What Made the Democratic Party Go Crazy?

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

The answer was not Trump alone.

Indeed, irony abounds when Democrats resonate with the claims of the vestigial Never Trumpers that the MAGA movement “hijacked” the Republican Party.

In characteristic projectionist fashion, the left is simply falsely attributing to their opposition the very hijacking that hit the Democratic Party.

The Republicans are still the party of conservatism and traditionalism. But in the last decade, it adopted an expansionary middle-class agenda that has led to record party registration, its first popular presidential vote victory since 2004, and control of all three branches of government.

The MAGA emphases also have accomplished what prior “moderate” Republican presidents and presidential candidates had sought but largely failed to achieve: making inroads with minorities and youth and substituting class commonalities for racial chauvinism.

Thus, in 2024, 55 percent of Hispanic men and somewhere around 25 percent of black males voted for Trump—along with a +2 advantage for Trump among young men in general (18-29).

In contrast, Joe Biden left office with below 40 percent popularity in many polls. His replacement, 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, despite a substantial advantage in funding and overwhelmingly biased, favorable media coverage, lost both the popular and Electoral College vote.

Since the election, a variety of data points show a steady erosion in Democrat Party favorability (24 percent positive polling) and voter registration (for the first time in memory, Republicans are out-registering hemorrhaging Democrats in new voter affiliations).

They are also on the losing end of a 40/60 split among voters on most issues—especially the border, energy, crime, transgenderism, and foreign policy—a truth that even the legacy media cannot disguise.

The Democratic implosion does not necessarily mean they will not win back the House in the next election. Historically, it is difficult for even an unpopular out-party not to pick up lots of House and Senate seats in an administration’s first midterm. But if Democrats capture at least the House, the vote will not be for their party’s policies or politicians as much as a reflection of their ginned-up opposition to Trump, the messenger of a radical and controversial counterrevolutionary message.

The Democratic project is bleeding out because it either does not address what the middle class is worried about, or it offers no solution to popular anger—namely over inflation, the out-of-control DEI commissariat, illegal immigration, crime, high energy prices and tyrannical Green New Deal policies, steep interest rates, unaffordable housing costs, and anemic foreign policies.

Instead of winning on issues, the left resorts to melodramas that no one believes in anymore: the planet is about to boil, requiring net-zero elimination of affordable fossil fuels!

Institutionalized DEI bias is necessary to make up for past and present “toxic” white supremacy/privilege/rage!

Illegal aliens are the oppressed who have a perfect right to enter and reside in the U.S. without legal permission!

The plight of a large and victimized transgender community is the new civil rights cause célèbre!

“Words matter” correctness seeks to coin strange vocabulary and usage—Latinx, “preferred pronouns,” “undocumented migrant,” “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces”—along with toppled statues, changed names, and a rebranded U.S. founded in 1619.

But while the public knows how the left/Democratic agenda is imploding, they are confused over why the Democratic Party is hellbent on such nihilist missions.

Why did Democrats become unrecognizable to the middle class, and who is responsible for their collective self-destruction?

There are four root causes of the wreckage of the Democrat Party.

Globalization

Globalization asymmetrically enriched the bicoastal, liberal elite—in big tech, international corporations, the media, academia, law, government, etc.—with new worldwide markets and audiences.

In contrast, muscular labor and resource extraction involved in assembly, manufacturing, farming, construction, mining, timber, oil, etc., were sometimes offshored, outsourced, or ossified due to “free” but not fair trade.

So Democrats went giddy at the millennium when both billionaires and affluent professionals—often from the new trillions of dollars in market capitalization in Silicon Valley and Wall Street—trended left-wing.

Who then needed the middle class when Democrats now had huge financial and political resources in government, foundations, NGOs, the media, and higher education to affect public opinion, change voting laws, and outspend Republicans?

So Democrats became a utopian elite cadre of the very wealthy who would patronize and take care of the subsidized poor, both as psychological penance to assuage their guilt over their own newfound global riches and to solidify poorer voters with expansionary entitlements.

Illegal Immigration

The left knew its issues were not winners, so they began at the millennium redefining “illegal immigration” as “legal immigration” or just “immigration” and even “migrant.” The result was that by 2025, 55 million residents and citizens of various statuses were not American-born—a record 16 percent of the U.S. population.

From 2021 to 2025, 10 to 12 million illegal aliens had been added to the pool of some 20 million existing resident illegal aliens. The left sought to mainstream these immigrants—from mostly poor countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia—into Democratic constituents, either in the first or by the second generation.

The left’s appeal was twofold: both generous welfare and support subsidies, and a DEI message that as the supposed “non-white,” new immigrants became “victims” the second they set foot onto U.S. soil.

As the instantaneously oppressed, new immigrants had concocted grievances of “racism” against the majority culture—to be redressed by progressive-provided DEI/affirmative action in appointments, hiring, and admissions.

New mail-in and early ballot Covid-era rules were designed to end the audit and authentication of ballots and tailored to accommodate those who might vote without the bother of citizenship.

