America has been told, relentlessly, that the nation became officially and irrevocably unhinged in November 2016.
That's when a vulgar reality TV star flipped off the calcified Washington establishment, became president and triggered much hysterical weeping and teeth-gnashing among pundits and other palace guardians who play journalists on TV.
But as we lurch toward the 2020 presidential campaign, what of the Democrats?
Is the party of the angry American left -- moving ever leftward and angrier by the minute -- any more stable than Republicans of two years ago?
No. There's a frenzy among the Democrats unleashed by the upcoming presidential campaign. We haven't seen its like except in those Hieronymus Bosch paintings of hell.
The Democratic center has collapsed. Moderates are hunted down and cast out by the hard left that pulls the party's chain. The late poet Maya Angelou famously warned that "when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
And that's the scary part. What are Democrats showing the nation other than that many of them want to take us to Venezuela?
"It concerns me that so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left," said former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who's thinking about running for president as an independent and wondering how Democrats can possibly pay for all the things they're promising, from universal health care to free college, free everything.
Now the left that rules the party wants his head on a pike.
The Democratic Party itself has become unbound in an orgy of the extreme. They're fixated on the sin of some Democrats wearing blackface decades ago. And this becomes their fig leaf to cover a push for late-term abortions and in some cases, infanticide.
That doesn't win elections. That loses elections. But they don't want to hear it. Addiction to anger overwhelms them now.
How else to explain those standing ovations and the wild applause in the New York Senate chamber when abortion up until birth, for any reason, was approved and signed into state law?
Gov. Andrew Cuomo had the One World Trade Center lit up pink in victory over helpless infants. And then he insisted that he was Roman Catholic and an altar boy. Cuomo's skin must be made of wood.
Wood can't blush. Wood can't feel any shame. And apparently, neither does the old altar boy.
Most Americans don't support abortion deep into the third trimester. Most Americans wouldn't applaud in triumph. They'd feel shame for those clapping, like the old altar boy thumping his chest in victory. And they'd feel sorrow for the babies.
That's most people. But Democratic politicians in New York felt the need to display triumph, loudly and stridently. The leftward tilt of the Democratic Party is almost a desperation, a hunger of the zealous.
This has already hurt presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, the California Democrat. She made it clear she wants to get rid of private health insurance. "Let's eliminate all of that," Harris said. "Let's move on."
Let's eliminate all that? Harris tried to walk that back, but she went too far.
It is a disaster for her. But a rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, is worse off. Warren finally and formally hammered the Faux into her own Fauxcahontas narrative.
The Washington Post reported that Warren had identified herself as "American Indian" on a 1986 registration for the state bar of Texas, though she was not Native American. She foolishly took the infamous DNA test that proved she's no more Native American than my late Sicilian father-in-law.
Warren had insisted she didn't use her "minority" status to climb the career ladder.
Ah, but of course she did just that. She danced the dance of race and favor. She didn't check her privilege. Instead, she checked the box that said minority.
Now there's another wildfire consuming the party of identity politics: The Virginia Democratic Black Face Spectacular.
Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, who won office accusing his opponents of racism, apologized for being in a racist medical school yearbook photo. Then he said he wasn't in the photo but had worn blackface for a Michael Jackson dance contest in the 1980s. He almost moonwalked for reporters until his wife stopped him.
Then Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, a Democrat, admitted he, too, wore blackface in the' 80s. And the beneficiary of all the chaos, Democratic Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, was ready to succeed Northam when he was accused of sexual assault.
When Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was dragged through the mud in his bloody confirmation hearing, unfairly accused without evidence of being a sexual predator, Democrats and media allies shrieked that we had to believe the women making the accusations.
But are Democrats insisting that Fairfax's accuser be believed?
No.
The talk of Democrats wearing blackface has all but covered up something else that Northam, a pediatrician, said about aborting a child who had been delivered.
"When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of -- obviously -- the mother, with the consent of the physicians -- more than one physician, by the way. ... If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered.
"The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and mother."
A discussion. You mean the discussion that America isn't having about the value of human life.
Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.
Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author