Once upon a time, not too long ago in America, Barack Obama had to sweat bullets to shake off his affiliation with Jeremiah Wright, a radical black preacher who gave a speech five days after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 and blamed the violence on America’s inherent racism, imperialism, and support for oppression worldwide, first and foremost Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Obama zigged and zagged, but when he got trounced in the Pennsylvania primaries, he called an emotional press conference and denounced his former pal and mentor.
Those were the days.
This week, Obama’s top aide, David Axelrod, took to the airwaves to celebrate Abdul el-Sayed, who won a tight Democrat primary race in Michigan. El-Sayed campaigned with Hasan Piker, the internet influencer famous for crowing that “America deserved 9/11”. El-Sayed has repeatedly refused to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and when an Islamist terrorist attempted to slaughter Jewish children at a synagogue in West Bloomfield, he muttered some explanation about how the perpetrator was simply grieving his family members in Lebanon, Hezbollah operatives killed by the Israel Defense Forces.
When asked by National Public Radio if El-Sayed was the new Obama, Axelrod replied, “well, for sure”, before rushing off to CNN’s studio to portray AIPAC’s efforts to derail El-Sayed’s election as a shady attempt by an agent of a foreign government to meddle in American affairs.
How to make sense of this sea change in the Democrat Party? To hear some of its bigwigs tell it, it’s all the fault of… the Jews. Earlier this summer, Rahm Emmanuel, another Obama acolyte and a likely Democrat candidate for president in 2028, delivered a fiery speech in Tel Aviv University in which he blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for pursuing a benighted policy of needless aggression. Emanuel never quite said outright that Bibi was to blame for moderate Democrats running into the arms of Israel-haters like El-Sayed, but he didn’t need to: the claim is one of the party’s most resonant talking points these days.
In recent interviews with The Dispatch, for example, numerous Democrat lawmakers, including another potential presidential hopeful Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, argued that it was Bibi and Bibi alone who was responsible for the party’s strong left turn on Israel.
There’s a perfect English word we can use to respond to such arguments, but it isn’t suited for print in a family-friendly newspaper.
The Democrat Party made a choice, and that choice had nothing to do with Israel. It chose to embrace, enthusiastically and passionately, the Democratic Socialists of America, or the DSA, the formerly fringe group that is now behind some of the party’s most promising stars, including New York’s mayor Zohran Mamdani. It chose to replace the bread-and-butter issues that used to interest its candidates – remember Clintonomics? – with an obsession with Israel, caring about “Palestine” more than they do about the average American pay cheque. It chose to elevate candidates like El-Sayed because, not in spite, of their extremist outlooks and sensibilities. And there’s no clearer proof of the ideological warping of the Democrats than blaming everything everywhere on the Jews.
It hardly takes a genius political scientist to understand this point. If the party’s disagreement was merely with Netanyahu’s policies, it could’ve elevated any number of reasonable Bibi critics or come up with nuanced policy proposals to reflect its reservations. Instead, it went all out for hucksters like Piker, now widely celebrated as the party’s new kingmaker, elevated toxic bigots like El-Sayed, and fell hard for policies – if you can call them that – like abolishing the police and opening the southern border to all who desire to enter.
Look at Piker’s rise, at Mamdani’s election, at El-Sayed’s victory, and you’ll see the pattern clearly: the Democrat Party now belongs to those who derive their energy, their purpose, and their popularity from hating Jews, Israel, and America.
How did we get here? Future historians will have their work cut out for them, though anyone interested in explaining how the party of Bill Clinton became the party of Zohran Mamdani would do well to start with Obama. From elevating Iran’s murderous mullahs to championing the grad school world view that rejects American exceptionalism and romanticises the so-called “Global South”, Obama fundamentally changed the character of his party – and his nation – in ways that are only now becoming clear. But even if you disagree on the historic causes for the party’s descent into madness, one thing ought to be clear: no sane American, let alone American Jew, has any business supporting the party in its current form.
Sure, the Republicans have their problems, too; these problems are many, and real. And yes, ours is a two-party system, which means you’ve got to choose someone or else. But the Democrat Party these days consists either of terror apologists or those telling us its perfectly all right to vote for the terror apologists because of Donald Trump. And that’s not a serious political party – that’s a cult. As the Democrat Party is rushing to toss itself out the window, then, the best we can do is get out of its way, watch it plummet to its death, and hope that it finds in its original core values the energy to be born again as party interested anew in America.
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.