The Graveyard of Progressive Misadventures Progressive overreach alienated the middle class, replacing working-class roots with elite dogmas—and now the Democrats are reaping the whirlwind they sowed. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/28/the-graveyard-of-progressive-misadventures/

Sometime after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the American Left began exploring, then embracing, and finally enacting agendas that proved not only unhinged and unworkable but also fatal to the left-wing project itself.
How did the party so alienate the middle classes when it once professed it was the sole party and protector of those in-between? How did the Democratic Congress sink to a 16 percent approval rating in a current liberal Quinnipiac University poll? How could 63 percent of registered voters view the Democrats unfavorably in a recent Wall Street Journal poll?
In sum: despise the middle class, then lose elections.
At the turn of the millennium, globalization generated massive wealth by opening a 6-billion-person consumer market to the rising global powers of Silicon Valley, media, academia, law, finance, and transnational corporations. The result was a Democrat Party increasingly dominated by a new and different sort of “committed” left-wing billionaire.
The Democrat Party, by the turn of the century, had become a home for the ultra-rich, the upscale professional classes, and the subsidized poor. And its new initiatives reflected the values, ideas—and pretensions—of the globalized bicoastal elites, from reimagining a sustainable green economy to “diversity” and apologetics for America’s culpability abroad.
In the ancient days of the 1990s, Bill Clinton ensured that the Democrat party was for strong borders, legal-only immigration, and protection of union jobs from cheap imported labor. Abortion was to be safe, legal—and “rare.” Now, abortion is often praised and worshipped by the left, as if it is integral to saving a warming planet.