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On Feb. 4, an American television audience watched the nation’s oldest political party commit mass suicide.
In front of the Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., many of the Democratic Party’s most well-known Congressional figures gathered to whine about the zero-based budget analysis being conducted by Elon Musk, the billionaire who leads the ad hoc Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk is discovering that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) effectively became a slush fund for “progressive” Democrats to launder money and finance political vanity projects and graft. Recipients included organizations associated with George Soros, Bill Gates and Chelsea Clinton; hers alone received $84 million from the agency.
Comments from Congressional Democrats are beyond telling.
“Elon Musk is a Nazi nepo baby, a godless, lawless billionaire,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts shouted, receiving enthusiastic cheers. “This is the American people. This is not your trashy cyber truck that you can just dismantle, pick apart and sell the pieces of.
“We are not done agitating. We will see you in the courts, in Congress, in the streets.”
Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey agreed.
“We will not take this (excrement) from Donald Trump and Elon Musk; we will fight back,” screamed McIver, who promised to “shut down the city. We are at war!”
Those and similar comments reflect more than irresponsible agitation. They expose the Democratic Party as out of ideas. The Democrats have nothing but corruption and intimidation — as Musk and President Donald Trump are ruthlessly revealing.
The Democrats themselves know they constitute a spent force. They admitted as much 48 hours earlier while concluding a conference to elect a new party chairman.
“In private meetings and at public events, elected Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided,” wrote the New York Times’ Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein, who added that the party “is struggling to define what it stands for” and “what issues to prioritize.”
“They disagree over how often and how stridently to oppose Mr. Trump,” Lerer and Epstein continued. “They have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future. The tepid race for D.N.C. chair illustrated the lack of a broad party message that goes beyond attacking Mr. Trump to offer a new vision.”
The Democrats put themselves in that position by embracing ideological radicals, an educated class infatuated with them and the billionaire oligarchs who fund them, such as Soros. That explains the abuse of USAID. In the process, the party embraced the absolute contempt those radicals and their acolytes have for the rest of society, as FrontPage Magazine often reported.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris illustrate both sides of the problem. As FrontPage recently discussed, Biden felt so insulated from accountability that he believed he could get away with insulting prospective voters during his 2020 Presidential campaign. In previous decades, any candidate would receive pervasive, unrelenting criticism for such behavior.
The virtual president even threatened to withhold school lunches from low-income students in 2022 if their schools refused to implement pro-transgender policies.
In 2024, Harris made a point of making legalized abortion the centerpiece of her own presidential campaign. By doing so, she told American voters two things. First, neither she nor her party have any answers to the broader questions posed by domestic and international problems. Second, her party’s base is far too narrow.
David Brooks, the New York Times’ token faux-conservative, described the current Democratic Party as “the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores,” while honestly confronting his own class’s myopia.
“Those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the postindustrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies to meet our needs,” Brooks wrote. “Meanwhile, vocational training withered. We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.
“Society worked as a vast segregation system, elevating the academically gifted above everybody else. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and LGBTQ inequality. High school graduates … don’t speak in the right social justice jargon or hold the sort of luxury beliefs that are markers of public virtue.”
Though Brooks called Trump “a monstrous narcissist,” he admitted “there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.”
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman defined his party’s problems more bluntly.
“I think their primary currency,” he said, “was shaming and scolding and talking down to people and telling them ‘Hey, I know better than you,’ or ‘You’re dopes,’ or ‘You’re a bro,’ or ‘You’re ignorant’ or, ‘How can you be this dumb? I can’t imagine it. And then, by the way, they’re fascists. How can you vote for that?’
“I know and I love people that voted for Trump, and they’re not fascist,” Fetterman added. “They don’t support insurrection and those things. If you go to an extreme, and you become a boutique kind of proposition, then you’re going to lose the argument — and we have done that.”
As they performed an autopsy on Harris’ failed efforts, two Democratic insiders who managed successful presidential campaigns advised their party to pay serious attention to the legitimate concerns of ordinary Americans.
“Democrats have flat-out lost the economic narrative,” wrote James Carville, who guided President Bill Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 victories. “The only path to electoral salvation is to take it back. Perception is everything in politics, and a lot of Americans perceive us as out to lunch on the economy — not feeling their pain or caring too much about other things instead.”
Rahm Emanuel, who managed President Barack Obama’s successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns, agreed.
“With inflation stinging, school absenteeism skyrocketing and students’ academic scores plummeting,” Emanuel wrote, “Democrats consumed themselves in debates over pronouns, bathroom access and renaming schools and adopted terms such as ‘care economy’ and ‘Latinx’ to win over voters. It was a hermetically sealed conversation with ourselves, and we appeared much as we sounded: distant and detached.”
But addressing the legitimate needs of ordinary Americans in a coherent, practical way means abandoning the anti-Trump histrionics and the “woke” narrative those same Americans rejected in November. Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett admits the problem but disregards the solution.
“We have no coherent message,” she said. “This guy (Trump) is psychotic. There’s so much but everything that underlines it is white supremacy and hate. There needs to be a message that is clear on at least the underlying thing that comes with all of this.”
The contenders for the Democratic Party’s top leadership position reflected Crockett’s view. During their debate, moderator Johnathan Capehart from MSNBC asked how many of them believed that racism and misogyny accounted for Harris’ defeat?
All the contenders raised their hands. One even raised both her hands.
“That’s good,” Capehart replied. “You all passed.”
The ongoing USAID scandal represents the Democrats’ biggest challenge since the Civil War, when that party defended slavery. But instead of initiating their own reforms, Democrats rely on agitprop.
On Feb. 7, in response to Trump’s executive order dissolving the Department of Education, about a dozen Congressional representatives effectively formed a mob and demanded entrance to the department’s locked building, claiming Congressional privilege. Led by California Rep. Maxine Waters — who has incited mob action before — the representatives tried to intimidate the lone security guard. Police from the Department of Homeland Security had to be called to disperse the mob.
Either the Democrats confront their own corruption and condescension, or American history will record their boisterous political theatrics as the dying screech of an increasingly irrelevant party.