Nov 21, 2018 - 10:36 am EST
Why has the Democratic Party gone mad?
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/why-has-the-democratic-party-gone-mad
 
November 20, 2018 (WorldNetDaily) – Right now, tens of millions of Americans – including many decent, traditional Democrats – are wondering what on Earth has possessed today’s Democratic Party.
How can one possibly explain what increasingly appears to be the progressive left’s growing descent into madness?
What are normal Americans to make of the never-ending attempts to overturn the constitutional election of President Donald Trump by any means possible – legal or illegal, moral or immoral? What explains the willingness to savagely destroy decent people like Brett Kavanaugh and his family with willful disregard for the truth, evidence, presumption of innocence, due process, honesty and basic humanity? What explains the perpetually outraged mobs harassing Republicans and forcing them out of restaurants, movie theaters and airports – and the constant ludicrous demonization of them as “racists,” “fascists” and “white supremacists”?
Before exploring this question, let’s first pause and allow for the fact that there are many decent people on the left. There are people of conscience and principle, a prominent one being former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who today openly criticizes – and is persecuted in return by – his fellow leftists. Moreover, there are rational – or at least understandable, however flawed – arguments that can be made in favor of some leftwing policy positions such as socialized medicine (concern that poor children get needed medical care), gun control (desire to avoid tragedy arising from criminal or mentally ill people with firearms) or raising the minimum wage (concern that everyone has a living wage). Those making such arguments may be naïve, mistaken about their facts, ignorant of the laws of economics, think too emotionally, or be oblivious to the unintended consequences of their feel-good policies – but that doesn’t mean they’re insane.
However, something very different is going on now.
There are no rational, sane or even understandable arguments for insisting that dozens of different genders exist, or for forcing women to allow men to use their locker rooms, bathrooms and showers and to compete in (and often win) their athletic competitions, and for forcing everyone else to play along with the delusion that a man is a woman (or vice versa) or else be treated as criminals. There are no sane arguments for importing as many immigrants as possible from terror-hotbed countries into the U.S., and for eliminating America’s borders and dismantling her border law enforcement agencies, and for creating irresistible economic incentives for poor people the world over to flood into the U.S. at wildly unsustainable levels.
There are no sane arguments for eliminating voter registration requirements, as Democrats now advocate. There are no sane arguments for upending the world’s most hallowed, 250-year-old legal system whose central tenet is “innocent until proven guilty.” There are no sane arguments for attacking people just for being white, or just for being men.
These and other current Democrat policies and obsessions are purely destructive. In the microcosm, the analogy would be to an individual whose life is composed entirely of one irrational, self-destructive event after the other, amounting to inevitable ѕυιcιdє.

Bring on the ‘guillotines’
Consider the Democrats’ new love affair with violence.
Although cable news officially banned the M-word (“It’s not mob behavior,” insisted CNN’s Don Lemon, “it’s people who are upset”), in reality left-wing mobs now besiege, scream at and harass Republican officials at every opportunity.
“You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, for what you care about,” Clinton told CNN. “That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.”
That, of course, is the classic totalitarian position of both communists and Islamic supremacists; each literally defines “peace” as the condition that will naturally result when the entire world is communist – or Islamic. When we control everything, there will be peace.
Unfortunately, when Clinton urged uncivility, and former Attorney General Eric Holder instructed Democrats to “kick” Republicans (“when they go low, we kick them”), when Nancy Peℓσѕι told a New York gathering to expect “collateral damage” to those Americans who don’t agree with her party’s radical agenda, and Minnesota Democratic Party communications official William Davis threatened Republicans with “guillotines,” the left’s pre-election message was clear: Violence is not only OK, it’s how we win.
Indeed, the Democratic evocation of “guillotines” is no accident. In her 2011 book, “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America,” Ann Coulter explained how Democrats “are heirs to the French Revolution, the uprising of a mob,” whereas “conservatives are heirs to the American Revolution and the harmonious order of a republic.”
Thus, in Minnesota, after Davis’s call to the guillotine, two Republican candidates were assaulted – not mobbed, mind you, but physically attacked and injured. Shane Mekeland, a state representative candidate, suffered a concussion after being sucker punched while speaking with constituents at a restaurant. And state Rep. Sarah Anderson was punched after spotting a man destroying Republican yard signs. Her attacker desisted only when she ran away from him to her car and threw it in reverse, she told the Washington Free Beacon: “It was just insane. He was charging at me, saying, ‘Why don’t you go kill yourself?’ To have someone physically coming after you and attacking you is just disheartening.”
So, how do we explain this disturbing transmogrification of what was once a comparatively sane and civil Democratic Party?
Don’t bother asking leftists; they’ll insist you’re the crazy one. “Democratic Socialist” Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently demonstrated the left’s go-to tactic of projection when she told Vanity Fair Democrats couldn’t compromise with the “insane people” on the right who are holding the country “hostage.”

