Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
The progressive street is leading fossilized Democrats into a sort of collective madness.
The dinosaurs of the party desperately seek relevance by sounding crazier than the new unhinged base that disrupts Senate hearings, loudly pronounces a new socialist future, and envisions octogenarian Maxine Waters as more the future of the party than is septuagenarian Nancy Pelosi. The spectacle is right out of Euripides’s Bacchae, as the creaky old guard of the polis, Tiresias and Cadmus, dress up in trendy, ridiculous ritual costumes to stumble along after the racing and frenzied young maenads in their lethal courtship of suicidal Dionysian madness.
Six-term senator Dianne Feinstein is running against a far more radical Democrat, Kevin de León, in California’s general election. (He added the accent and the “de” to his name in midlife, thereby enhancing his ethnic authenticity.) Feinstein’s current Senate colleague, the junior senator Kamala Harris, has been interrupting, sermonizing, and shouting at the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in a fashion that generates the media buzz and attention usually reserved for supposedly sober and judicious old hands like Feinstein.