Victor Davis Hanson: The Democratic Party Is ‘Gone Forever’

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We talk about the Democratic Party as if it’s the Democratic Party of, say, the last century. We know what that Democratic Party was. It believed in an equality of result. It was not socialist or Marxist for the most part. It just believed in big government and good and generous entitlements, supportive of unions. 

It had thrown off its racist pedigree for a century, and by the 1960s it was the forefront of civil rights for the most part by isolating the Democratic segregationists in the South. So, there was a positive role to play for the Democratic Party. But there is no more Democratic Party. There’s the name Democrat Party, or Democratic. 

People on the right tend to prefer the word Democrat Party, people on the left Democratic because they feel it is, you know, truly a democratic operation. But it’s really a Jacobin party. Jacobin refers to a group of radicals that hijacked the French Revolution of 1789, and they met in a Dominican monastery that was called the Jacobin, and they took that name, and they thought that a constitutional monarchy with a parliament, as was transpiring in Britain earlier, was a sellout to the revolution. 

So, they wanted to get rid of the kings, the monarchy, and they attacked organized religion. They executed people with a guillotine, well over 2,000. They were most infamous for the Reign of Terror, where they accused almost anybody of being a counterrevolutionary who was to the right of them, until finally the Robespierre brothers themselves suffered a counterrevolution brought by the Thermidors, and they were eliminated. 

But they were a very radical, violent group, and they’re very similar to the Democratic Party. They thought the world was reinvented when they came on, just like the 1619 idea. They toppled statues. They went after organized religion. They destroyed property. They were at war with what they called the bourgeoisie and the rich, and they wanted a radical redistribution of property. 

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They believed in secularism. In other words, they were radical humanists that did not believe in a higher power. And if you look at what the Democratic Party has become, this new Jacobin organization doesn’t believe, for example, in borders at all. 

Now, Alejandro Mayorkas may have said the border is secure, but what he really meant is there is no border, because 10 to 12 million people, including 500,000 criminals, just marched across into the United States as part of a Jacobin idea of altering the demography. And we do have now 53 million people who weren’t born in the United States, of all legal status and illegal statuses. 

And 16%, a new record, of the United States population was not born in the United States. They didn’t believe in fossil fuels, and had their agenda been actualized to its full extent, given what’s happened in the world today with the scarcity of oil, we would be broke. It’s only the efforts of conservatives and [President] Donald Trump in particular that got us up to 14 million barrels. 

But they didn’t believe that. They had an almost religious ideology, the Al Goreism, the John Kerryism, that said that the United States has to suppress, if not eliminate, fossil fuels, while China and India were building coal plants each month. They had this strange cultural agenda, like the Jacobins in France, that was a rejection of all prior norms and traditions. 

The Democrats don’t believe that, as Bill Clinton said, that abortion should be rare and safe, but legal. They believe in abortion on demand up to the moment of birth. In fact, if you look at the Democratic Convention manifesto in 1992 and 1996 on immigration, on trying violent 17-year-olds as felons, on balancing the budget, today the Jacobins would call that Democratic Party of just three decades ago racist or fascist. 

Another element of the Jacobins is that with this DEI, they have replaced class by race, and they’re fixated on race, antithetical to Martin Luther King’s dream that the content of our character, and not the color of our skin, would matter. They’re a violent party. when Donald Trump was almost killed three times, Democrats rushed to social media and either said that Donald Trump had staged those near-death experiences, or they lamented the fact that the three shooters had missed their target. 

The [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] demonstrations are bizarre. You have grown adults, many of them in their 60s and 70s, and they are mocking law enforcement officers that are trying to enforce the law. They stick plastic phalluses in their face. They throw excrement at them. They throw bottled water at them. They try to stop the enforcement of federal immigration law. 

Jacobin Democrats, governors, senators, they all have created 600 sanctuary cities in the spirit of the old Confederacy that says federal law does not apply to any of these places, that the state itself can pick and choose which federal laws it chooses to obey. Another thing, so they’re violent as well. 

Besides the three attempts on Donald Trump, we had the execution, really the assassination, of Charlie Kirk by a lunatic that was praised by the Jacobins. And of course, we’ve had the House leadership, a few years ago, was playing baseball in Washington, D.C., and was almost taken out by James Hodgkinson, another former Bernie Sanders aide. 

The final thing that’s weird about the Jacobins. The Robespierre brothers and their cohort were wealthy people, highly educated, products of the French aristocracy and the professional classes. So is the new Jacobin Democratic Party. If the Republicans have ostracized Nick Fuentes for his extremist and repugnant views, the Democrats have welcomed Hasan Piker. 

He’s this influencer who poses as a socialist communist and a man of the people, but in fact, his parents are multimillionaires. He’s a multimillionaire. He drives a Porsche, and he acts as if he’s on the barricades, enacting a communist revolution. I say that because he said there’s going to have to be blood in the streets. 

He has praised Luigi Mangione for killing Ryan Thompson, the head of UnitedHealth corporation. He said that was a social murder, that socialists like himself can pick enemies of the people. No trial, no cross-examination, just name them as arbitrary enemies and then execute them with impunity. 

Is anybody in the Jacobin Party objecting to that? No. He’s an iconic hero. He was at Stanford University lately. He was at Harvard. He’s touring all the major universities where he’s given a rousing welcome by the new Jacobins. 

You look at Zohran Mamdani. He’s a Jacobin. He’s an open, you know, pro-Hamas mayor. He’s anti-Semitic in the way that he’s treated Jews. He’s a socialist or worse. He’s trying to tax the wealthy into making them leave New York. 

Recently, at a research hospital that Ken Griffin, the billionaire, had generously endowed with $400 million, these Jacobin organizations protested why young kids were being treated for cancer inside the hospital, as if they’d like to shut that down. 

And Mamdani, of course, was born to millionaire parents in Uganda. His family are multimillionaires, with an endowed professor as a father, a subsidized filmmaker as a mother. 

Then we get to Ilhan Omar. She can’t decide how much she’s worth. She says on one day she’s worth $30 million. Next day she says it was all a mistake when people point out her hypocrisies. 

We have AOC and Bernie Sanders, the two socialists flying to rallies on private jets. That’s typical Jacobinism. 

So, let me just conclude. We talk about a Democratic Party as if it’s the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton. It doesn’t exist. It’s gone. It’s gone forever. 

What has replaced it is a radical agenda that wants to remake the United States into a social welfare state and to completely redirect the course of Western civilization. It doesn’t like the United States, the Jacobin Party. At least it says it likes the United States, but not the United States that was envisioned by the Founders and the following 250 years. 

They feel, as Barack Obama had said, that they want to fundamentally transform America. And they just might. 

Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. 

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