‘Psychological causes of political madness’
In trying to come to grips with the metastasizing madness of today’s Democratic left, pundits typically cite factors such as these, all of which play a role:
Hatred of Trump – This is indeed a major factor, since intense hatred can, all by itself, literally make a person crazy. As I write in “How Evil Works”: “Hate is like spiritual plutonium, possessing bizarre, explosive and transformative qualities of which we are largely unaware. It is the means by which evil itself blooms on this earth, especially when rage is focused and magnified by a malignant worldview.” If you get mad enough – you go mad.
Toxic ideology – This would be the “malignant worldview” just mentioned. The radical-left ideology that has consumed today’s Democratic Party is arrogant (moral superiority to “greedy, racist Republicans” is its ethical foundation), it is dishonest (lying to defeat “fascists” and “nαzιs” is always morally permissible), contemptuous of history (leftist revolutionaries see the past as wall-to-wall oppression that must be overturned and buried), and religiously devoted to socialism (this despite its stunning 100 percent failure rate, most recently in oil-rich Venezuela where inflation approaches 1 million percent and there’s no toilet paper).
Emotional thinking – It’s widely recognized (there are even multiple peer-reviewed studies confirming) that liberals think more emotionally, while conservatives think more logically, in arriving at policy ideas. Unfortunately, emotional thinking is incompatible with sober consideration of the long-term consequences of policies that, however disastrous in the long term, make the person advancing them feel like a morally good person right now.
Hatred of America – The same leftists who so easily brand Trump and Republicans as racist and immoral tend also to feel essentially the same way about their own nation – seeing America as a fundamentally racist, immoral country. That is why, to cite just one example, over 100 cινιℓ ωαr-era statues, monuments and symbols have been torn down across the U.S. since 2015.
Indoctrination – It’s well known that America’s colleges and universities, with rare exceptions, are utterly possessed by the most radical parts of the leftist political and cultural spectrum, prompting historian William Lind to refer to today’s colleges as “small, ivy-covered North Koreas.”
Other factors are often cited: Conservative political commentator Steven Crowder says the left is not compassionate as claimed, but rather, consumed with envy. (Indeed, Winston Churchill described socialism as “the gospel of envy.”) If that sounds like a transgression of the Tenth Commandment, “Thou shalt not covet,” consider that in reality the left cannot operate or even exist in its present form without violating virtually all of the Ten Commandments – from “Thou shalt not kill” (abortion), to “Thou shalt not commit adultery” (the left’s sɛҳuąƖ revolution), to “Thou shalt not steal” (“wealth redistribution”) to “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” (the left’s reflexive defamation of opponents as “racists” and “haters”).
Many people have long cited liberals’ trademark naïvete, which in large part explains the natural leftward-tilt of many young people. Others focus on the left’s willful blindness to the lessons of history, economics and human nature. Still others, like ’60s New Left leader David Horowitz, docuмent the religious aspects of leftist belief. After all, since the leftist-socialist-Marxist worldview is fundamentally atheistic – and since man is inherently religious by nature, seeking meaning and significance higher than mere day-to-day survival – leftist political ideology easily takes on the exalted qualities and fervency of a deeply held religious belief.
Some psychologists and psychiatrists have taken a stab at this subject, including Lyle Rossiter, M.D., a clinical and forensic psychiatrist and expert witness in countless court cases, who wrote “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.” In it, Rossiter explains:

Quote To rescue us from our troubled lives, the liberal agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sɛҳuąƖ indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship. Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. Radical liberalism thus assaults the foundations of civilized freedom. Given its irrational goals, coercive methods and historical failures, and given its perverse effects on character development, there can be no question of the radical agenda’s madness.