The new immigrants understood that Democrats gave them an instant pathway to the middle class through racial and ethnic preferences, after the Obama-era new concepts of “diversity.” It had redefined the old affirmative action black/white binary of 12/88 percentages into a huge, victimized class of 30 percent of the population, who were now portrayed as oppressed by the 70 percent majority and thus deserving of special treatment. Class and wealth no longer mattered and were thus replaced by superficial appearance and race, and gender.

Ironically, however, the Frankenstein monster of massive illegal immigration and DEI pandering proved fatal to the old liberal Dr. Frankenstein.

The new radical first and second generations—e.g., an AOC, an Ilhan Omar, a Zohran Mamdani—demanded from the party of their condescending fossilized benefactors (a Nancy Pelosi, a Chuck Schumer, the Clintons, etc.) radical redirections on the issues. Suddenly, there were venomous anti-Israeli and unapologetic pro-Hamas protests on campuses, as over 1 million foreign students swarmed into higher education.

DEI took on an overtly and radically racist tone as evidenced most recently by Joy Reid’s vile pseudo-scientific rants about “mediocre white men,” the sick racist prior mutterings of New Yorker writer Doreen St. Feliz about dirty white and plague-ridden people in history, or the past craziness of Sacramento State President Luke Wood and his half-educated agenda of “eliminating whiteness.”

The Rise of the Guilt-Ridden Professional

Globalization did not just launch. the Google creators, Jeff and Mackenzie Bezos, Mike Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman, Lisa Jobs, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, and a host of other billionaires, but also a secondary class of millions of wealthy and privileged bicoastal professional underlings. From La Jolla to Seattle and from New England to Washington, DC, these credentialed and titled experts saw themselves at the end of history.

As the new degreed aristocracy, no longer was their time and money needed to address adequate housing, fuel, food prices, transportation, or health care. Instead, they were freed to worry globally, especially about whether red-state hoi polloi’s ignorance might endanger their own beatific lives.

Thus were born radical climate change psychodramas, the transmogrification of civil rights into racial bias and prejudice, and radical cosmopolitanism that saw the EU, the UN, Davos, and all their appendages as enlightened models to nullify the global losers in the interior of America, who were now dubbed clingers, irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs, and garbage.

Higher Education

Elite universities have become fabulously rich and globalized. The bicoastal elite prized gilded letters after their names—BA, MA, MBA, JD, MA, PhD, MD—from the ‘right’ places: the Ivy League, Stanford, Berkeley, or the tony four-year colleges like Amherst, Brown, Pomona, Williams, etc. Alumni gave liberally to elite campuses and advocated that others, like-minded but even richer, top their donations.

Over a million foreign students flocked to higher education, paying 110 percent tuition, room, and board premiums—without background audits. Student loans surged to $1.7 trillion, delighting universities that jacked up their charges accordingly. To suggest that even a small percentage of 300,000 Chinese students were actively engaged in espionage, or that 50-60,000 students from illiberal regimes in the Middle East were at the forefront of the new anti-Semitism, was considered “nativist,” “xenophobic,” or “racist.”

Universities with new multibillion-dollar endowments opened global campuses abroad, without worry over the anti-American or anti-liberal values of their overseas partners. They sought billions of dollars in foreign contributions.

Endowments soared to 30, 40, and 50 billion in the Ivy League and elite campuses. Administrators and their staff grew exponentially to rival the number of students, all to handle the new all-purpose university (“Center for…[fill in the blanks of the oppressed or climate change brand]) that was therapeutic, left-wing, and indoctrinating.

The goal was no longer impartial education but overt ideological bias. Unquestioned was the campus orthodoxy that the U.S. was hopelessly traditional and conservative, so left-wing higher education was not so much prejudicial but a needed “balance” to a clueless American public.

No longer were crackpot ideas of the faculty lounge—the world would boil over in a decade, biological men could compete against and dress with women, and the most affluent and privileged nonwhite immigrants were victimized and eligible for DEI preferences—just esoteric. Now they were mainstreamed into the policies of the Democratic Party, as well as the administrative state, from the Department of Education and DOJ to the Pentagon, FBI, and CIA.

Add it all up, and there is no more Democratic Party as America once knew it.

The Democrats abandoned the middle class because they saw it as a global loser and themselves as worldwide winners. They now had the institutions and the big money, along with the leverage of millions of high-paid coastal professionals in law, the media, the university, and the administrative state to win elections by outspending, out-broadcasting, and out-regulating their clueless opponents.

Only the Neanderthals worried about how to buy a small house. The real winners worried about what the latest fad was in natural kitchen counters, cabinets, and flooring. Only the deplorables fretted about electricity costs and gas prices rather than their far more important carbon footprint. Only the blinkered thought about crime, because they lacked the intelligence or savvy to live safely and securely in the right zip code.

The elite university became the farm team for the new elite. Its position papers, grant-funded “research,” and the latest “studies” would supposedly provide the expertise, the “authorities,” and the “experts” to provide the necessarily “correct” analysis of climate change, race, crime, immigration, and foreign policy.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were the last Democrats to go through the motions of appealing to the middle class. But in retirement, they both cashed in, went global, and became multimillionaires by selling their name and brand—and so joined the madness.