What has become of the Democratic Party?

(Getty)

It is nearly unrecognizable from its former self.

Many of us were born and grew up in Florida where, decades ago, most people were registered Democrats. There weren’t many Republican candidates to vote for. In those days, the Dem Party was mostly reasonable in its positions and most Dem candidates who were winning office were generally moderate.

Then something happened, starting in the early 1980s and then building through that decade. The Dem Party became something it had not been before. The country had just left behind the time of Jimmy Carter, who ended up being a very liberal president on policy decisions. As the1980s unfolded, it became obvious that the Democratic Party was being highjacked by special interest groups and extreme leftists. These people had agendas for drastic change and were clearly moving the Dem Party to the political left. The whole Party slowly became distorted from what it used to be.

Business people like me became aware that the D Party was slowly taken over by the leftist ideologies of labor unions, extreme environmentalists, anti-business consumer groups, personal injury and plaintiff trial lawyers, government workers, ivory-tower academics, Hollywood glitterati, racial minorities, artists, socialists, anti-growthers, university professors, the mainstream media, hippies, the “forever needy”.

At the same time, traditional white Southerners, believing they were betrayed by what the Democratic Party had become, moved toward Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party in droves as it embraced states’ rights, traditional values and the wisdom of the U.S. Constitution. Reagan carried 49 states in 1984, beating the Democrats’ New Deal stalwart, Mondale. Mondale’s defeat exposed how broken the Dem Party—a captive of special interests—had become.

The Democrat’s new hodge-podge of special interest leftists started the atrocious and ugly practice of demonizing judges who were nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Robert Bork, a competent and learned scholar, was nominated by President Reagan and immediately was savaged by Democrats. The Dems made outrageous and nasty rants against Bork on the Senate floor, and “borking” became a national term for the practice of defamatory vilification of judges and politicians. The Dems changed forever the entire process of Supreme Court and federal court judicial nominations. And they repeated this nasty assault again with a campaign against Clarence Thomas when he was nominated to SCOTUS in 1991. But all this did not go unnoticed by average Americans, and was one of the “final straws” that motivated many to leave the Democratic party.

The people of Florida and elsewhere recognized that the Dem Party had been seized and transformed, and in the mid-1980s began to elect Republicans in great numbers, something they had not done before. As the Dems pushed more pro-minority, pro-redistribution, pro-gender-war, welfare identity politics, the Party lost a large part of the white working class and the business class, and suffered landslide defeats.  By 1994, the Dem Party became so out-of-touch with regular Floridians that Republicans took the Florida Legislature from them. This also happened in the U.S. Congress.

Fast forward to current times. These days the most engrossing stars of the Dem Party are self-declared socialists, and these people are banging out good poll numbers, building follower bases, and raising surprising amounts of money. Yet no one inside the Party seems to be challenging their radical beliefs. If some action is not taken, and soon, the Dem Party is drifting toward being a socialist party, or at least joining forces with the Socialist Party of America.

A glance at what is shaping up to be the possible Democratic platform for 2019 and 2020 is also an alarming prospect for reasonable Democrats who hope for political victory in 2020. How will the average American voter react to the costs of the Green New Deal, “free” college for everyone, “free” (government) health insurance, taxpayers paying off $1.6 trillion of student debt, taxing unrealized capital gains, amnesty for illegal aliens, reparations for blacks, banning right-to-work laws, rights of illegals over citizens, Medicare-For-All costing $32 trillion, a return to free giveaways and food stamps, abolishing ICE, diminishing our military forces, eliminating the Electoral College and significant increases in taxes?

My guess is that most Americans won’t be bamboozled by such crap.

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BizPac Review.

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John R. Smith

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