Leftist Fury Boils Over as Democrats Lose Power, Seek Confrontation

The Democratic Party establishment has been utterly discredited by four years under the Biden administration. While some of its party leaders and strategists have made a short-lived effort to rhetorically move to the “center,” the base of the party seems to be having nothing of it.

It wants “blood,” not abundance.

At least, that’s what a recent Axios report suggested.

“At town halls in their districts and in one-on-one meetings with constituents and activists, Democratic members of Congress are facing a growing thrum of demands to break the rules, fight dirty—and not be afraid to get hurt,” Axios reported.

Axios noted that many House Democrats have said that “they see a growing anger among their base that has, in some cases, morphed into a disregard for American institutions, political traditions and even the rule of law.”

Some of the quotes in the Axios piece, all anonymous of course, are downright disturbing.

“Our own base is telling us that what we’re doing is not good enough … [that] there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public,” one House Democrat apparently said.

“I actually said in a meeting, ‘When they light a fire, my thought is to grab an extinguisher,’” another House Democrat said, according to Axios. “And someone at the table said, ‘Have you tried gasoline?’”

The story became even more ominous when just a short time later news broke that 10 people had been arrested and charged in connection with a terrorist attack at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Texas on the Fourth of July.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

The Axios report certainly could just be a planted story by House Democrats trying to justify their antics and impotence. But I do think it’s reflective of the state of the American Left and the direction Democrats are likely to take in the immediate future.

Left Out of Power

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House is undeniably an inflection point for the United States, more so than his first victory in 2016. When Democrats rode what remained of President Joe Biden into power in 2020, the country was still gripped by the Great Awokening, the George Floyd riots, and was under widespread COVID-19 lockdowns.

Even though Biden won by the narrowest of margins and wasn’t even particularly popular with the Democrat base, he represented a return to the mid-2010s era of Obama, of institutions (wholly co-opted by the Left), of an end to populism in all forms.

The Establishment had struck back.

But then the reality of governing hit. It turns out an autopen president is wholly unprepared to handle the demands of the job in a time of crisis. The Left used its shallow political victory to foist what turned out to be a deeply popular agenda on America. Elite institutions followed suit—assuming this was the way of the future—and in some cases wholly discredited themselves.

The country fell into a malaise deeper than even the late-1970s Jimmy Carter gloom.

Then, after trying to literally imprison a former president, the dam broke. The entire country shifted to the right. Tech titans were lifting weights, abolishing DEI, and saying that mean Democrats made them censor Americans. Movies and entertainment produced during the Awokening became money-losing jokes. Corporations were scraping references to race-based hiring from their websites.

Trump spent the first days of his presidency seriously striking at the nodes of entrenched left-wing power in the bureaucracy and reversing the Biden administration’s decision to flood the country with millions of illegal aliens.

Now that Trump is riding a high of political success, both foreign and domestic, the Left is seething and looking for answers. They aren’t used to being this powerless. The institutions they’ve relied on for so long to enforce their dogmas have lost their old strength. Their demands are ignored and mocked. Their political leaders, desperate for relevance, have made appeals to moderates and conservatives instead of them.

This has all been deeply and existentially dismaying to people used to getting their way.

Democrat pride in America has sunk to new lows as they realize the country is no longer theirs to control. So where do they go from here?

Mamdani, Lander, and Luigi

As the Axios story noted, the Left’s base doesn’t want anything like the “triangulation” of Democrats in the 1990s who co-opted some of the Right’s Reaganite message and held onto power in a more conservative era. It wants maximum confrontation. It wants to revive the feeling of revolution, of being on the right side of history.

So, it is embracing almost cartoonish post-colonial socialists like New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a young millennial who proudly embraces virtually every bad leftist idea since the French Revolution. It is rallying behind a peak member of the Howard Zinn generation.

The college campus activist class sees the Democrat establishment weakening and it is taking its shot to fully topple it.

Democrat base voters, many of them who imagine that in fighting Trump and Republicans they are stopping Adolf Hitler and Darth Vader, want spectacle from their political leaders. Hence, the cringeworthy stunts from politicians like New York Comptroller Brad Lander and California Sen. Alex Padilla. I’m guessing we are going to see a lot of embarrassing behavior like this in the coming years. Democrats know their base craves victimhood.

I suspect most of the “blood” being demanded by Democrat base voters is of this variety. Dumb stunts carried out by theater kid politicians to simulate danger and fighting the “man.” This is “doing something.”

Yet, there is undeniably a fringe that’s willing to do more. There are the Luigi Mangione types who may decide that in an era in which their ideas have been rejected, they will take matters into their own hands and murder those who disagree with them. Some on the bloodthirsty Left have shamefully glamorized these actions.

These trends are unmistakable. Yet only a handful of Democrat leaders have been willing to take a stand against the current within their own party. Most seemed resigned to the party’s move leftward or are actively encouraging it.

Many seem to think that is the way forward for the Democratic Party, and maybe it is in a certain way.

But we shouldn’t be complacent to the reality that if a movement like that ever does fully take power, the reality will first be blood, then tyranny. All the repressive actions of the Biden administration will be doubled down on and magnified. On that, we should take the LARPing leftists seriously.

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