No different result

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.” That quotation, once attributed to Euripedes, must comfort those of us — and the pollsters tell us our numbers have lately been on the increase — who have cautiously allowed ourselves to believe that America, at least, if not the Western world, has got back on “the right track” since January 20th. For even as the good news has come rolling in, about immigration, the economy, the regulatory burden, the so-called “trade war,” the Iranian threat and the decline of “wokeism” — not to mention the faint glimmer of hope that justice might eventually be done for the authors of the “Russiagate” hoax — day by day the prophecies of doom and the calls for revolution by the media’s champions of the Biden era status quo have only grown more strident.

Wikipedia tells us that, although the above quotation is unattested in Euripedes, there is a near equivalent in Sophocles that seems even more apposite today: “Evil appears as good in the minds of those whom God leads to destruction.” That could count as a pithier version of what I was trying to convey in this space last spring in three articles under the heading of “The Culture of Innocence” (see The New Criterion of April, May and June, 2025). The dominant media culture would translate certain classes of criminals, including (especially) illegal aliens, as innocent victims of the evil Trump regime, against which their and their left-wing allies’ revolt is accordingly justified.

For a while this summer, that revolt in California looked like replaying the events of May-June 2020 when, as you will no doubt remember, incipient revolution came to the streets of urban America over mostly unavailing attempts to enforce the law of the land against the land’s privileged class of holy innocents. Then the revolutionary casus belli was the death of a career criminal, George Floyd, in police custody, which brought his BLM and Antifa acolytes into the streets; now it was the newly persecuted illegal aliens who had attained the self-proclaimed sanctuary of California and whom the federal authorities had come to think California was better off without.

In their cause and in response to raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, protestors erupted into the streets of Los Angeles, many of them waving Mexican flags as if to confirm that their national loyalies lay with a foreign country out of which, nevertheless, they were desperate to remain. The media and Democratic apologists for the anti-ICE rioters — including Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — threw in their lot with the rioters as if to show that, thirty years on, the late Christopher Lasch’s “Revolt of the Elites” had finally gone kinetic.

On the other side of the country at about the same time, a Muslim named Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary election as the party’s nominee for mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the world outside Israel on a platform demanding, among several other revolutionary projects, to “Globalize the Intifada” — the Intifada, that is, better known to its critics as the rape, torture and murder of Jews. Mr Mamdani, too, is proposing to operate within the country’s institutional structure only with the purpose of destroying it. I’d like to think that he himself is being led to destruction, according to Sophocles’s dictum, by his God or gods, but it will come as no surprise to anyone if there prove to be enough crazy people in New York to elect him mayor, come November.

In the rest of thc country such insanity has got to be a harder sell, which is why Democratic soul-searching in the wake of last year’s defeats has taken on the bizarre cast that it has. Governor Newsom is far from being the only Democrat who, having briefly flirted with moderation and common sense in the wake of the initial policy Blitzkrieg of the Trump administration — he is reported to have said that he thought it just possibly “unfair” for men to be allowed to compete in women’s sports — has since doubled down on the woke madness of the Biden years, as well as the Trump hatred which, as the principal plank in the Democrats’ platform, so signally failed to move the country at the last election.

Even the far-left Nation magazine must have felt vague intimations of what’s wrong with the party’s imperviousness to experience when it headlined: “The Democratic Party Remains Committed to Learning Nothing From Its 2024 Defeat.” Of course the author of the report which followed, Jeet Heer, had no fault to find with extravagant monsterings of the president or his supporters and presumably doesn’t think that such demonization has ever put off moderate Democratic voters. Nor did he have anything positive to say about the Trump campaign — anything that the Democrats might learn from or want to try themselves next time. He mentions “economic populism” (perhaps like Mr Mamdani’s version of it) but obviously doesn’t have any time for the Trump version. The only thing he is prepared to give Trump credit for is purging the Romney leftovers from the failed 2012 campaign.

Others, such as Michael Baharaeen of UnHerd took a different view.

Over the weekend, the New York Times hinted that the Democratic National Committee’s autopsy may finally be coming out soon, and the details of the paper’s reporting suggest that the party’s effort at self-examination is slated to fall well short. The biggest takeaway was that the report is expected to avoid any reflection on the role played by Joe Biden’s decision to run, his refusal to drop out sooner, and the party’s choice to replace him with Kamala Harris. There is also little indication that Democrats plan to reckon with strategic decisions the Harris campaign made, including framing the election as a choice between democracy and fascism. While looking forward is of course an important part of this process, it’s hard to see how a party can do this in an informed manner if it refuses to address what were obviously consequential decisions.

Cal Thomas wrote a column with almost exactly the same title as Mr Baharaeen’s: “Democrats conduct political autopsy but ignore the real cause of death.”

Well, it’s what they do, isn’t it? No matter how ruinous the mistake or misapprehension to the ideologue himself, it can never be acknowledged as such without ruin to the ideology to which he has pinned all his hopes and his very identity. So James Carville, one of the pioneers in recent times of politics-as-war, wrote for The New York Times what the paper advertised as “My Fix for the Confused and Leaderless Democrats.” And what do you suppose this “fix” was? After first admitting that “The Democratic Party is in shambles,” he confidently predicted that the deep divisions in the party could be papered over if only it could return to campaigning on a platform of undoing all that the president has done. In other words, the party’s only salvation continues to be all Trump-hatred, all the time.

