The conventional wisdom in Washington holds that President Donald Trump’s November victory, combined with the whirlwind of activity that has characterized his first several weeks in office, has created disarray among Democrats. Like most things “everyone knows,” however, this view is too simplistic. It’s more accurate to say that the Democratic Party was already a rotting, morally adrift derelict and that Trump’s election was the rock upon which it finally foundered. At the risk of belaboring the metaphor, the shrill squealing and scrabbling we hear from the wreck are nothing more than the rats fighting among themselves over the few remaining scraps of garbage they can find sloshing around in the filthy bilge.

This is far worse than the usual infighting, internal dissent, and ideological disagreements that bedevil all political parties after a decisive defeat. The Democratic Party is utterly bereft of any coherent vision of a future in which the United States remains a positive force in the world while also enabling its citizens to prosper. Indeed, the Democrats are openly hostile to the concept of a nation-state with secure borders and federal laws that take precedence over local statutes. For example, a document obtained by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project reveals a pact in which twenty-two blue states and two sanctuary cities pledged to collectively obstruct any federal effort to curtail birthright citizenship:

We have obtained a secret agreement between 22 blue states, DC, and San Francisco, signed beginning on November 8, 2024. This agreement, just 3 days after President Trump’s landslide election win, shows that these resistance actors began, as a matter of absolute urgent top priority, plotting their resistance to President Trump’s anticipated actions to end birthright citizenship … Their top priority was not gas, groceries, public safety, or any other matter of concern of their citizen constituents, but instead a raw political calculus to ensure that the future children of the illegal aliens that entered during the Biden Border Crisis could turn into voters.

Students of American history will recognize their common interest agreement as a close cousin of extralegal “agreements” associated with the nineteenth-century nullification crisis that planted the seeds of the Civil War. This brings us to another aspect of the deepening rot within the Democratic Party. Their increasingly shrill rhetoric about “our democracy” notwithstanding, they have never shown much enthusiasm for abiding by the rule of the people. It is by no means a coincidence that, when the voters elected the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, it led directly to the secession movement. Moreover, the governors of all eleven Confederate states were Democrats, as was the Confederacy’s president, Jefferson Davis. 

This discomfort with the will of the voters clearly manifested itself among the Democrats during the last election cycle. In 2024, they effectively abolished their own primary system by concocting rules that excluded any serious challenger to then-President Joe Biden. And, when his debilitating cognitive condition rendered him unable to run an effective campaign, then-Vice President Kamala Harris was simply anointed by the Democratic National Committee as his replacement. Meanwhile, several Democrat-dominated states attempted to remove her GOP challenger, Donald Trump, from their ballots pursuant to the Constitution’s insurrection clause. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states have no power to enforce that clause:

An evolving electoral map could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties, and States across the country, in different ways and at different times. The disruption would be all the more acute — and could nullify the votes of millions and change the election result — if Section 3 enforcement were attempted after the Nation has voted. Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos — arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the Inauguration … For the reasons given, responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States.

It’s important to understand how consequential the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Anderson really was. Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, described it thusly: “The court’s decision was one of the most important and impactful moments in its history.” That is by no means an exaggeration. The justices all came together in order to prevent the disfranchisement of tens of millions of voters in crucial battleground states. And there can be little doubt that widespread disfranchisement was the Democrats’ goal. After years of insisting that the Electoral College is undemocratic, they tried to deprive millions of their constitutional right to cast a ballot for the candidate of their choice.

Bill Wilson/The American Spectator

This brings us to the Constitution itself and the increasingly ambivalent attitude of the Democrats regarding the nation’s founding document. According to a national survey of two thousand Americans conducted by the Cato Institute just four months before the recent presidential election, Democrats have a far less favorable view of the Constitution than do Republicans. Whereas 74 percent of the latter have a “strongly positive” view of it, only 42 percent of the former agree. Even worse, considering the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch, only 31 percent of those who call themselves “very liberal” view the Constitution favorably. This could well be driving the ongoing trend away from Democrats that Gallup first reported last year:

Political independents continue to constitute the largest political bloc in the U.S., with an average of 43% of U.S. adults identifying this way in 2023, tying the record high from 2014. Independent identification has been 40% or higher each year since 2011, except for the 2016 (39%) and 2020 (39%) presidential election years. Equal 27% shares of U.S. adults identify as Republicans and Democrats, with the Democratic figure marking a new low … Over time, the increase in the percentage of independents has come more at the expense of Democrats than Republicans, which might be expected since Democrats were previously the largest political group.

The caveat with which this passage ends is both gratuitous and illogical. This trend wouldn’t “be expected” simply because the Democrats once outnumbered the Republicans. It would only be anticipated if the former had increasingly abandoned its traditional working-class base in order to pursue a globalist agenda that favors self-styled “elites” that can’t provide enough votes to sustain the Democratic Party’s once dominant position. This is what Trump intuitively understood when he first ran for president a decade ago, and it is what produced his remarkable victory last November. The Democrats, however, refuse to absorb the meaning of the election and thus cannot adjust to the realities that will determine their fate.

Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print edition.

The Democrats are less in disarray than in denial. They refuse to believe they are breaking up on the rocks of a populist movement that will reduce them to splinters. They still seem to think that they can survive by insisting those rocks will crumble if they ignore the political winds that drove them to destruction. But consider the rocks. As James Woods succinctly put it on X, “Two guys who have more money than they’ll ever need are working for NO SALARY 16 hours a day to make the lives of hard-working Americans better.” No amount of slander or demagoguery will be able to overcome this kind of genuine patriotism. The Democratic Party has long since been reduced to an empty husk that will eventually succumb to its internal rot.

Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our spring 2025 print magazine.