‘God gave them over to a depraved mind’
Yet there is still one final factor that must be explored, one that ultimately becomes the key to unlocking our puzzle. But before we get there, consider the following:

Friends, a spirit of madness – of delusion, of depravity, of otherworldly folly – increasingly possesses the “progressive” left and its political stronghold, the Democrat Party.
Let’s remember, it’s impossible to truly explain human behavior without accounting for the spiritual dimension, since at our core we are spiritual beings. We take our shape – our thoughts, our worldview and our very identity – from the way we respond to the leadings of God or the devil, from a dimension just beyond our senses.
So let’s consider one more explanation for the left’s growing madness, which brilliantly describes the terrible consequences of refusing to acknowledge God’s existence despite being surrounded by overwhelming evidence of Him, of embracing and celebrating gross immorality, and of choosing to reject God’s laws of life while suppressing the truth and persecuting those who uphold it.
And as you read the following, bear in mind that this analysis – quoted from the Bible (Romans 1) – is mocked by our society’s elites, who regard it as hateful, superstitious, contemptible and dangerous:

Quote The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. …
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sɛҳuąƖ impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sɛҳuąƖ relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

That was the Apostle Paul writing to the new believers in Rome. Now consider one other scriptural passage, this one from the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 28), in which Moses lays out the just rewards of life – first for loving and obeying God, and then for rebelling and turning against Him.
“And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the LORD thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth: And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God:

Quote Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field.
Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. …
The LORD shall establish thee an holy people unto himself, as he hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, and walk in his ways.

Many other promises of blessings are also cited.
However, what about those who stubbornly rebel against God, so as to be their own pathetic god?
“But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee:

Quote Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. …
Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.
Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out. …
The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart:
And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee.
Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her: thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof. …
The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed always.

Today’s Democratic Party – not every Democrat of course, but the national party and its leadership – has abandoned God and His laws. As celebrated Russian author, dissident and gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said so famously and simply at the end of his life, about why communism had destroyed so many millions of innocent lives throughout the 20th century: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
What about us? Each of our individual lives unfolds in the midst of a millennia-long war between the powers of light and darkness. And the main battle is raging within the mind of each of us. If we harken to the temptations of the Dark Side, we descend into a state of delusion, hatred, sin and bondage, cut off from God’s grace and wide open to demonic forces. This is not about theology or philosophy or psychology, but our everyday street-level reality.
Very simply, we are meant – indeed we have been conceived and designed by our Creator – to be obedient to Him, spiritually sensitive to His laws, to love God and our neighbor, always repenting of our sins and forgiving others for theirs. If we do this, if we travel this beautiful path with humility and gratitude and courage, we are walking in God’s light and His blessings will follow us always, in this life and the next.
Otherwise, it gets ugly. I’ve been there and I don’t recommend it.
 
The preceding, originally published on WorldNetDaily and re-publsihed with permission, is the introductory story in the current issue of WND’s Whistleblower magazine, edited monthly by David Kupelian. November’s issue is titled “DESCENT INTO MADNESS: How the Democratic Party abandoned its principles, morality and sanity.”
David Kupelian is an award-winning American journalist, vice president and managing editor of online news giant WorldNetDaily (WND.com), editor of Whistleblower magazine, and a widely read columnist. He is also the bestselling author of three influential books—"The Marketing of Evil," its sequel "How Evil Works," and most recently, "The Snapping of the American Mind: Healing a Nation Broken by a Lawless Government and Godless Culture." Kupelian has been interviewed by Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham Neil Cavuto and many other TV and radio hosts.