The left hits the wall.

The American Thinker
October 10, 2025

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Thomas Cole was an early 19th-century painter of the Hudson River school who specialized in allegorical paintings, large canvases intended to present moral lessons through a series of images. One of the earliest of these was “The Course of Empire,” which displayed the progress of a classic imperial state from its founding to its final dissolution. The last of the five canvases was titled “Destruction,” which is apt enough, showing as it does the final disintegration of the state and featuring tidal waves crashing, bridges collapsing, flames and smoke, and women being run down.

This is what the collapse of a thoroughly rotten system should look like — chaos, destruction, panic, and terror in the streets, and at the end, the looming shadows of the barbarians, in their furs, their armor, and their MAGA caps.

But we’re not seeing any of that today, as we witness the collapse of the near-century-old left-liberal hegemony destined to establish a rationalized soft totalitarianism that would put us all in our place and tell us what to do — all for our own good, needless to say.  Instead of screams, lightning flashing, and dogs howling, it’s been awfully quiet. Sure, we’ve heard plenty of whimpering, whining, and screaming at the sky from the lefties, but they do that even when things are going great. Other than that, it’s business as usual during alterations.

Up until a year ago, the left was sitting on top of the world. It had seen a steady rise since March 1933, which we can take as marking the inception of America’s liberal imperium. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a WASP patrician who viewed the country with a sense of noblesse oblige. His vision of a new society was mild, benign, and paternal.

It almost immediately went off the rails, largely due to FDR’s right-hand man, Harry Hopkins, the prince of fellow travelers (the KGB — OGPU at the time — considered him one of its most valuable “agents of influence”), along with Mussolini admirers Adolf Berle and Rexford Tugwell. Their vision of the New Deal was far more centralized, more controlled, and more dictatorial, featuring such democratic trappings as collective agriculture, public mobilization, nationalization, and blatant propaganda.

The old Supreme Court (of which our version is but a pale shadow) performed its last service to the country by shutting down the National Recovery Act and eliminating the most blatant fascist tendencies.  But plenty of those tendencies remained, and although the New Deal policies failed to overcome the Depression, they were given credit for winning WW II. The Axis wasn’t destroyed by American will and industry — it was brought down by the New Deal. So the “liberal” megastate was cemented into American society by victory, and the New Deal continued into the postwar era.

The bureaucracy dug in for the long haul. The Executive branch metastasized to an unbelievable degree, budding agency after agency, each with its grubby fingers wrapped around some aspect of the economy or society as a whole. By the late 1950s, social scientists were predicting that, while the democratic norms would be “allowed” to exist — there would still be elections, along with senators, presidents, and so forth — the real power would lie with committees of agency heads, aided, needless to say, by hordes of academics who would dictate policy to the “elected” officials. In other words, government by central committee.

If the GI generation (the so-called “Greatest” generation) or the Silents did anything at all to prevent this, the record doesn’t show it.

Then came the 60s, and all those daydreams vanished. While there had been rumbles of discontent during the previous decade, it was the coming of the Boomers that put New Deal neofascism up against the wall. A consensus exists that young people during the 1960s — particularly the “hippys” (at least that’s how some spell it) — were revolting against the Norman Rockwell America of Mom, Dad, apple pie, the church, all the way up to the Constitution.

This is a gross error. The 60s kids were in open and completely justifiable revolt against controlling, centralized liberalism that came out of the New Deal, focusing on the Draft, an unconstitutional innovation that was never intended to outlast WW II. The Draft made it personal, but to the Youthquake and Hippie movements, all the plans of the liberal elites with their management degrees, mainframe computers, and mammoth bureaucracies were anathema.  

By mid-decade, centralized, universal liberal programs, including federal welfare, urban renewal, criminal justice “reform,” and forced racial integration, were beginning to collapse. The Vietnam War, a conflict overseen by not-very-bright Ivy League grads who believed that they could fight a war using management theory, acted as a lightning rod for the entire effort. (Ironically, the tide didn’t begin to turn until the management crowd was ousted and control of the war was returned to the military.)

Totalitarian liberalism died of simply unworthiness to exist. The Boomers were there to kick it into a ditch and cover it over. Nor were they alone; for the next quarter-century, every president (with a single exception) was elected in opposition to this program.

But that didn’t mark the end of it. Leftists were by then thoroughly integrated into the bureaucracy, much more than communists had been from the 1930s through the 1950s.

