The stakes are increasingly high in federal elections as more things are swept up in the vortex of Washington, DC. Historian Victor Davis Hanson has noticed a trend with some of these things: The Left appears to be backing off a bit.

He begins with San Francisco, a once beautiful and thriving city now largely ruined by leftist policies, similar to Washington, Los Angeles, and New York. Yet leftists in those cities “are now trying to undo the very policies of those they elected, as if they are slowly waking up from a collective madness — in an election year.”

A similar confessional and re-examination among the left is occurring over the border catastrophe. Upon ascension, the Biden administration discarded, and ridiculed as illiberal, the security measures it had inherited from the prior administration — the end of catch-and-release, the demand that would-be refugees apply for entry in their home countries, the continuation of the wall, and Mexico’s responsibility to stop the transit of millions northward through its country.

Much of the sudden left-wing panic over the border is, of course, opportunistic because it is an election year and the left fears losing power for what it has done to the middle class. The optics of 8 million people swarming the border with impunity over the last few years have alienated the public. And the infusion of illegal migrants into inner-city and border communities threatens to hemorrhage the Democratic base.

Democrats are suddenly demanding something be done, “perhaps even a rebranding of what worked in 2020 as their own.”

The same rethinking of energy is occurring as well among the left—in an election year. The more they talk of banning natural gas, mandating electric vehicles, and ending internal combustion engines, the more they quietly reverse course, draining the strategic petroleum reserve, quietly allowing more federal oil leases, and encouraging national production to return to pre-COVID levels present during the Trump administration.

Frackers and drillers are working at near-full production. Production in 2023 ended up at 13.5 million barrels a day. In short, halfway through the Biden administration, as it desperately drained the strategic petroleum reserve on the eve of the midterms to lower the high gasoline prices it had spawned, the left kept up the green rhetoric as it greenlighted oil production.

In early 2024, the U.S. is once again the largest oil producer in the world.

As for the cities Hanson talked about at the outset, police and crime mark another big shift for the Left. Whereas Democrats called for “defunding” police and soft-on-crime policies, the reverse is now often the case. Black Lives Matter is losing steam. He even wonders something big: “Does the left now fear that its promotion of tribalism and guilt-ridden racial essentialism is leading to a race-obsessed, fractious society, headlong on its way to a Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, or Iraq — in an election year?”

Yet another example of change is in the Middle East. Where once progressives thought their “therapeutic approach was supposed to lead to an ecumenical Middle East,” the opposite occurred. They’re left scrambling.

Hanson concludes:

The woke, Jacobin revolution was promoted by progressives, mostly out of guilt and insecurity, as an overdue remake of America based on therapeutic principles. For three years, it found a rare pathway to power, enacted much of what it had long wished, and discovered the result was not just a catastrophe but dangerous to the very architects themselves.

So now in 2024 — an election year — the left is trying to undo what it created without explaining why and what they did to us and themselves as well.

Read the whole thing here.