internet, and during the hearings throwing out the concept of due process. Any means is deemed permissible to enact visions of social justice, given legislative and executive power is lost for now — and as if proverbially ordinary Americans who watched the televised circus might applaud the performers.
Diane Feinstein, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and the Democratic fossils on the Senate Judiciary Committee may in their golden years try to lumber onto the departing progressive train, but their septuagenarian and octogenarian creaky efforts to get on board grow sad. Joe Biden was reduced to threatening to beat Trump up behind the locker room. Diane Feinstein staged a clumsy eleventh-hour ambush of the hearings that proved pure bathos. Even leftists such as Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren fear that they are suddenly pseudo- revolutionaries, compared with the new, far more radical Jacobins, who in cyclical French Revolutionary style call for massive repeals of all student debt, free tuition, packing the Supreme Court, Medicare for all, a specified end to fossil fuels, quotas based on identity politics, and an abolishment of Immigration and Custom Enforcement. No one quite knows how far this cannibalistic cycle will go.
The emotional powerbase of the new Democrats is now Corey “I am Spartacus” Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gellibrand, and thousands of state and local Ocasio-Cortezes. Barack Obama really did fundamentally transform the old Democratic party. Or rather from 2009 to 2017, he dismantled it at the congressional, state, and local levels while he was elected twice to the presidency. But even the now multimillionaire Obama appears to the new Democrats as a near has-been sellout. And in his fifties, he will have to hit the streets again, in his prior mode of “get in their face, bring a gun to a knife fight, punish our enemies,” to recapture his hard-left fides.
The hatred of Kavanaugh and the left-wing repudiation of due process and of Senate protocol and tradition united the Democrats by moving their party far more to the left rather than to the center. Apparently, Democrats must embrace or at least excuse Antifa-like tactics or they are no longer Democrats. Diane Feinstein’s reprehensible behavior must be seen in this context as seeking to be as radical as the unhinged expressions of Kevin de León, her election rival for the Senate seat.
Yes, both parties are now more united and energized. But one did so by enticing the recalcitrant back into the fold; the other, by warning them to join the revolution or be guillotined…”