Democrats recently held a meeting where party leaders made it clear loyalty is the only thing that matters. Unsurprisingly, a headline from The Washington Post article describing the meeting vastly understated reality: “House Democrats explode in recriminations as liberals lash out at moderates.” Socialist/Marxist hard-core radicals lashing out at progressives is more like it — in a party where ever-increasing demands for “authenticity” are the only currency that matters.

What kind of authenticity? “Triggering the blowup was Wednesday’s votes on a bill to expand federal background checks for gun purchases,” the Post explained. “Twenty-six moderate Democrats joined Republicans in amending the legislation, adding a provision requiring that ICE be notified if an illegal immigrant seeks to purchase a gun.”

In other words, Democrat Party members who would like to take Americans’ guns away were furious that some of their colleagues supported making sure illegals can’t get guns. As a result, media-made “superstar” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared through her spokesman that Democrats who side with Republicans “are putting themselves on a list.”

It’s going to be quite a list, and ideology is only half of the equation. As Victor Davis Hanson so aptly explains, Democrats are a party where “ending capitalism, the internal combustion engine, and so-called white privilege become, for now, the new revolutionary agendas.” And while the old party elitists may pay lip service to the first two tenets, he warns, “The third canon of race unfortunately is not apparently, like gender, a social construct, but innate, unchanging and genetic — and historically an igniter of tribal strife every time it is elevated to being essential rather than incidental to identity.”

The new breed of Democrats, whose ignorance is only exceeded by their arrogance, couldn’t care less. If the old guard won’t get more tribal, they are eminently expendable. Thus, when former VP Joe Biden called current VP Mike Pence a “decent guy,” he infuriated leftists who believe Pence’s anti-same-sex marriage stance is all that matters. And when failed New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon called him out, Biden backtracked. “You’re right, Cynthia. I was making a point in a foreign policy context, that under normal circumstances a Vice President wouldn’t be given a silent reaction on the world stage. But there is nothing decent about being anti-LGBTQ rights, and that includes the Vice President,” he tweeted.

Biden is the tip of the iceberg. Bernie Sanders? Just “an old white, and rather affluent career politician, still barking at the class-struggle moon,” as Hanson puts it. A person “burdened by his utter lack of intersectionality,” National Review editor Rich Lowry adds. Elizabeth Warren? Her Native American “ancestry” has proved to be as tenuous as her explanations for exploiting it, making her just another rich, old, white women.

Kamala Harris? In order to authenticate her “blackness,” the daughter of a Tamil Indian mother and Jamaican father told a radio audience she used to get high in college while listening to “Snoop” and “Tupac” — neither of whom released music until years after she graduated. Cory Booker? Apparently inventing a drug dealer friend named “T-Bone” was his ticket to “down with the struggle” relevancy.

And on it goes, as each of these Democrats and others try to out-authenticize one another by moving further and further left. Ocasio-Cortez wants a 70% tax rate? Punked by Ilhan Omar, who wants to jack it to 90%. Both are outflanked by Warren, who apparently believes advocating for outright wealth confiscation will mitigate her tribal deficiencies.

The party’s new breed and their establishment fanboys and fangirls are also on board with a Green New Deal, universal Medicare (and the subsequent elimination of private insurance), tearing down the existing border wall, reparations for black and Native Americans, abolishing ICE, and embracing post-birth abortions.

And yet, as always, Democrats remain fearful too much elucidation of their intentions is their worst enemy. “Democratic leaders agree that candidates need to be careful not to say anything now that could haunt them in the general election, if they become the nominee,” The Washington Post reports.

The haunting is in full swing. As Hanson points out, Democrats are a party “in which over a dozen and often overlapping victim cadres agree that each degree of non-white-maleness adds authenticity and becomes a force multiplier of left-wing radicalism.”

It is a force multiplier whose ultimate destination elicits a question: How could any white, heterosexual, male — routinely vilified as “privileged,” “cisgender,” and “toxic” — still be a member of the Democrat Party, much less one of its presidential candidates?

And what about Christians, who were referred to as “bitter clingers” by the former Democrat president, and saw the Knights of Columbus, the world’s largest Catholic fraternal organization, vilified as a promoter of “extremist” views by two Democrat senators?

Jewish Americans? How many anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, pro-BDS, Louis Farrakhan-supporting Democrats does it take to engender irreparable alienation?

After all, the House failed to pass a resolution condemning anti-Semitism.

Yet the rush to the left remains undimmed. “So many Democratic presidential prospects are now claiming the progressive mantle in advance of the 2020 primaries that liberal leaders are trying to institute a measure of ideological quality control, designed to ensure the party ends up with a nominee who meets their exacting standards,” Politico reports.

Quality control? Exacting standards? Ideological purity with all the attendant fanaticism is more like it. “You don’t just get to say that you’re progressive,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told party donors at a conference last December. She and her followers envision 2020 as a watershed election where they will get a chance to “leverage our power.”

As always, power is all that matters to the American Left. That’s at least partly why DNC chairman Tom Perez announced Fox News would be barred from holding a Democrat Party presidential debate because of its “inappropriate relationship” with President Trump. Apparently 90% negative coverage of the president by the media is insufficient.

The list of initiatives mentioned above is all about the Liberty-crushing empowerment of progressive-controlled government, and their desire to abolish the Electoral College and pack the Supreme Court with four new leftist justices is all about making the arrangement permanent. Yet why are the same Democrats who hid behind a facade of “tolerance” for decades now embracing in-your-face radicalism?

Two reasons: The election of Donald Trump so enraged them they can’t contain themselves, to the point where they’ve made it clear they intend to investigate unprecedented portions of his adult life, and the lives of his associates and family, irrespective of their relationship to his presidency — and irrespective of what the Mueller investigation finds.

In other words, Democrats are embracing the Stalinesque “show me the man and I’ll find you the crime” mindset championed by the Soviet dictator’s secret-police director Lavrenty Beria.

Yet far more important, Democrats think a combination of mass immigration — absent assimilation — and five decades of indoctrination-based education, that produced legions of Americans united solely by the idea they live in an inherently flawed nation needing radical transformation, has reached critical mass.

Don’t bet on it. “Progressives are like a worn rope being pulling apart at both ends,” Hanson states. “At one end, there is an effort to radicalize prior radicalization, and on the other end victimhood is heading toward parody.”

Not parody. Self-inflicted political irrelevancy.