Three years ago, most of us thought it would be impossible for the Democrats to find a candidate more liberal than Hillary Clinton. Today, there are 20. "It's not an illusion," Politico's John Harris warns, "The party is presenting its most liberal face since the 1970s." Or, as some would say, ever.
The party that couldn't seem to connect with everyday Americans in 2016 has even less in common with them now -- a fact they seem intent on proving with extreme lurches on immigration, climate change, transgenderism, and life. These days, old-school Democrats can't even take comfort in Joe Biden, who played centrist to Barack Obama's radical. A few weeks into his candidacy, the former veep shed his "moderate" label faster than most people can say "Hyde amendment" -- starting a sprint to the Left that even the media doesn't understand.
Ahead of tonight's debate, reporters at McClatchy are warning viewers that if they're tuning in to see the Joe Biden they used to know, they're wasting their time. The people who thought the affable 76-year-old was somehow the "voice of ideological restraint" is in for a rude awakening. "The 2020 Democratic frontrunner's emerging policy agenda is anything but moderate -- at least compared to the party's last presidential nominee... Biden has either exponentially increased the scope of what Clinton proposed or advocated for new ideas that most Democrats would have up until recently considered fringe," the outlet argues. "Taken as a whole," Alex Roarty writes, "Biden's policy platform represents a significant shift from Clinton's."
Who could have believed that just a handful of years ago, when Americans thought taxpayer-funded abortion was as extreme as it gets? That almost seems tame now, in a party advocating the killing of perfectly healthy newborns. The Democratic candidates are so many light years away from normalcy that it made news when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) suggested she might be against late-term abortions. Three years ago, that wouldn't have made her an outlier. But in today's field, she stands alone.
That may be the only place she does. Off the campaign trail, Gabbard has plenty of company -- as in 79 percent of the American people. Sixty-six percent are the voters Democrats call their own: "pro-choicers." The other campaigns, meanwhile, raced to explain how tolerant they are of dismembering innocent babies. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Pete Buttigieg, and Beto O'Rourke tried to out-radical each other, insisting that killing a child on its birth day is all about "personal decisions" and "women's bodies." When Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) were asked, they didn't respond. But they didn't need to. Every one of them is on the Senate record fighting for legal infanticide.
And it's not just basic human decency that's taking a hit. On nearly every major issue, this unapologetic extremism is having a devastating effect. There's a candidate lobbying for legal prostitution. Another one showing up at RuPaul's DragCon. One former cabinet official even lobbied for taxpayer-funded abortion for men. The question isn't if Democrats are moving Left. The question is how much farther they can go. When candidates like Biden are this far off the reservation, it "just how much -- and how rapidly -- the Democratic Party has changed in the three years since Clinton was its standard bearer," Roarty points out.
Matt Bennett, one of the Left's own at think tank Third Way, agrees. "There's no doubt," he says with a mixture of concern and awareness, "...our party has moved to the Left. You'd have to be insane to deny it." Not as insane as the party bosses who think they can win with an agenda that turns our borders into trampled welcome mats and our children into garbage. USA Today tells the 2020 Democrats not to "fret about electability." Don't worry. Based on this agenda, they aren't.
