Loser leftists don’t change their minds — they just change the rules

A set of shared issues and values binds the Democratic Party to the new Democratic Socialists in its midst.

Certainly, the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump derangement — marked by lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College and the nine-justice Supreme Court — helped give birth to the socialists.

But the overriding commonality among those on the new left is that if they do not get their way, they blame the “system.”

Then they seek to change the rules, no matter how hallowed those laws and conventions may be or how much they themselves benefited from them in the past.

When the left lost the White House, Congress and, for the most part, the Supreme Court, it began clamoring to overhaul the system.

For left-wing Democrats, that angst also translated into calls to bring in two new blue states, to weaponize the FBI and DOJ, to ally with social media to suppress the news, and to spy on congressional representatives.

All the socialists and communists did was up the ante in destroying norms by calling for the end of the presidency, the Senate, the border, the police and the Pentagon as well.

By 2021, it was time to destroy the southern border and welcome in some 10 million illegal immigrants — without audits, English proficiency, health checks or the ability to support themselves.

Had Kamala Harris been elected in 2024, we would have had another four years of this, and another five million illegal aliens.

One way of achieving radical change is to alter America’s demography by welcoming as many immigrants as possible who, in the first or second generation, might follow the examples of Rep. Ilhan Omar, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani or Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

They represent an entirely new sort of immigrant who nurtures both complaints against and dependence on their host country.

They can see only the sins of America, never the catastrophes of the homelands that drove them or their parents here.

It is strange for so many new immigrants to act on an elemental desire to reach America — only on arrival to profess that it is full of toxic, sinful people, living and dead.

Yet the damned hosts have inexplicably welcomed them, allowing them to share in the freedom, security and prosperity created by the dead whom the newcomers nonetheless slander and smear.

Similarly, the neo-Marxist-driven demand to mandate equality — albeit now substituting racial and gender consciousness for class consciousness — requires the destruction of established traditions, laws and norms.

The radical left’s key agendas — defunding the police, destroying the border, granting mass amnesties to illegal aliens, subsidizing wind and solar energy while waging a war on fossil fuels, expanding racial essentialism in hiring and admissions — have never won more than 30 to 40% support among the general public.

Yet their solution was not to ask why the public rejected them, and then to reflect, reboot and recalibrate.

Instead, the solution was to alter or destroy the system that had denied them power.

Communists, socialists and radical Democrats prefer moving the goalposts.

When equality of opportunity was largely achieved, they next demanded a mandated equality of outcome.

When a large, affluent middle class arose, the left, in its eternal search for a victimized class, pivoted and replaced class oppression with racial victimization.

When a lack of victimized minorities could not guarantee a majority constituency of the aggrieved, the left redefined “victimization” to include anyone who was not a white heterosexual male, regardless of income and privilege.

And when the people finally tired of their totalitarian social engineering, the left sought to change the system by radically altering the way Americans vote, the manner in which government is formed and functions — and finally America’s very demography.

The common denominator?

Human nature revolts at forced statism, coercive redistribution and government-mandated equality of results.

It instead yearns for liberty and freedom.

No matter how much deception, camouflage or brainwashing is employed, statism, socialism and communism can never sustain public support.

Throughout history, the left has therefore begun by changing the rules and altering the demography — if not through changes to election rules, bureaucratic fiat and biased court orders, then eventually through sheer violence.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.