by Victor Davis Hanson
Trump and MAGA did not operate in a vacuum in the decade between 2015 and his re-election in 2024. His formal opposition was no longer the liberal Democrats of old but rather a new, far more radical manifestation. In their mission to fundamentally change the nation, they were more suited to 18th-century revolutionary France than 21st-century America.
The nature of the two-party system, of course, is to find ways to counter and even discredit the opposite party. Yet since the end of the Civil War, these disagreements had played out within accepted boundaries. But the decade of Trump, from 2015 to 2025, unleashed a hysteria unseen in over 160 years, one in which Democrats sought to destroy — not merely defeat — the candidate, then president, then ex-president, then candidate again, and finally re-elected President Trump.
What were the ideologies and motives that inspired their uniquely fanatical opposition?
One characteristic of the new radical Democratic Party was its pivot from solidarity with the middle classes to a movement of the wealthy and professional cadres as self-appointed protectors of the subsidized poor — a movement that reflected the 21st-century sources of influence and wealth within the Democratic Party.
Yet like the Jacobin movement of old, the new elites of the radicalized Democratic Party rarely felt that they should themselves be subject to the consequences of their own radical ideologies — whether climate-change taboos on personal energy use, open borders, defunding the police, etc.
Take, for example, the most radical firebrands of the new Democrats — Reps. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Mayor Mamdani. They were all either children of the upper-middle classes or had claimed to be multimillionaires while in Congress or had arrived as immigrants from the ruling elite of their prior, usually illiberal, homelands — all in ways impossible for ordinary citizens.
Leftist elites proved ecstatic supporters of fringe issues — reparations to African Americans, transgendered athletes competing in women’s sports, and banning natural gas appliances. Such boutique obsessions either were of little relevance to or actively alienated the middle class and minorities.
The radical transformations started as early as the 2016 campaign. In their rhetoric, Democrats under once-moderate Hillary Clinton had become veritable Jacobins — the modern counterparts of French Revolutionary fanatics, as they substituted lawfare, radically transformed balloting laws and procedures, and weaponized federal agencies as their guillotine.
The left did not care whether a Trump position dovetailed with their own, was in the interest of the country or was popular. Instead, if they saw Trump’s fingerprints on a policy, they opposed it. Destroying this supposedly demonic public menace was worth appearing hypocritical or at odds with public opinion.
Never in their wildest imagination did the new Jacobins believe that they were tearing down protective norms and erecting in their place dangerous new precedents that might boomerang on themselves, especially if the supposedly permanently inert Trump ever returned to power.
So the new Democrats were oblivious to the ancient warnings of the historian Thucydides, who chronicled the horrific left-right cycles of revolution on the island of Corcyra (modern Corfu) during the Peloponnesian War and the sheer folly of demolishing legal and cultural norms that would shortly be missed by those who destroyed them:
“Indeed men too often take upon themselves in the prosecution of their revenge to set the example of doing away with those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity, instead of allowing them to subsist against the day of danger when their aid may be required.”
In 2020, an addled Joe Biden, in a Faustian bargain, had been nominated to provide a moderate veneer for this new hard-leftist Democratic Party. This Biden facade was necessary to conceal what became, after 2020, the most radical political agenda in modern presidential history, one implemented by this same Jacobin apparatus, which would never have been able to realize such dreams transparently or in normal times.
Aside from rampant inflation, massive deficits and DEI fixations, the most shocking of the new left-wing Democratic policies was the complete erasure of the southern border — a nihilism whose aim even neutral observers in retrospect could never really understand. Under Biden and his Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the border simply and by design became nonexistent. Unfortunately, the influx occurred in an era when the tenets of the old melting-pot assimilationist and integrationist model had largely been damned out of existence.
During and after 2020, this same sort of Jacobin nihilism extended to almost every corner of American life. Mass looting and shoplifting in major blue-state cities were either lightly or not at all punished. In California and other blue states, stealing less than $950 worth of merchandise had been by ballot proposition officially deemed a misdemeanor, effectively precluding arrests, bookings, arraignments and jail time. That fact became well known to discerning criminals, and the impunity spread de facto nationwide following the death of George Floyd.
On a larger scale, the overall blue-state model that had emerged over the last two decades reached its logical breaking point. With huge voting pluralities, Democratic lawmakers had been free to put into practice some of their most radical immigration, crime, fiscal and diversity agendas.
Cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Portland had become synonymous with high taxes, eroding infrastructure, weaponized jurisprudence, huge unfunded pension obligations, unserviceable entitlement costs, poor public schools, high crime, lawless homeless populations and assorted green, antibusiness and DEI regulations.
All this surrealism proved utterly unsustainable, and it, too, fueled the Trump renaissance, given that there was no sign the Democratic Party would repudiate its neo-socialist drift and tack back to the center.
The blue-state paradigm reflected a new medievalism, with the few very rich, the many poor and a declining number in between. States dominated by the Democratic Party that claimed to rectify inequality were the most asymmetrical in wealth distribution in recent memory. Blue congressional districts had more inequality than their red counterparts.
After the turn of the millennium, elites in our coastal cities, east and west, were newly enriched by free trade and the ensuing huge globalized worldwide audiences and markets. Those in high tech, finance, entertainment and elite universities suddenly enjoyed billions rather than millions of consumers and clients.
The resulting spectacular wealth — $9 trillion in market cap in Silicon Valley alone — encouraged a romantic, top-down mindset. All the old civilizational challenges of food, shelter, transportation and energy development were now assumed to be permanently solved by this new professional class, without any investigation about whether their nostrums had actually improved the lives of the rest of society. A functioning society was taken for granted, as if running on autopilot.
In short, the elites conducted their social experiments and put their agenda of high taxes, radical green mandates, lax law enforcement, hyperregulation and woke sermonizing into practice without injury to themselves. In contrast, the lower classes were the proverbial lab rats who suffered the consequences.
As Americans en masse fled blue states for red, the left was not particularly bothered. Instead, the attitude of California and New York was a nihilist tone of “good riddance.”
As one Silicon Valley fixture, Shankar Singham, put it, “If everyone in the middle class is leaving, that’s actually a good thing. We need these spots opened up for the new wave of immigrants to come up.”
The later election of the unapologetic Zohran Mamdani only confirmed the notion that the flight of capital was more or less welcomed.
Two core realities defined the new elite leftism. First, in their hubris, the privileged left assumed that human nature was malleable and fluid. Like the Marxists of old, they would invent, through mandated massive government intervention and investment, a “new American” whose mindset and behavior met their progressive requisites and produced a brave new world to come.
Second, central to the such social engineering was the idea of exempting the rulemaking elite themselves from the new fiats, reminiscent of the prerogatives of the Communist Party nomeklatura in the Soviet Union.
The old liberalism of the 20th century that had embraced traditional values was now rare in the new scolding Democratic Party that fixated on the boutique and trivial while ignoring the existential.
In the left-wing fixation on Trump and his white voters as supposed racists, the left cast all reason, all history to the wind. In the meantime, the new Democratic Party did not grasp that the more obsessed they became, the less popular they appeared, or that Trump might have deliberately trolled them to achieve just such an effect.
Therefore, over a decade, any failure of the Democrats to destroy Trump was met not with introspection but with renewed zeal as they blindly raced headlong to their self-made near ruin — and the nation’s.