In the late 60s into the 70s, American leftism went through a rebirth in the form of the New Left, a movement heavily influenced by the Frankfurt School, a group of Central European Marxists given refuge in the U.S. following the rise of Hitler, who began working to undermine their benefactors as soon as they arrived. The “cultural Marxism” of the Frankfurt School, which melded Marx, Freud, and other influences, held a wide appeal to left-wing Boomers, particularly when it came to its focus on sex.

Armed with this ideology, the New Leftists began a decades-long “long march through the institutions,” which included the bureaucracy, academia, media, and entertainment. They were aided in this effort by the Rockefeller Republicans, not yet termed “RINOs,” devoted to proving that they could create a monster nanny state more efficiently than the Left, and a conservative movement that had effectively acquiesced to leftist hegemony and retreated into isolated think-tanks and low-circulation journals.

The leftist advance was slowed by Ronald Reagan and the uneasy Gingrich-Clinton partnership, but it was never enough. The leftist tumor continued expanding into the new millennium, readying itself for the coming of the messiah.

He came in the form of Barack Obama. Obama the Watershed, the One, the Lightbringer. The leftist mob greeted Obama with a hysteria seldom before witnessed in American politics, reminiscent of the way that German mobs had greeted Hitler. Surely, the golden dawn was upon them; their day had come at last. Obama called for the “Transformation of America,” and insisted he had the plans all worked out.

But fortunately for the American republic, Obama was not, intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually, an American at all, but more along the lines of the Big Men who take over third-world countries. He had spent his formative years in Indonesia, the most corrupt country on earth, and drew all his concepts of politics and governance from this experience.

Obama’s idea of governing was that of a rajah, sending out decrees, making pronouncements, and otherwise going on expensive trips and blowing money like an entire task force of drunken sailors. The result was a stillborn “transformation” amounting to ObamaCare and loads of leftist rhetoric.

If Obama had been succeeded by the perky and winsome Hillary, as was the plan, we would today be living in a red fascist America, with all the nightmares that term suggests. But fortunately for us and the survival of human freedom, the people had other ideas. (Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out that rule by the people is the rarest form of government. It effectively died out with the fall of Athenian democracy and didn’t reappear — overlooking a few Renaissance Italian city-states— until the late 18th century.) With the people having spoken, the plan to cement Obama’s accomplishments with a Hillary presidency didn’t work that way, thanks to Donald Trump attaining the Oval Office.

Donald Trump was a playboy, a sharp businessman in a corrupt industry, a casino owner, and a reality-show entertainer. And Harry Truman was a failed haberdasher, and George Washington a Virginia planter.

While Trump accomplished a lot in his first term, his efforts were truncated by inexperience and his decision to accept the advice of political hacks like Chris Christie, along with trusting blatant hustlers like James Comey, even now on his way to the courtroom.

Trump was still held to be a threat — if not a complete nightmare — for leftist Democrats. We need not go back over the story of RussiaGate and the numerous other scandals of Trump 45, except to say that they were all bogus and were all backed, and sometimes created, by the upper tiers of a leftist elite who held Trump and his MAGA movement to be fascism incarnate.

At the end of his first term, it appeared that Donald Trump was finished — and with him, any hope of maintaining a democratic republic in the United States. The summer 2020 Antifa/BLM riots created the impression that the U.S. was ungovernable. A pandemic devised by the Chinese military in collaboration with U.S. health bureaucrats had been used as a club to beat the Trump administration for years on end. Finally, Trump was forced out of office by blatant cheating, with the courts and all electoral institutions going along with the joke.

It looked as if the American left had won its long-term campaign, exactly as leftist intellectuals had foreseen as long ago as the 1930s. The control levers were almost completely in their hands. They controlled federal law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, the military, academia, and almost all media and entertainment. The Internet, the sole means of commentary and action remaining open to the public, was being reined in through a campaign of censorship. What awaited them was an endless plain of opportunity, a society with its defenses stripped away and open to any variety of exploitation.

Following the 2020 election, in what appears today to have been a self-inflicted error of the grossest type, the left attempted to destroy Trump. Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, and Steve Bannon — the most threatening of Trump’s loyalists, from the lefty point of view — had been effectively nullified through prison or bankruptcy. The J6 marchers were being persecuted to an extent not seen in this country for a century and a half, their rights completely abrogated and their status reduced to the level of legal scapegoats.

Trump himself became the target of the full machinery of leftist lawfare, indicted over ninety times and subject to simultaneous trials overseen by some of the most corrupt legal hacks in the country. These efforts continued throughout the four years of the Biden Interregnum, with the country run by a secret committee (its members still a matter of speculation) behind the facade of a senile, ineffectual, deeply corrupt old man.

