Battle Royale

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Retooled Democratic and Republican parties are getting ready for the battle over the soul of the nation.

The Republican and Democratic parties are at different phases of unfriendly takeovers. By the Republicans, one can say it all started around 2009 with the early stirrings of the Tea Party movement. When it claimed its first scalp in Congress (Eric Cantor), it announced its arrival. Anyone breathing in the 1980s would not have expected Donald Trump, of all people, to be the avatar of Americans longing for a return to traditional values and governance of the past, but he has been that man since his ride down the elevator at Trump Tower in 2015. The move of the party from the Chamber of Commerce wing of Paul Ryan to the MAGA force of Donald Trump has taken time. In every election cycle, the Republicans of old who enjoyed doing nothing to make their constituents’ lives better are retiring or being retired. Donald Trump is something like 130-0 in this year’s primaries. The process has taken time, and Trump having few allies in Congress when he arrived in 2016 stifled much of his program—along with two impeachments and the phony “Russian collusion” investigation.

As for the Democrats, the party of Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton wants nothing more to do with them or much of their base. Bernie Sanders (technically, an independent) was a lone lefty outcast for much of his senatorial career. But with each cycle, he has new friends like AOC and Chief Lizzy Warren. The explicit takeover of the carcass of the “old” Democratic Party by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is simply the next step left. The party of Bill Clinton that could make deals with Newt Gingrich Republicans gave up trying to triangulate toward the middle. Its official policies are heading to a completely open border, lots of free stuff for illegal aliens, trillions in forgiven student loans, no more ICE, reparations, ending aid to Israel, etc. They are somewhat behind the Republicans in gobbling up the former party of left-of-center liberals, though they warned Hakeem Jeffries that he was next to go. What stands before us are two new parties fighting for the future of America.

We are no longer talking about whether welfare recipients should work or not, or how best to contain the Soviet Union. On the one side, we have a Republican Party that wants America as close to the vision of the Founding Fathers as possible in the age of nuclear weapons and the internet. Patriotism is a plus, and even with the history of slavery, the U.S. is a great country, the best in the world. On the other side are the Democrats who have gone full Marxist in their platform. They see the U.S. as a racist country, where only the rich do well. They emphasize slavery well beyond its role in the country's history. While one might be tempted to simply write off the Democrats outside of their blue city/state bastions, their destructive vision of America has some friends on the Right, and of course with Muslims, who are simply biding their time, reproducing, and waiting to take the whole ball of wax for Sharia. New “socialists” like Mamdani are wealthy and plan to be the ones doling out the slop in the soup lines.

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Let’s teleport ourselves back to the mid-1980s. Poppy Bush is president, and the Democratic and Republican parties seem to be more or less as they were during the days of Richard Nixon. Virtually all politicians of that day were veterans, even left-wing stalwarts like George McGovern, who was a B-24 pilot. The Democrats were tax-and-spend liberals, and they had the unions, minorities, Jews, and younger voters as their backers. The Republicans were the foreign-policy guys whose domestic policies seemed to be pro-business and pro-wealthy. The underlying, unspoken reality of those days was that virtually everyone in power in Washington was a white, Christian male. They had similar backgrounds and values. A debate on gay marriage or trans treatments for children would have lasted three minutes max. The parties could get along on many issues because those involved were patriots and had overall shared values.

Now let’s return to the present. Much of the country has given up on religion, or I should more accurately say that they have traded traditional religion for Science as it is peddled by their favored practitioners. Most of those in Washington have never served in the armed forces. The result is disdain for America, her values, her religious grounding, patriotism for the U.S., and dislike for those in the armed services. How cavalierly soldiers and sailors were thrown out of the armed forces for not wanting to take an experimental COVID vaccine. Trans mania receives a veneer of science to allow for the sterilization and destruction of children because they like the wrong toys. “Climate change” has become a multibillion-dollar cult that does not follow the science or make accurate predictions—one of the great strengths of the scientific method.

What we have in Washington we have in the country writ large: two populations, one traditional and in love with the U.S. and a second one completely detached from American history, values, and patriotism. I find it both sad and revolting to see porch pirates or shoplifters who no longer have any shame. Shame comes from religious or social values and stigmas; what happens when people no longer subscribe to those ways of life? “Students” spend years getting worthless degrees and then spend the following decades trying to pay off their student loans. On the one hand, most of the “leaders” of the DSA are wealthy and are play-acting socialists. The masses who vote for their crazy candidates are people who feel that they got stiffed by the system. They went to college but aren’t making that much money. They don’t know if they will marry, or if they are married, if they will ever afford a house. They see how much it costs to raise and educate a kid and give up on the idea of children. There are lots of people who feel that they could be doing better but are not. One can blame them or the system; it doesn’t matter. The DSA may be disingenuous, but there are a lot of people who are willing to give it a try, as the current Democrat/Republican dynamic doesn’t seem to lower their rent or make food cheaper. It’s like a guy in a sinking boat whose only option is a rickety-looking raft. When the boat is sinking, even that thing looks somewhat appealing.

While I grew up in a Democrat house, I obviously hope that the Democrats get manhandled in every relevant election. Their vision for America has been tried and has failed at every turn. Marxism and Socialism do not produce better outcomes but simply more wealth for the people at the top. Capitalism is the only system that leads to better lives through all levels of society. An interesting note from the World Cup had Europeans venturing out to the suburbs to see endless McMansions. They assumed that there was 1 percent wealth and the rest. They were shocked to see that many Americans are well-to-do and live nicely. That is something not so common in Europe, where one is hyper-wealthy or middle class.

The future of America stands before us in the 2026 and 2028 elections. The DSA lunatics who won last week are all but guaranteed to enter Congress for New York. The bigger question is the overall balance in Congress and who will replace Donald Trump in 2028. A DSA country will be a basket case before 2032; a traditional America may just have a shot at a brighter future.

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