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It wasn’t the plan and it wasn’t smooth. But when the cover-up of President Joe Biden’s physical infirmity fell apart, the left wing of the Democratic Party, led by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama and supported by the American Left’s vast “dark money,” carried out a coup. Out with Joe and in with Kamala. The out-of-power Clinton clique tried to prop up Biden but to no avail. The American Left is nothing if it isn’t ruthless in its drive for political power.
The Democratic Party is lurching left, just as it did in 1984. That year the Democrats gathered for their convention in San Francisco; this year it will be in Chicago. But no matter the city, the leftist pull of the Party’s power centers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Manhattan and the Beltway is never out of power within the party, though it prefers to pretend that there are moderates in the leadership.
With the nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris, the American Left will openly and inarguably be at the controls. Then candidate Barack Obama pretended on 2008 to be a centrist, but he governed from the left and shifted the entire party to the left. President Biden’s disastrous term cemented the left and its ideology into the driver’s seat of the Democrats. What Kamala Harris says over the next three months as she rhetorically tries to tack to the middle does not much matter. She and her party are from and for the American Left’s vision for the United States.
We have rarely seen that agenda on full display. It’s been 40 years in fact since the mask was last off the Democrats in a presidential election. It was a different set of radicals atop the party then. The country was bitterly divided in the 1980s over how to confront the Soviet Union, and the American Left’s embrace of appeasement was on full display.
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President Reagan had run and won in 1980 on a platform of “Peace Through Strength” and his first four years had been confrontation over confrontation with a Democratic Party being taken left by its activists demanding a “nuclear freeze.” Reagan began the Defense build-up that would eventually cause the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Democrats did their best to stop both the defense build-up and Reagan’s full throated opposition to communism.
A young activist named Randall Forsberg issued a “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race” in the same year as Reagan’s first of two sweeping victories. The insurgent left wing of the Democratic Party, picking up the pieces of the rout of Jimmy Carter, embraced the “Nuclear Freeze” as a central tenet of their party. In the early 1980s, a staff writer for The New Yorker, Jonathan Schell, wrote a series of essays for the magazine about nuclear weapons and then published a revised form of them in a best-selling book, “The Fate of the Earth,” which soared up the best-seller lists. One of his colleagues, Bill McKibben, wrote a memorial to Schell in the magazine not long after Schell’s death in 2014, which revealed that Schell was ahead of his time in anticipating what the left would do in the aftermath of the triumph of Reaganism.
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“Some months ago, I phoned Jonathan,” McKibben wrote. “By then gravely ill, he’d abandoned work on a book in part about climate change, a subject of great mutual interest.”
Schell was in the final months of his life when McKibben called. “But he hadn’t stopped mulling over, with his characteristic penetration,” McKibbon continued, “his great topic, which really was the fate of the earth.”
The “nuclear freeze” movement was an umbrella for the American Left, which had sprung up during the Vietnam War. That movement was busy burrowing into academics and thereafter into public education and beyond. Christopher Rufo in his best-selling book of last year, “America’s Cultural Revolution” laid out in extraordinary detail the left’s “long march through the institutions.”
Demonstrators hold hands and vocalize as they march towards Central Park during a massive nuclear disarmament rally where 750,000 gathered to demand a freeze on nuclear arms, New York, June 12, 1982. (Lee Frey/Authenticated News International/Getty Images)
The nuclear freeze movement was the organizing slogan of the American Left in the Reagan years. It was based on the fundamentally flawed belief in appeasement of enemies. Whether because they are socialists like the European left, or even Leninists like China’s Xi Jinping, Democrats don’t like their core beliefs on full display. So America rarely gets a full frontal exposure of what the left edge of the Democratic Party really wants. Even today, when climate change theology permeates everything on the left, rarely does the American Left spell out what its agenda means for the average voter.
