February 15, 2025
Special Edition
The Left Goes from Madness to Irrelevance,
By: Victor Davis Hanson
February 5-12, 2025

Various polls show historical lows of public support for the Democratic Party, ranging from 31 to 41 percent approval.

Yet, at the same time, during a recent Democrat leadership conference, various panelists unanimously claimed that racism and sexism alone accounted for the defeat of Kamala Harris.

Do they think, then, that white male Joe Biden would have defeated Donald Trump or at least done far better than Harris? In fact, as Biden exited the nomination, he polled worse against Trump than did Harris—a black female polling higher than a white male.

The same irrational disconnect was evident during the recent wild Senate confirmation hearings. Democratic senators, in raucous fashion, shouted down and interrupted nominees like Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Kash Patel—in a way that was not true of the past Republican audits of Biden’s 2021 nominees.

Senators Schiff and Warren were the most egregious in their rudeness and came off the worst for it. Their outbursts had some general themes.

All were utterly unaware of their own unethical past and current shortcomings. The more Adam Schiff screamed at Patel, ordering him to turn around in his chair as if he were some sort of minion, the more Republicans remembered all the reasons why Schiff had been censured by his House colleagues: for chronically lying about the Russian collusion hoax and for lying that he had not any contact with the whistleblowers and his accomplices that fueled the first Trump impeachment.

The so-called Schiff memo accusing the Nunes majority report of the House Intelligence Committee was itself fraught with lies. And so, as expected, Schiff was exposed as a mythologist long ago by the inspector general’s report detailing his untruths. In any state other than California, his record of falsity would have ended his career; but in California, his controversial lies that Trump was a Russian puppet won him a Senate seat.

Elizabeth Warren screeched at Robert Kennedy for suing the pharmaceutical companies—until he pointed out that she, the supposed leftwing heroine, along with socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, were, in fact, the two largest recipients of Big Pharma money.

Many of the Trump nominees were accused of wanting to weaponize the government. Apparently, the senators were afraid that once in power, the Trump cabinet would do exactly what the Biden IRS, FBI, CIA, Pentagon, and DOJ had done: use the powers of their offices to wage lawfare and bureaucratic harassment of Trump and his supporters. In other words, the senators knew that if they were Trump and had suffered what they had dished out to him, and if now they were again in power, they know they would retaliate against themselves.

Otherwise, the Democrats were clueless that nominees like Hegseth, Bondi, and Patel were frequent guests on televised news and podcasts. Thus, they were experienced interviewees who had mastered modern media repartee and impromptu give-and-take. All the nominees had prepped studiously for the confirmation hearings.

In contrast, the Democrats winged it, and most were inept auditors anyway. So, naturally, they came across as unprepared and arrogant. They remained clueless about how they grated and repelled in the televised hearings—like petulant adolescents assuming their heated screaming substituted for light and clarity.

What did the Democrats not ask or care about? None wanted to hear RFK, Jr.’s strategies to combat an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Few, if any, wished to listen to Patel outline his plans to reform a weaponized FBI. Bondi was not asked about her views of the most critical challenges facing the Department of Justice.

In sum, after the pathetic performance of the Democratic “lions” of the Senate, the already rock-bottom public views of the Democrats will only go lower.

In their limited self-reflection, the Left keeps looking for reasons why they have lost the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court—and both the Electoral College and popular vote.

In lieu of confronting the frightening truth that their message is largely antithetical to the values and wishes of the majority of American people, they search and search for quick fixes: just one more Trump-Hitler comparison, yet one louder, more gross outburst at Kash Patel, perhaps just a few more invectives like “racists!” and “sexists!” to explain their losses.

Yet deep down, they know why the American people are tiring of them. And it is not just their obnoxious messengers, senators Adam Schiff, Elizabeth Warren, Mazie Hirono, and Tim Kaine, whose rudeness, ignorance, and incompetence during the nominee hearings were reminders of the Democratic descent.

Nor was the problem trying to get away with another four years of foisting an enfeebled Joe Biden on the country, to serve a second term as a waxen veneer for the hard Left revolutionary agendas of the Obamas, the Warren-Sanders neo-socialists, and the woke squad—open borders, millions of illegal aliens, unlivable blue cities, massive deficits, green extremism, woke venom.

So, it is not the off-putting or comatose messengers or even the obnoxious methods of the current Democrat hierarchy that explain the party’s historic low polls and recent losses. Had a Warren, Sanders, or Kaine headed the ticket in 2024, they would have still lost. Even a so-called moderate Democrat, Josh Shapiro, could not have saved them.

The message, not the messenger, lost the Democrats and the American people.

Democrats did not enjoy 50 percent approval on a single issue. A sane party would have recalled its 1996 Democratic National Convention agenda, which called for secure borders, legal-only immigration, support for law enforcement, strong national defense, and fiscal sobriety aiming at balanced budgets. All that won Bill Clinton an easy victory over Republican candidate Bob Dole.

