The Patriot Post® · Democrats Veer Left

Back in the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama told a frenzied crowd in Columbia, Missouri, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Eight years later, as the Democrat Party prepares to formally anoint Hillary Clinton as his would-be successor, we find that the transformation has occurred in the party as well.

The Democrats’ official platform will be released next week, but as The Wall Street Journal’s William Galston writes, Democrats are “animated by the frustrations of the Obama years and reshaped by waves of economic and social activism.” We’re not sure exactly what the Democrats could be frustrated about, considering they’ve effectively taken over the health and financial sectors, redefined the concepts of marriage and gender, all but erased our southern border to allow nearly unfettered immigration, and decimated viable industries like coal through ham-fisted regulation — and that’s just in the last eight years. They even have the convenient bogeyman of a Republican Congress — one that has talked tough to its base but was mostly steamrolled by the purveyors of these far-Left initiatives.

If you ask the Democrats, though, this election will be about “free” stuff: a vastly increased minimum wage, “no-cost” college education, wealth transfers from rich to poor and old to young, and money for nothing by way of a paid-leave revision to the Family and Medical Leave Act. (The funds to pay for all this would magically appear by taxing certain financial transactions — never mind the economic damage that those taxes would cause.) They call it addressing “inequality,” but no one can ensure equal outcomes except through brute force. Which reminds us — the Left also wants further regulations on the type and ownership of weapons for private citizens interested in exercising their Second Amendment rights.

And the party that booed the very mention of God last time around will push to be the judge and jury of what constitutes “environmental and climate justice.” Gaia would be so proud.

Democrats also “reward” the ethnic group that votes with them more than 90% of the time by keeping them wards of the welfare state and shamefully supporting the racist “Black Lives Matter” movement. It’s worth pointing out that black lives only matter to Democrats once they emerge from the womb, as the plurality of abortions in this country are of black babies. And black lives don’t matter much to the Left when the vast majority of their murders are committed by other blacks on Democrat-run urban poverty plantations. The unfortunate truth is, black votes are what matter to Democrats.

So while the Republican platform is being described as a “far-right” one, it’s unclear whether the presumptive nominee will follow it to the letter, particularly on its more socially conservative aspects. But no such problem will exist for Democrats with Hillary Clinton. In fact, given the precarious balance of the Supreme Court, she may do more damage in one four-year term than Obama did in eight — especially if she has long enough coattails to flip the House and Senate. (Then again, a toothless Republican-controlled Congress provides a perfect lightning rod for criticism when the Democrats hold the White House.)

The last eight years have emboldened the Left to think they can get away with almost anything, so it’s not a shock that their platform is ambitious, pedal-to-the-medal socialism. We may be fortunate that the face of it belongs to the wildly unlikable and untrustworthy Hillary Clinton.