The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: The Democrat Party is 'Gone Forever'

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

The traditional Democrat Party of the last century has been systematically replaced by a radical Jacobin movement that seeks the fundamental transformation of Western civilization. This new faction mirrors the French Revolution’s extremists by toppling statues, weaponizing race through DEI, and showing open disdain for national borders. From billionaire socialists to the rejection of law and order, the modern Left has abandoned the working class in favor of a revolutionary agenda that endangers the very foundations of the American Republic, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.” 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠  Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027  👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications:  https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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For less, give AncestryDNA. Visit Ancestry.ca. Today. Offer ends May 10th. Terms apply. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for The Daily Signal. We talk about the Democratic Party as if it's the Democratic Party of, say, the last century. We know what that Democratic Party was. It believed in an equality of result.

It was not socialist or Marxist for the most part. It just believed in big government and good and generous entitlements, supportive unions. It had thrown off its racist pedigree for a century, and by the 1960s it was the forefront of civil rights, for the most part, by isolating the Democratic segregationist in the South. So there was a positive role to play for the Democratic Party, but there is no more Democratic Party. There's the name Democrat Party or Democratic. People on the right tend to prefer the word Democrat Party, people on the left Democratic, because They feel it is truly a democratic operation. But it's really a Jacobin party.

Jacobin refers to a group of radicals that hijacked the French Revolution of 1789. And they met in a Dominican monastery that was called the Jacobin. And they took that name. And they thought that a constitutional monarchy with a parliament, as was transpiring in Britain earlier, was a sellout to the revolution. So they wanted to get rid of the kings, the monarchy, and they attacked organized religion. They executed people with the guillotine, well over 2000. They were most infamous for the reign of terror, where they accused almost anybody of being a counter-revolutionary who was to the right of them,

until finally the Robes-Pierre brothers themselves suffered a counter-revolution brought by the Thermidors, and they were eliminated. But they were a very radical, violent group, and they're very similar to the Democratic Party. They thought the world was reinvented when they came on, a year zero, just like the 16-19 idea. They toppled statues. They went after organized religion. They destroyed property. They were at war with what they called the bourgeoisie and the rich, and they wanted a radical redistribution of property. They believed in secularism.

They thought that a divine being, Ratio, was the true God. In other words, they were radical humanist that did not believe in a higher power. And if you look at what the Democratic Party has become, this new Jacobin organization doesn't believe, for example, in borders at all. Now, Alejandro Mallorcas may have said the border is secure, but what he really meant, there is no border. because 10 to 12 million people, including 500,000 criminals, just marched across into the United States as part of a Jacobin idea of altering the demography. And we do have now 53 million people who weren't born in the United States of all legal status and illegal statuses. And 16 percent, a new record of the United States population was not born in the United States.

They didn't believe in fossil fuels and had their agenda been actualized to its full extent. dent, given what's happened in the world today with the scarcity of oil, we would be broke. It's only the efforts of conservatives, and Donald Trump in particular, that got us up to 14 million barrels. But they didn't believe that they had an almost religious ideology, the Algorism, the John Kerryism, that said that the United States has to suppress, if not eliminate fossil fuels why China and India were building coal plants each month. They had this, strange cultural agenda like the Jacobins in France, that was a rejection of all prior norms and traditions. The Democrats don't believe that, as Bill Clinton said, that abortion should be

rare and safe, but legal. They believe on abortion on demand up to the moment of birth. In fact, if you look at the Democratic Convention manifesto in 1992 and 1996 on immigration, on trying violent 17-year-olds as felons, as balancing the budget. Today, the Jacobins would call that Democratic Party just three decades ago racist or fascist. Another element of the Jacobins is that this DEI, they have replaced class by race, and they're fixated on race, antithetical to Martin Luther King's dream that the content of our character and not the color of our skin would matter. They're a violent party. When Donald Trump was almost killed three times, Democrats rushed to social media and either said that Donald Trump had staged those near-death experiences, or they lamented the fact that the three shooters had missed their target.

When you see ICE, the ICE demonstrations are bizarre. You have grown adults, many of them, their 60s and 70s, and they are mocking law enforcement officers that are trying to enforce the law. They stick plastic fallacies in their face. They throw excrement out and they throw bottled water at them. They try to stop the enforcement of federal immigration law. Jacobin Democrats, governors, senators, they all have created 600 sanctuary cities in the spirit of the old confederacy that says federal law does not apply to any of these places, that the state itself can pick and choose which federal laws it chooses to obey. Another thing that, so they're violent as well.

Besides the three attempts on Donald Trump, we had the execution, really, the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a lunatic that was praised by the Jacobins. And of course, we've had the House leadership a few years ago, was playing baseball in Washington, D.C., and was almost taken out by James Hodgkinson, another former Bernie Sanders aide. The final thing is weird about the Jacobins. Rose Pierre's brothers and their cohort were wealthy people, highly educated, products of the French aristocracy and the professional classes. So is the new Jacobin Democratic Party. If the Republicans have ostracized Nick Fuentes for his extremist and repugnant views, the Democrats have welcomed Hassan Piker.

He's this influencer who poses as a socialist communist and a man of the people, but in fact, his parents are multi-millionaires. He's a multi-millionaire. He drives a Porsche, and he acts as if he's on the barricades enacting a communist revolution. I say that because he said there's going to have to be blood in the streets. He has praised Luigi Mangione for killing the killing the... Ryan Thompson, the head of United Health Corporation, said that was a social murder, that socialist like himself can pick enemies of the people, no trial, no cross-examination, just name them as arbitrary enemies and then execute them with impunity.

Is anybody in the Jacobin Party object to that? No, he's an iconic hero. He was at Stanford University lately. He was at Harvard. He's touring all the major universities where he's given a rousing welcome by the new Jacobins. You look at Zoran Mondami. He's a Jacobin. He's an open, you know, pro-Hamas mayor.

He's anti-Semitic in the way that he's treated Jews. He's a socialist or worse. He's trying to tax the wealthy into making them leave New York. Recently at a research hospital that Ken Griffin, the billionaire had generously endowed with $400 million, these Jacobin organizations, protested why young kids were being treated for cancer inside the hospital, as if they'd like to shut that down. And Mondami, of course, was born to millionaire parents in Uganda. His family

are multimillionaires, endowed professor as a father, subsidized filmmaker as a mother. Then we get to Ilyan Omar. She can't decide how much she's worth. She says on one day she's worth $30 million. Next day, she says it was all a mistake when people point out her apocracies. We have AOC and Bernie Sanders, the two socialists flying to rallies on private jets. That's typical Jacobinism. So let me just conclude. We talk about a Democratic Party as if it's the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton. It doesn't exist. It's gone. It's gone forever. What has replaced it is a radical, radical agenda that wants to remake the United States into a social welfare state and to completely redirect the course of

Western civilization, it doesn't like the United States, the Jacobin Party. At least it says it likes the United States, but not the United States that was envisioned by the father and the following 250 years. They feel, as Barack Obama had said, that they want to fundamentally transform America, and they just might. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hansen for this. Daily Signal.

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