Instead, Democrats since the beginning of the Obama era have figured that by veering hard left on social issues like abortion on demand, glorifying illegal immigration, transexual chauvinism, and the unworkable and dangerous new green deal, they would capture the youth vote for a generation.

Instead, they had no clue that their own disastrous record of high inflation, interest rates, insurance costs, and gas and food staple prices trumped cultural issues and led to splitting the youth vote almost evenly between Trump and Harris.

Democrats also felt that by normalizing illegal immigration and an open border, a new cohort of 12 million illegal aliens from south of the border would energize the Latino vote. The new influx would ensure that the massively changing demography of America would continue to flip red states blue, as it has in the past, with states like California, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico.

In fact, open borders had almost the opposite effect. The more the world’s impoverished swarmed border towns and Mexican-American communities—jamming health care services, flooding the schools, spiking crime, trafficking children, and empowering gangs—the more Hispanic Democrats would not vote like Democrats but instead punish them.

By parroting “abortion,” “abortion,” “abortion” nonstop, the more the Left figured they had locked up huge majorities of women voters. Clueless, they never understood that women know better than men what hyperinflation looks like at the grocery store and gas pump. They value safe streets and the freedom to be secure from random criminals.

As a result, Harris failed utterly to capture the margins in old Democratic constituencies needed to offset the party’s huge loss of male and white voters.

Democrats mostly see Americans merely as a conglomeration of separate tribes: blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, gays, women, transsexuals, and upscale bicoastal whites. In their tribalist views, all the groups are seen as more loyal to their own tribal members than they are either to other tribes or to America itself.

In what they call “intersectionality,” Democrats believe that they have to fuse and weld together the disparate bands by tailor-made concessions to each. So, Leftists, in the manner of Roman emperors bidding for the loyalties of the Praetorian Guard, then barter for the support of each tribe by promises of various entitlements, exemptions, and policies. They do not see voters as universally human with identical desires and aspirations, who embrace shared national wishes for affordable housing, food, transportation, power, fuel, and health care that transcend what differences they may appear to hold by their respective superficial appearances.

In contrast, Trump and the MAGA movement likewise appreciated the various tribal and special interest groups in America. But, in contrast to Democrats, they sought to unite all factions by their shared concerns over crime, inflation, affordable housing, border security, and deterring enemies abroad. Those worries would trump their individual racial or gender differences that then became incidental, not essential, to who they were. In sum, Trump, of all people, substituted class concerns for racial and sexual tribalism and mirabile dictu, and proved far more ecumenical in attracting new constituencies than past “moderates” like the Bushes, John McCain, Bob Dole, and Mitt Romney.

The more such Republican inclusiveness won out, all the more furious Democrats weirdly turned on their own tribalist constituencies to blame them for the November loss. So, the Obamas charged that blacks suffered from false consciousness—in Marxist terms of not knowing what “really” was good for them (unless they listened to their master tutors, Barack and Michelle Obama).

Party hacks blamed Hispanics for “selling out” their elite liberal patrons by voting to close the border and keep their communities safe and prosperous. Some clueless leftists thought Trump should close the border to punish apostate Mexican Americans, unaware that the majority of the latter wanted the border closed.

The hard-left women of The View damned “white women” for supposedly voting in ways that were too materialist—like ensuring safety for their children, affordability for their households, and honor and pride for the country. They, too, were in an echo chamber as their shrillness, quasi-racism, and incompetence bled their audiences. Indeed, for the first time in history, pay-to-watch Fox News in the Morning, hosted by African American Harris Faulkner (The Faulkner Focus), captured a larger audience than the free-to-watch The View.

In sum, the Democrats are atomized, each faction steadily smaller and shriller than a possible whole—all fighting with one another, none willing to conduct an autopsy of what went wrong.

Or is it worse than that—given the Democratic National Committee just elected hard left Minnesotan Ken Martin, known previously for tweeting that then President Trump was guilty of treason, by citing the demonstrably false story that Russians were giving the Taliban bounties for killing Americans and that Trump had done nothing about it? Martin comes to the DNC from running the Minnesota Democratic Party and on the recommendation of his close friend Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. However, note that Walz was one of history’s most inept vice-presidential candidates and contributed to the 2024 Harris defeat. And Martin did not reverse Minnesota’s bleeding of leftist viewers; in fact, Harris got fewer votes in Minnesota in 2024 than Biden had in 2020.

Perhaps the best simile is that the Democrats are acting like addicts and cannot break from their woke-DEI drug that they apparently must inject to survive—even as they accept that such fixations are lethal habits that are killing their own party.

Nevertheless, like all end-stage addicts, Democrats feel that perhaps just one more hot shot, just one more powerful, pure fix, will send them into nirvana rather than finally to oblivion. And so, they have forgotten nothing and have thus learned nothing.

If you do not take an interest
in the affairs of your government,
then you are doomed to live under
the rule of fools.
Plato