The Radicalization of the Democrat Party

By the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, leading Democrats such as Vermont senator and perennial presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat of New York) were openly socialist, and contempt for the flag and American principles was mainstreamed as a rejection of the “systemic racism” that supposedly permeates American society.

The radicalization of the Democratic Party began with William Jennings Bryan, its candidate for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908 (he lost all three times), and the linchpin of its transformation from a party defending the states’ rights against the federal government into a party of big government and ever-increasing federal power.

Despite all the evidence against him, which earned him a jail stint for perjury (the statute of limitations had run out for espionage charges), Hiss and his defenders, including people of the stature of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, continued to insist that Hiss was innocent—the victim of a frame-up by an unscrupulous and ambitious young congressman named Richard M.

The Vietnam War in the 1960s made open anti-Americanism fashionable and mainstream on the American Left and became the impetus for a general cynicism toward patriotism and any attachment to American values to be imparted to the wider culture.

Then the nomination of a far-left antiwar candidate, South Dakota senator George McGovern, for president in 1972 represented the legitimization and mainstreaming of Vietnam-era anti-Americanism in the Democratic Party.

As the 2024 presidential election illustrated in abundance, both leftists and those who oppose them are increasingly inclined to issue dark warnings these days about how our freedom, our democracy (a favored leftist locution; it’s actually a republic), and our very way of life are hanging in the balance.

When McGovern suffered a catastrophic defeat, the party appeared to tack to the right, nominating a supposedly centrist Southerner, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, in 1976, but the far left had captured the party, and has never let it go since.

However, on one side there are Americans who are trying to preserve the nation as a republic that respects the freedom of its citizens, while on the other side, there are powerful forces telling Americans that their very freedoms are the problem, and that the nation and the world at large need to be radically remade.

As the Alger Hiss case confirms, the far left had operatives at the top levels of the American government as far back as the 1930s.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-radicalization-of-the-democrat-party/