Never was the old definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result better exampled. Yet programmatic opposition to everything Mr Trump does just because it is he that does it still has an undeniable constituency in the media and in suicidally Democratic states like New York and California. Mr Carville is no fan of candidate Mamdani, but he is hardly alone in his willingness to work with him if it means beating Mr Trump and his party in the 2026 mid-term elections. In a now-notorious interview with the PBS “NewsHour” DNC Chairman Ken Martin dismissed any concern about globalizing the intifada with Mr Mamdani by saying:

You know, there’s no candidate in this party that I agree 100% of the time with, to be honest with you. There’s things that I don’t agree with Mamdani that he said. But at the end of the day, I always believe, as a Democratic Party chair in Minnesota for the last 14 years, and now the chair of the DNC, that you win through addition. You win by bringing people into your coalition. We have conservative Democrats. We have centrist Democrats. We have labor progressives like me. And we have this new brand of Democrat, which is the leftist. And we win by bringing people into that coalition. And at the end of the day, for me, that’s the type of party we’re going to lead. We are a big-tent party. Yes, it leads to dissent and debate, and there’s differences of opinions on a whole host of issues. But we should celebrate that as a party and recognize, at the end of the day, we’re better because of it.

There, in a nutshell, you have today’s Democratic party, in which dyed-in-the-wool deep staters and socialist revolutionaries, apostles of institutional capture and destroyers of institutions, Jews and Jew-haters are all united by one thing and one thing only, which is their common hatred of Mr Trump and all his works. They no longer even bother to pretend to have anything positive, anything of their own, as a party, to offer to voters — apart from the party’s blessing on whatever any fringe lunatic of the Mamdani stripe may take it into his head to promise the faithful. The big tent affords no room for any sense of the party that’s common to all, any more than it does for common sense.

No wonder the Democrats are enjoying their lowest approval rating in 35 years. It’s not, however, all good news for Republicans. Thirty-five years ago the Cold War was ending, the economy was booming and George Bush Sr looked unbeatable in 1992. But Bill Clinton, whatever his faults, at least didn’t promise to undo all that the Reagan-Bush administration had accomplished, as Mr Carville ought to remember if anyone does, and he was able to learn something from three successive Democratic defeats. The party of Messrs Carville and Martin and Newsom has not only learned nothing, it is determined to go on learning nothing for as long as it takes to establish that they are now and forever on the side of the angels and Mr Trump the devil incarnate.

One is driven to the conclusion that, once the decision of the Democrats’ dominant progressive faction was taken to wage war à outrance on Mr Trump and all his works, there could be no going back, no second-guessing, no admission even of error, let alone wrong-doing, even if such persistence in folly meant the ruin of the progressive project itself. And the big story of the summer for everyone but the progressives, helps us to pin down the exact moment when that decision was made. And who made it.

Revelations from John Ratcliffe of the CIA, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence and a report of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence kept under wraps at the CIA until it was ordered to be released by President Trump in July all help to make clear the sequence of events in late 2016 and early 2017. On December 9th, 2016, a CIA finding that “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure” was omitted from the President’s Daily Briefing at the instance of an unnamed “senior official” in the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

The same day, an e-mail on what was described as “Russia Election Meddling” went out from Mr Clapper to members of President Obama’s National Security Principals Committee demanding a new assessment “per the President’s request,” clearly suggesting what that assessment was expected to show. This was promptly leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post who both took the hint that senior intelligence officials of the outgoing administration had reason to believe that there had been such meddling.

The result was the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 6th, 2017 in which John Brennan concluded, over the objections of at least two of his own, hand-picked CIA colleagues that Vladimir Putin “developed a clear preference” for the election of Donald Trump and “aspired to help his chances of victory” — leaving open to speculation the means by which this aspiration might have been realized. Also at Mr Brennan’s insistence, the discredited Steele dossier was included as an “Annex” to the assessment, described as “Additional Reporting from an FBI Source on Russian Influence Efforts.”

Such clearly improper behavior, whether or not it qualifies as criminal or even, as Mr Trump has suggested, treasonous, seems to me to have resulted from the ideological certainty of those who, accustomed to thinking of themselves as being “on the right side of history,” couldn’t believe they had lost to such as the Bad Orange Man without some dirty work at the crossroads by the latter, or by his agents in the Kremlin. They didn’t yet know what it was but were confident from the beginning that it would be turned up by the Mueller investigation — which explains their incredulity when the Mueller investigators failed to find any such thing.

Even now, even after this summer’s cascade of revelations from the files of the nation’s intelligence services, I know of no prominent Democrat or media analyst who spent years promoting the “collusion” narrative who has admitted he was wrong, even to the extent of having made an honest mistake. Neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times has returned its Pulitzer Prize, nor has the Pulitzer Committee asked to have it back. Here’s how typical Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Charlie Savage of the Times begins his report on the release of these intelligence records:

The Trump administration in recent weeks has released a series of reports intended to undermine the conclusion reached by intelligence agencies before President Trump’s first term that Russia had favored his candidacy in 2016 and sought to improve his chances of winning. That assessment, an unclassified version of which was made public in January 2017, has long infuriated Mr. Trump. In disclosing the reports, he and his team are proclaiming that President Barack Obama and his team torqued the intelligence analysis process to deliberately discredit Mr. Trump’s election. The administration has coupled that case with overheated and attention-grabbing claims. Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Obama of treason, and his top officials have made criminal referrals about national security officials under Mr. Obama — all as the administration is trying to distract supporters who are angry about its broken promise to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“Intended to undermine the conclusion reached by intelligence agencies”? You or I might think that the intelligence agencies had undermined, at the president’s command, their own conclusions, and that President Obama’s “torquing” of the intelligence to discredit Mr Trump could no longer be in doubt, whatever “attention-grabbing claims” might be made about it. But we already know not to expect any such acknowledgment of the obvious from the media or their Democratic dependents — especially now that they’ve got Russian Collusion 2.0 all teed up in the form of the equally mythical “Jeffrey Epstein files.” Talk about distraction!