Политический аналитик предупреждает о неизбежном крахе Демократической партии США из-за радикализации и отрыва от электората

Both Yogi Berra and the great physicist Niels Bohr are credited with saying that "predictions are hard, especially about the future." Currently, much of America is freaking out over the Marxist takeover of the Democratic Party, but for anyone who paid attention, this wasn't hard to foresee. It has been coming for generations. If the party elders had not bent the rules so ruthlessly, Bernie Sanders and his DSA gang would have taken over years ago. The establishment media has been loath to admit any of this was happening, so they have only recently reported it. But make no mistake, massive political realignment is coming for the Democrats. For most of the 20th century, the Democrats presented a flexible liberal centrism that won a lot of elections and papered over the fractured nature of their coalition. This was in contrast to the Republican creed of limited government, the rule of law, and strong defense ideas, dating back to Lincoln himself. The Democrats were seen as more nimble in the face of new challenges. But eventually they had no answers for the Cold War or the out-of-control inflation economy of the 1970s. Later Presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were talented but facile, and left no lasting principles. The party of government only had one idea in the end -- more government -- and far-left activists became the only people bringing energy to the party. This took a long time to sink in, however, because of old voting habits. Eventually people had to deal with current political trends. For decades, Michael Barone's “Almanac of American Politics” series charted this movement. He found that in the 1970s, most American counties voted the same way they did a hundred years earlier. By the 1990s, though, demographic and economic changes were profound. Democrats benefited from increasing Hispanic immigration in many cities. But at the same time, the collapse of private-sector labor unions, automation, and the service economy ended the New Deal blue-collar labor era, and millions of Americans moved to the South for new opportunities. At the end of WWII, 34% of American workers were in a private-sector labor union. Today, it’s less than 6%. Dangerous, back-breaking jobs are now few. Almost all careers today are white-collar and require a lot of training, as do the remaining blue-collar jobs. Workers today see unions as leeches taking a big chunk of their pay for no good end. The decline of unions in many places also meant the end of an organized Democrat Party. Vigo County, Indiana, is a great example. Up until 2020, it had voted for every winning presidential candidate since WWII. But when its big GM plant closed, sending the UAW packing, it started voting like every other 84% white, Midwestern locale. Sure, labor unions, public and private, still have lots of soft money to spend, but they no longer have relevance with many voters. Even more important than the decline of labor unions has been the evaporation of Mainline Protestantism. Once America's dominant religious movement, home to people of all regions and political parties, the Social Gospel movement pushed these churches to the political left. Eventually, characters like William Sloane Coffin took over and emptied out the pews in the 1970s in a flurry of anti-Americanism and waving of Pride flags. A lot of their congregants went elsewhere, but white Democrats all but abandoned attending any church. The American college campus was also once a place where serious liberals might advance society, but much of academia today is just a laughingstock of race and sex grievance. If one isn't going into the hard sciences or engineering, the trend today is to save money and aggravation with an online degree or skip the whole thing entirely, like Charlie Kirk. Back in 2003, former Georgia governor Zell Miller wrote a book -- A National Party No More, explaining how the Democrats were woefully out of touch with the average American. His insights were anticipated even earlier by another conservative Democrat, the demographer Ben Wattenberg, who wrote several books, such as The Real Majority, way back in the 1970s. He forecast that the Democrats were heading into disaster if they could not stick close to the political center. But Democrats gave up on homeowners, small business, and churchgoing Americans. Worst of all is the deleterious effect of extremist Muslim Democrats. Some Muslims -- those from the Balkans, or the Kurds, like the great Enes Kanter Freedom, fit well in America. They share, as Pres. Lincoln said, "the moral sentiment" of the Founding Fathers. Those from Somalia and Palestine, though, are often Jew-hating grifters. Those from South Asia tend to be Marxists, from a culture where "anti-colonialism" has long combined communism with Islamism. And it is these Muslims who have learned to game affirmative action and DEI to fill so many positions at elite universities, like Mayor Mamdani's father. New York City may even now have more Muslims than Jews, But this anti-free market, anti-Jewish thinking comes with quite a cost. Historically, there were as many or more Democrats on Wall Street than Republicans. Democrats regularly nominated Wall Street titans for President -- like Samuel Tilden and John W. Davis or their sons, like John F. Kennedy. While New York's Jews have been the financial backbone of the Democratic Party since the Civil War, when August Belmont, Sr. served a record 12 years as chairman of the DNC. But these days, even the most stubborn Jewish donors, like Wall Street's Bill Ackman, understand they are not wanted and no longer support the party. That leaves a big hole in the DNC's finances. Something all the soft money from foundations and public unions cannot quite overcome. Nor does it address the Democrats' brain drain problem. Their smartest activists were often American Jews in the law and the media, like Julien Epstein, who have left the party. What does the future hold? If the past is any indication, once a political party loses touch with normal voters, there is no turning back. Like private-sector unions and the liberal Protestant churches that have collapsed, the Democrats no longer have anything compelling to offer working people. Just free stuff for illegal immigrants. But uniquely, America's two parties are a kind of duopoly. For legal and practical reasons, it is very hard for any third party to compete with or replace either of the current parties. So, the Democrats will still be around for a while, will win election years by capturing the "protest vote," and will rely on the inertia of their loyal voters. Those who have not yet figured out that the Democrats of today are nothing like what they were even a few decades ago. Much less in the era of Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson, when liberals made their reputations fighting Communists, not joining with them. But they will continue to get smaller, nuttier, and more irrelevant. Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, KY.