“Liberals protest; radicals rebel. Liberals become indignant; radicals become fighting mad and go into action. Liberals do not modify their personal lives and what they give to a cause is a small part of their lives; radicals give themselves to the cause. Liberals give and take oral arguments; radicals give and take the hard, dirty, bitter way of life.” —from Saul Alinsky’s “Reveille for Radicals,” published in 1946

Perhaps nothing has contributed to the toxic nature of today’s political climate more than the disturbing reality that a once classically liberal Democrat Party has been hijacked by the radical Left. This is not the party of John F. Kennedy, Tip O'Neill or former DNC chair Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who simultaneously supported liberal causes while remaining staunchly anti-Communist. Today’s DNC chair is Thomas Perez, whose contribution to “thoughtful” debate is to assert that Republicans “don’t give a s—t about people,” and declare that Donald Trump “didn’t win the election.”

But Donald Trump did win the election, despite the recounts, the death threats and petitions aimed at getting Electoral College voters to subvert the will of the people, and the felonious Inauguration Day riots, courtesy of leftist thugs who smashed property and threw rocks at police.

And ever since, a Democrat Party, aided and abetted by a corrupt phalanx of leftist radicals in media, academia, Hollywood and vast swaths of the unelected federal bureaucracy, has made it clear Donald Trump must not be merely challenged or discredited.

He must first be demonized and then impeached — by any means necessary.

Hence, a severed presidential head is presented as comedy. A Shakespeare play featuring an orange-haired Caesar murdered by political rivals is presented as drama. A CNN host of a religious show tweets that Trump is a “piece of s—t” who is “a stain on the presidency,” and Huffington Post columnist Jason Fuller writes that everyone assisting Trump’s agenda must be convicted of treason — and executed. “Anything less than capital punishment  —  or at least life imprisonment without parole in a maximum security detention facility  —  would send yet another message to the world that America has lost its moral compass,” Fuller spews.

America hasn’t lost its moral compass. Democrats have urged their followers to trample on it. Last Wednesday, Bernie Sanders supporter and dedicated Trump-hater James T. Hodgkinson attempted to massacre Republican Congressmen, critically wounding Steve Scalise before being shot dead by two Capitol Police officers.

Sanders was “sickened by this despicable act” and insisted that violence “is unacceptable in our society” — now. Yet the same Bernie Sanders told Rachel Maddow in March that “seeing members of Congress, Republicans, having to sneak out the back door or claim I’m worried about my safety, I can’t even hold a town meeting” is “our goal.”

Blaming Democrats or the greater left for the motives of Hodgkinson, regardless of his politics, or his list of Republican targets, is the stuff of fools or agitators. Yet it is hard to ignore the reality that Democrat politicians have supported groups such as Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter, whose violent tactics have been propagandized as a fight for “social justice.” They are virtually silent about, or tacitly supportive, of masked “antifa” (anti-fascist — irony alert) thugs who commit violence to oppress “hate” speech. And in May, Hillary Clinton announced her intention to fund groups supporting the “Resistance™” movement.

The Resistance™ movement highlights the divide between classic Democrat liberalism and the Party’s current allegiance to radicalism. The Nation’s Natasha Lennard illuminates why the former no longer satisfies the radicals. “Liberals cling to institutions: They begged to no avail for faithless electors, they see ‘evisceration’ in a friendly late-night talk-show debate, they put faith in investigations and justice with regards to Russian interference and business conflicts of interest,” she writes. “They grasp at hypotheticals about who could have won, were things not as they in fact are. For political subjects so tied to the mythos of Reason, it is liberals who now seem deranged.”

In short, faith in the Constitution and the Rule of Law is deranged. What’s not? According to Lennard, "disruption, confrontation, doxxing [publishing personal information online] and altercation remain tactics anyone taking seriously a refusal to normalize Trump-era fascism should consider.“

No one has led the effort to de-normalize Donald Trump more than Democrats and their media allies. Absent a shred of proof, Americans have been fed a steady diet of media leaks regarding collusion between Trump and the Russians, while former FBI Director James Comey, who testified that investigation began almost a year ago, refused as late as May to confirm whether the FBI had even begun investigating the only known felonies perpetrated by that leaking.

And media leaking about the Russian investigation has now morphed seamlessly into leaks of the investigation being conducted by Robert Mueller, and the revelation that the investigation into "Russian meddling” has now morphed into an investigation of Trump’s “obstruction of justice.”

Loretta Lynch’s efforts to obstruct justice as outlined by Comey himself? Mueller’s conflict of interest with regard to his long friendship with Comey, in clear violation of a special counsel statute? His hiring of at least a dozen attorneys, including four who contributed several thousands of dollars to the Democrat Party, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and one who once represented the Clinton Foundation?

The media portray Muller as a paragon of integrity, and Democrats threaten that any attempts to remove him will precipitate impeachment proceedings. The same impeachment theme Democrats have reiterated ad nauseam since the inauguration.

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan takes on the media and their unstinting efforts in making “the whole political scene lower, grubbier,” and “showing the young what otherwise estimable adults do under pressure, which is lose their equilibrium.”

The result? “By indulging their and their audience’s rage, they spread the rage,” Noonan adds.

The Democrat Party? Dedicated leftist Camille Paglia excoriates their reaction to Trump’s election as “one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of the modern Democratic party,” and describes Party leader Chuck Schumer as someone who “asserted absolutely no moral authority as the party spun out of control in a nationwide orgy of rage and spite.”

Not quite. Rage and spite are integral parts of the Democrat Party platform. Promoting victimization, and the tribalism it inevitably produces, is now its stock in trade, based on an adage as timely as it’s ever been:

The right believes the left is wrong; the left believes the right is evil.

Thus, a party once known for classic liberalism’s “give and take,” now embraces the radicals’ “hard, dirty, bitter way of life.” It is the party that champions the political correctness Paglia refers to as “repressively Stalinist, dependent on a labyrinthine, parasitic bureaucracy to enforce its empty dictates.”

What dictates? “Well-nigh the entire ruling class — government bureaucracies, the judiciary, academia, media, associated client groups, Democratic officials, and Democrat-controlled jurisdictions — have joined in ‘Resistance’ to the 2016 elections,” writes Angelo Codevilla, who further characterizes that Resistance™ as “a cold civil war against a majority of the American people and their way of life.”

Will Democrats and their allies turn a cold war hot?