Democrats spelled it out in 1984 when Walter Mondale and his running mate Geraldine Ferraro went all in with the American Left. “MONDALE PLEDGES IMMEDIATE EFFORT FOR ARMS FREEZE” was the headline in the September 6, 1984 New York Times.
The American electorate did not care about the Freeze Movement’s mass marches. It did not buy into the rhetoric of the left which captured the Democratic Party during the 1980s. “Under Mr. Reagan,” the Democratic Party’s platform to stop Reagan in 1984 read, “the nuclear arms race would continue to spiral out of control. A new generation of destabilizing missiles will imperil all humanity. We will live in a world where the nuclear arms race has spread from earth into space.”
President Reagan, in the mind of the Democrats, “has contributed to the decline of U.S.-Soviet relations to a perilous point. Instead of challenges, he has used easy and abusive anti-Soviet rhetoric as a substitute for strength, progress, and careful use of power.”
Former President Ronald Reagan, the late Henry Kissinger and Howard Baker laughing during a GOP fund raising dinner. (Photo by Larry Downing/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)
The “San Francisco Democrats” as then U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick labeled them at the Republican Convention in 1984, got crushed by the American electorate that year. But “leftism light” under the banner of Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis fooled no one four years later and Vice President George H.W. Bush brushed Dukakis aside.
The American Left would remain dominant within the Democratic Party until Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council drove it out of sight before his successful campaign for the party’s nomination in 1992. The thumping the Democrats had at the polls in 1994 after “Hillarycare” crashed and burned reminded the Manhattan-Beltway media elites, again, that ours is a center-right country.
When Ambassador Kirkpatrick took the stage at the 1984 GOP convention, she reminded the audience that she was herself a Democrat as President Reagan had once been, and began by quoting Harry Truman who had said four decades earlier that the “elements of our strength are many. They include our democratic government, our economic system, our great natural resources. But, the basic source of our strength is spiritual. We believe in the dignity of man.”
Kirkpatrick then contrasted the Democrats of Truman’s era with those of 1984:
“That’s the way Democratic presidents and presidential candidates used to talk about America.”
“These were the men who developed NATO, who developed the Marshall Plan,” Kirkpatrick continued, “who devised the Alliance for Progress. They were not afraid to be resolute nor ashamed to speak of America as a great nation. They didn’t doubt that we must be strong enough to protect ourselves and to help others.”
“They didn’t imagine that America should depend for its very survival on the promises of its adversaries,” Kirkpatrick added.
“They happily assumed the responsibilities of freedom,” she said, approaching the defining moment of her speech.
“I am not alone in noticing that the San Francisco Democrats took a very different approach.”
So was born the term “San Francisco Democrats” and it has endured, though the fortunes of the American Left ebbed from that moment until now. Perhaps it is a forty year cycle: Every four decades the Democrats openly go “full San Francisco left wing extreme” and get blown out in the November election.
Their cover-up of Joe Biden’s infirmity blown by the debate with President Trump and their lawfare strategy proven an enormous mistake, the American Left has gone all in again, with Vice President Harris replacing the infirm incumbent. No matter whom Harris picks as her running mate —even if it is the old school liberal Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, there will be no blurring of the edges of the socialism the Democrats wholly embrace, no watering down of their appeasement policies of the four years of Biden and the eight of Obama.
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Democrats are going to put a choice before the American people: A mangled “managed decline” of the U.S. overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris or a renewal of American strength under President Donald Trump.
It’s as clear a choice as America has had since 1980 and 1984. Pray our center-right join with the old school liberals in the FDR-Truman-JFK-LBJ mold to finish the American realignment away from the American Left.
Prayer is in order because we really don’t want to live under the control of Kamala Harris, the Squad and the dark money web behind them. That they are planning a radical agenda isn’t in doubt. If the American Left somehow pulls off a miracle out of the wreckage of their bait-and-switch coup from “Scranton Joe” Biden back to the San Francisco Democrats, the bell will be tolling for all of us as well as our allies like Israel, NATO and in the Asian Pacific theater.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.