By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host
Karl Rove remarked on Fox News that when Congressman and Democrat Party presidential candidate John Delaney took the stage at the California Democratic Convention, and then was booed when he criticized socialized medicine (“Medicare for all” is the current catch phrase), it revealed a divide among Democrats as we approach the 2020 Presidential Election season. Both Delaney, and former Colorado Governor Hickenlooper, were booed for denouncing socialism, even though they “chose their words carefully and intentionally.”
Rove was essentially saying that now there are two Democrat Parties. One yearns for the more fundamental and traditional party that moves toward the center when the leftwing air gets too thick, and the other is the extreme socialist version nurtured by the Democrats in our education system and by Hollywood. The socialists have now come of age, and they are a significant voice in a party that is trying to cope with the kind of change they thought they had hoped for.
I believe the divide in the party largely runs along geographical lines. In other words, if the convention had been held by the Kansas Democratic Party, or the Georgia Democratic Party, I don’t think the vitriol and audible discontent would have glowed so brightly. When I tell people I am from California, even out-of-state Democrats quickly quip, “Ah, you mean Kommiefornia?”
I tell my fellow Californians all the time, when the doom and gloom fears begin to percolate, remember that the rest of the country is nothing like California (except maybe for New York City, Chicago, and a few neighborhoods in a handful of large cities).
This is, and will be, a large concern for the national party. The fringe is no longer the fringe. The socialists have now multiplied into a faction large enough to be a factor in the direction that will be taken by the Democrat Party. While they are for the most part still confined to college campuses, MSNBC, CNN, Hollywood, San Francisco, the California Coast, and the three largest population centers in the country, the reality is that like a cancer, they are growing and spreading. The old mantra of only injecting socialism a little at a time so that the voters won’t realize that what is going on is truly Marxist has gone out the window. The socialist rooster has come home to roost, and the Democrats had hoped that when that day came America would be ready for it. And while the Millennials are more than happy to proclaim by more than 50% that they think there is nothing wrong with socialism, the voters older than they are, and the younger generation behind them, are not exactly in the same mindset.
The socialist revolution has come to America, but there aren’t enough revolutionaries to carry it out.
Meanwhile, President Trump is winning over an ever-growing percentage of Hispanics and Blacks, which leaves the Democrats with the Millennials beating the socialist drum, the old guard refusing to go to that extreme, and a small group of newly protected groups (homosexuals and transsexuals) even beginning to believe things are getting a little ridiculous.
As a result, many of them have decided to #walkaway.
Could we be seeing the beginning of the Democrat Party going the way of the Whigs? Could we see a great divide, and an era of Republican control that lasts decades?
The radicals will take to the streets before they let that happen. And, that’s my fear. I believe the radical extreme wing of the Democrat Party houses a faction that is just itching to launch a campaign of blood in the streets.
Funny thing is, they were saying the same thing about the Tea Party only a decade ago.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
