In 2015, when Donald Trump was running for the Republican nomination for president, a refrain that was often heard from his supporters and mocked by his detractors was, ‘He fights.’
It seemed empty and vacuous, but in fact, it represented a few core issues that GOP voters felt their party was ignoring, or at least not prioritizing. Today, it is the Democratic base that is demanding its party ‘fight.’ But fight for what?
Trump’s core issues, and those of what would become known as MAGA, were a bit obscure at first, but eventually became very clear: Secure the border, abandon globalism and bad trade deals, and fight the culture war.
What are the issues or policies that are animating today’s fighting spirit in the Democratic Party? There are three that are dominant.
The first issue can roughly be called redistribution of wealth. We should avoid using the term socialism here, because it is vague and toxic, and what Democrats are really talking about is the very purpose of the social safety net, from welfare to food stamps.
At least nominally, the position of the Democratic Party for half a century has been that welfare programs are a hand up, not a hand out. As John F. Kenndy put it, they are the rising tide that lifts all ships.
In practice, this has led to a permanent underclass that is funded by high-earning taxpayers, but Democrats have long refused to admit it. Democrat socialists have ripped off the Band-Aid. Soaking the rich to pay for the basic needs of the poor and working man is their proud new mantra.
It turns out, the likes of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani have Democratic voters with them on this about-face. In a recent Gallup poll, 66% of Democrats had a positive view of socialism, with only 42% saying the same about capitalism.
Former President Joe Biden used to whisper that billionaires should ‘pay their fair share.’ Today, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., shout from the rooftops that the rich should pay way more than their ‘fair share,’ and basically subsidize everyone else.
The second major issue that the democrat socialists have locked onto is Israel, and America’s relationship with and military funding of the Jewish state, something that even a decade ago the party supported as bedrock policy.
According to a Pew survey, since 2022, the percentage of Democrats with a negative view of Israel has gone from 53% to a staggering 69%, and the lean and hungry New Democrats know it.
Rep. Ro Khana, D-Calif., who has been quietly crafting a new vision for his party, recently posted a list of issues at the core of his mission. They included ‘Medicare-for-all,’ child care for $10 a day, housing, and then, right there at the bottom, ‘No bombs to Israel.’
Meanwhile, pro-Israel Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., has all but admitted there is ‘no room’ in the party for those on his side of the issue. That’s not good news for the political future of moderates like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
The third issue that is clearly firing up the Democratic base is immigration, and when I say they are fired up, I mean seemingly normal people leaping in front of the cars of federal authorities to keep them from deporting illegal alien criminals.
Take Mamdani’s acceptance speech in Brooklyn last week: ‘Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas,’ he said. ‘Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.’
The key words here are ‘who made this movement.’
Make no mistake, this new iteration of the Democratic Party will not only seek to give amnesty to every person illegally in the United States, they will open the border again, and their voters will cheer on the invasion.
It wasn’t just establishment Republicans who underestimated Trump’s appeal in 2015, it was the whole country. What we didn’t see then was that on his big three issues, the border, globalism and the culture war, he was tapping into a real popular zeitgeist.
Today, we are at a similar point, on redistribution of wealth, Israel and immigration, the democrat socialists have found popular policies among their base, and all the Chuck Schumers in the world can’t talk them out of it.
Just as Trump took over the GOP before anyone quite knew it, the democrat socialists have found the same fighting path to dominance among Democrats, and for the few moderates left, it already looks far too late to stop it.