At the 1984 Republican convention, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, called his liberal critics “San Francisco Democrats.” That was taken as an insult then, but now Democrats would probably see it as a compliment.
Today’s Democratic political strategists think more like Jan Morris, the transgender writer, than Dick Morris. They could not care less about triangulation these days. The Democrats have become the party of transgender bathrooms, the Muslim Brotherhood, “constitutional” rights for foreigners, sanctuary cities, and cop-killing militancy, among other once-outré positions. They are making even the San Francisco Democrats of the 1980s look quaint.
Back then, the party was led by bad Catholics. Now, it is entertaining leadership bids from bad Catholics turned Muslim activists. Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, who left Catholicism for Islam, is in the running to become the head of the Democratic National Committee. One part Noam Chomsky, one part Al Sharpton, Ellison is the perfect representative of the party’s descent into open radicalism.
Ellison says that he didn’t care for the “rules and regulations” and “orthodox dogma” of Catholicism. He ditched it after a college friend from Libya took him to a “Jum’ah” at which he heard anti-Western polemics in line with his political views.
“I was curious, so I went with him, and I saw all these shoes out in the hallway in the student center at Wayne State and men and women were sitting in there on sheets and there was a speaker talking about things that were interesting to me,” he has said. “I was working on anti-apartheid activities at the time and I was active on racial justice and fairness issues, so I liked what the speaker was saying. I went back the week after that and started reading more on the Qur’an and started reading other books on Islam.”
It would be fitting, if a party so enthralled with radical chic fell into the hands of a Muslim who advocates for transgender bathrooms and Planned Parenthood funding. Ellison campaigns next to feminists one day, then meets with the Muslim Brotherhood the next. For a party that promotes Western relativism and flirts with Eastern extremism, Ellison makes sense.
But if it is not Ellison, it will be Tom Perez, Obama’s labor secretary. Said to be the leading contender, Perez symbolizes the party’s embrace of illegal immigration. One of the items on Perez’s résumé is his former leadership of CASA de Maryland, a George Soros-financed organization that advocates for amnesty. CASA is an acronym for the Central American Solidarity Association.
Party leaders insist that both candidates are equally “progressive,” though Ellison, an early supporter of Bernie Sanders, is favored by the party’s most committed leftists and, revealingly, by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. In either case, the party will remain wedded to the far left. There is little to no interest among party officials in reclaiming any of the white, working-class voters that Trump poached from them.
Long gone are the days of the Democratic Leadership Council, that Clinton-era nod to the loss of working-class Democrats to Ronald Reagan. Today’s Democrats pride themselves on not reaching out to them. New York Times columnist Charles Blow speaks for many of them, when he says that he has “no patience” for outreach to Trump voters:
There is no more a compromise point with those who accept, promote and defend bigotry, misogyny and xenophobia than there is a designation of “almost pregnant.”
Trump is a cancer on this country and resistance is the remedy. The Trump phenomenon is devoid of compassion, and we must be closed to compromise.
No one need try to convince me otherwise. The effort is futile; my conviction is absolute. This is a culture war in which truth is the weapon, righteousness the flag and passion the fuel.
Fight, fight, fight. And when you are finished, fight some more. Victory is the only acceptable outcome when freedom, equality and inclusion are at stake.
They are all San Francisco Democrats now, and they are in no mood to take the advice of adopting a “big tent” that they once self-servingly dispensed to defeated Republicans. The Democrats used to make fun of the routed Barry Goldwater for having said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” But their rallying cry against Trump, with a few modifications, sounds similar. Call it extremism in the defense of liberalism, with the only vice being the willingness to recognize one.
