DAVID MARCUS: The age of the Democratic Party blocking fringe outsiders is officially over
There were two events on Tuesday that offered more proof of a national Democratic Party establishment that has lost control: One was a meeting, one an election, and both are harbingers of real danger on the American left.
The meeting took place in Washington, D.C., between the presumptive Maine Democratic Senate nominee, the Nazi tattoed, serial sexter Graham Platner, and members of his party in that body.
Some, mostly through wishcasting, thought this would be the end of the alleged oysters farmer’s run. Instead, it was a coronation, as was predicted in this column last week.
A decade ago, one phone call from a party leader could have ended Platner’s run, but those days are gone. Today, the Democratic Socialists of America will no longer allow it.
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Here is what brave Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had to say about the scandal-ridden candidate: "I met with Graham Platner today. We’re going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate."
No, if, ands or buts.
This was echoed by almost every smiling Democrat leaving the meeting. There will be no last-minute coup to oust the socialist. Instead, the party is pretending to be one big happy family.
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That, as they say, is that, and the reason for it is clear. Schumer and the grand poobahs of the party simply no longer have any leverage over the socialist candidates storming their keep.
Platner doesn’t need establishment endorsements. He has Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and commie podcaster Hasan Pike. He doesn’t need establishment money, as there are progressive billionaires more than happy to donate. Even the left-leaning media, always in lockstep with the establishment, have little influence over voters these days.
As in Maine, in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, the Democratic Party elites were unable to fend off the radical Muslim (and socialist) candidate Adam Hamawy, who not only testified on behalf of the terrorist behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, but also volunteered for an al Qaeda-linked group in Eastern Europe.
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At best here, the Democratic primary voters in the Garden State are trying to send a terrorist sympathizer to the halls of Congress. At worst, he is just a flat-out terrorist.
At this point, Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who has been sounding the alarm about the craziness overtaking his party, isn’t just on an island. He’s on a whole different planet.
Put bluntly, the far-left socialist extremists, with their Nazi and radical Islamic ties, are outflanking, often outspending, and absolutely outperforming the terrified geriatric leadership of the party.
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It’s become such a party of lunatics that, among the only partial wins the establishment notched Tuesday, in the primary to replace former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in California’s 11th District, was a weak first-place finish for Scott Wiener, himself a leftist lunatic, now headed to a runoff.
Wiener thinks that putting people on sex offender lists after sexual crimes is somehow anti-gay and would trans your toddler at the drop of a hat. But among his opponents was the former chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Democratic Socialists of America star Saikat Chakrabarti, who finished in third, failing to make the runoff.
Even this seeming victory is hollow, though. Pelosi endorsed Wiener just two years after she wielded the power to tell then-President Joe Biden that his career was over. Today, she can’t get the candidate she endorsed in her own district over 50%.
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This realignment of Democratic Party power, away from the old-school, Ivy League establishment, into the hands of the socialists, the radical Muslims and the guys with Nazi tats, will have profound implications for the 2028 presidential race.
In the last two competitive Democratic Party primary cycles, 2016 and 2020, Bernie Sanders was iced out by party leadership. Remember how, in 2020, after Biden’s surprise win in South Carolina, all the non-socialist candidates suddenly dropped out? That is how it used to work.
A decade ago, the Republican Party was overtaken by Donald Trump, and the GOP establishment was left like Wile E. Coyote frantically running in the air, unaware it was already over the cliff.
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But Trump was part of something much bigger. In fact, he had been a member of the Reform Party, founded by H. Ross Perot in his historic 1992 third-party run and later championed by Pat Buchanan. This was a long-running populist ascendency.
Today, it is the Democratic Party establishment losing touch and losing power, seeing their neoliberalism fade next to leftist populism, a populism of wealth redistribution, antisemitism and, to quote Trump, "Trans for everybody."
Biden was fond of saying that today’s GOP is not "the Republican Party of your grandfather." Well, I have some news for you, Grandpa Joe: The socialist Democratic Party you left behind and the socialist barbarians you have left at the gates don’t look a whole lot like the party that made Bill Clinton president, either.
And likely, it never will again.