Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
For the past century, the agendas of the Democratic Party were predictable. They professed concern for working Americans and supported blue-collar unions.
Unemployment insurance, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, and Social Security were their trademarks—often rapidly achieved by growing government bureaucracies and continually raising taxes. Still, many Democrats were socially conservative.
By the 1970s, Democrats still deplored antisemitism. Party officials had rejected their own segregationists to champion civil rights.
Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy all supported strong defense and military deterrence.
All that is now passé.
The only vestigial Democrat left in Congress is Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, himself roundly despised by Democrat leaders.
Today, supporting Israel and calling for campuses to stop their institutionalized antisemitism is Democratic political suicide.
Forty years ago, any Democrat with a Nazi tattoo was political toast; today, he can become the party’s nominee for the Maine Senate race.
So, the current Democrat Party is no longer truly democratic at all. Its new spirit and methods resemble the radical Jacobin Party of the French Revolution. Today, Democrats claim that if any opponent gives a Roman salute, he is a Nazi—while insisting that one of their own with a Nazi tattoo is not.
Jacobinism rejects Martin Luther King Jr.’s emphasis on the “content of . . . character.” It instead prefers fixating on “the color of . . . skin.”
It aims to divide the nation arbitrarily between the noble oppressed and the toxic oppressors.
So these new Jacobins have institutionalized racially separate college dorms and graduation ceremonies, along with hiring and promoting on the basis of race.
The new Jacobins destroyed the southern border and welcomed in 10–12 million illegal aliens, seen as a future proletariat constituency. Today’s Jacobins would now ridicule Bill Clinton’s 1990s calls for secure borders and an end to illegal immigration as “fascist” and “racist.”
The most recent nihilist developments in American society can be attributed to these Jacobin “Democrats”: biological men competing in women’s sports; critical legal theory that normalizes cashless bail; race-based reparations; violent felons arrested and back on the street hours later; radical abortion on demand until birth; attacks on the concept of the cultural “melting pot”; and opposition to organized Christianity.
These agendas lack broad majority support. So street theater and violence focus on Tesla dealerships, ICE officers, conservative campus speakers, and, at times, any journalists covering the unrest.
Jacobins make excuses for pro-Hamas campus violence, which often targets Jewish students. The often violent and corrupt Black Lives Matter movement was a Jacobin ancillary.
Free speech is labeled “disinformation” and “misinformation”—synonyms for not toeing the Jacobin Party line. Until recent pushbacks, near-religious radical green agendas warred against fossil fuels and cost the working classes billions of dollars for sky-high fuel and electricity costs.
Like the Robespierre brothers of old, the most radical Jacobins are so often to be found among the wealthiest and most privileged Americans. Radical New York mayor Zohran Mamdani grew up as a rich Ugandan. Radical, self-described communist Maine senatorial candidate Graham Platner attended one of the most elite and expensive prep schools in the United States.
When avowed socialists Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders barnstormed the country, they did so via private jets.
Radical “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar cannot decide whether she is worth $30 million or nothing. Hard-left California billionaire, gubernatorial candidate, and radical environmentalist Tom Steyer is a billionaire who jump-started his fortune by investing in coal plants overseas and offshoring profits to avoid taxes.
At least 10 states are drafting laws to tax the net worth, as well as the income, of “billionaires and millionaires,” apparently for their “social” crimes. Mayor Mamdani taps on the window of philanthropist Ken Griffin as a warning to get out of town. The mayor of Seattle scoffs at the rich leaving her state with their billions due to new punitive taxes, offering a sarcastic “bye.”
In the old days, Democrats were embarrassed by their radicals and distanced themselves from the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panthers. Today, left-wing bomb throwers are the Democrat Party.
Hasan Piker, another multimillionaire, $200,000 Porsche-driving communist, has openly supported “social murder.”
So Piker praised Luigi Mangione’s targeted murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Meanwhile, Jacobins on social media expressed disappointment that all three assassination attempts on Donald Trump failed. The arsonist who burned down Pacific Palisades was a Mangione acolyte and saw his destruction as a revolutionary act, perhaps a form of mass “social murder.”
Jacobin politicians call for Trump to be “eliminated,” label him as a “fascist,” and call for “any means necessary” to end his presidency. The aim is to lower the social and psychological barrier to violence.
The Jacobin Democrats of today are systematically destroying the legacy of the Democratic Party. And why not?
Their model is not the American Founding, but the radical mandated equality—and violence—of the French Revolution.