VDH: These Aren’t the Democrats of Old.

The left got drunk on the idea that it now had its hands on the money and influence in America. So it systematically began targeting institutions and leveraged them not from the noisy street with empty protests but from within.

Suddenly, the once-revered Supreme Court, now with a majority of conservative justices, became an obstacle to democracy and had to be packed or restructured.

The First Amendment was redefined as a bothersome speed bump that slowed progress. It needlessly protected noisy conservatives and their backward values.

The CIA, FBI and Pentagon were suddenly OK — if staffed with the right people. Their clandestine power, their chain-of-command exemption from messy legislative give-and-take and their reliance on surveillance were now pluses in the correct hands. These institutions became allies, not enemies, and so their powers were augmented and unchecked.

Sports were cool, given that they offered a huge platform for the social-justice warriors among the athletes to damn the very system that had enriched them.

The higher the gas and electricity prices, the better to shock the clueless bourgeoisie that their SUVs and home air conditioners were anti-green and on the way out.

The union shop was written off as a has-been enclave of old, white dinosaurs — an ossified, shrinking base of the Democratic Party.

The media glitterati were no longer to be mocked as empty suits and pompadour fools, but rather treated as useful foot soldiers in the revolution.

So what happened to turn the party of Harry Truman, JFK and even Bill Clinton into a woke neo-Maoist movement?

Read the whole thing.

Related: Roger Kimball on The Success of the Counterculture in Becoming the Dominant Culture.