But now it’s all gone. Biden himself — probably at the instigation of his angry wife — sabotaged the Democrats’ 2024 electoral efforts. An alcoholic, seriously unqualified candidate wrecked the party’s hopes at the cost of over a billion dollars, handing the Senate, the House, and the Executive to the GOP. Donald Trump entered his second term with a clear agenda and far more surefooted than he had been eight years earlier.

Now, less than a year later, it looks like this:

• Nothing has been heard from Joe Biden in months. It’s possible that nothing ever will.
• Kamala, the first kind of black female candidate, has made a handful of drunken public appearances. Her recent ghost-written memoirs created havoc within the Democrat party.
• Elon Musk’s DOGE revealed massive and undeniable waste and corruption within the federal government. Its work continues in a more low-key fashion.
• One of DOGE’s most compelling revelations concerned USAID, a money-laundering operation embedded in the federal government that distributed billions in funding to left-wing operations not only in the U.S. but across the planet. It has been shut down, with savings likely to amount to the hundreds of billions.
• A large percentage of the bureaucratic “worker” class has been eliminated, with hundreds of thousands more being dumped down the chute as you read this.
• Wokist officers, directly promoted and nurtured by Obama and Biden, are being ousted from the military. DEI policies have also been deep-sixed.
• Registrations for the Democrat party have collapsed. Instead, voters are fleeing en masse to become Republicans or Independents.
• Purple states are turning red, while blue states are edging toward purple. Even New Jersey, long a dependable dumb working-class Dem enclave, is threatening to go red in 2026.
• The last stable, sane, and intelligent Democrats are abandoning the party. This exodus was started by Tulsi Gabbard, now serving as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. She is being followed by such figures as Alan Dershowitz and John Fetterman.
• Even the entertainment cadres, always the flakiest part of the leftist coalition, are starting to peel away. Bill Maher and Jon Stewart are now attacking the Dems even more acidly than they did the GOP in years past.
• Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X opened the floodgates for free speech on the Net. Other infotech moguls such as Mark Zuckerberg have followed. (Plus, Musk just today seemed to be contemplating destroying Netflix, which hosts myriad trans grooming shows.)
• Almost all of Trump’s legal tormentors have been nullified, with the two most vindictive facing prison time for felonies.
• The sole thing working in their favor is lawfare in the form of various traffic court judges harassing the administration with bogus decisions. But these are being knocked down as soon as they come up. (Which is what Pamela Bondi has been doing, o ye of little faith.)
• Congressional Democrats are in a panic, with the party descending into a state of near civil war. House leader Adam Schiff is under investigation for felonies, while Chuck Schumer is harried by an insurrection by the party’s leftist fringe.
• Many of their current candidates have been unveiled as a pack of borderline psychopaths. The Jay Jones’s campaign for Virginia attorney general is collapsing after it was learned that he threatened Republicans — and their families — with death, while Katie Porter, the Dem frontrunner for California governor, has been crippled by videos showing her abusing reporters and relatives, along with accusations of spousal abuse.
• The Democrats have unleashed their ultimate weapon, the government shutdown, only to see it, not just fizzle out, but explode in their faces. If Donald Trump had accomplished only this, it would make his administration one of the most consequential in recent history.
• The party has no viable candidate for 2028. The choice hovers between Sandy O, a barmaid, J.B. Pritzker, a hack pol of the type most thought had gone extinct generations ago, and Gavin Newsom, a failed governor.

It will get worse. The DoJ is now targeting the Soros organizations, a key funding center for the left. Recent reports have revealed that the Biden EPA paid out billions to climate activists. Scarcely a day goes by without new reports of corruption and embezzlement by the American Left.  

The left is in free fall, and this needs to be recognized. It is not “troubled.” It is not “facing challenges.” It is not “in a state of turmoil.” It is in a state of disintegration. Its leadership is on the run. Its funding sources are drying up. Its infiltrators in government and the institutions are being identified and tossed into the street. The American left is facing existential catastrophe.

In response, the Democrats are abandoning normal politics as surely as the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, and the Khmer Rouge did before them. They have arrived at the same conclusion by the same methods. That the only road to power is by way of violence. We see this in Antifa and BLM, in the murder of Charlie Kirk and the vicious response, and in the rhetoric of Jay Jones and many others. As Matt Walsh puts it, “When I say they want us dead, it’s because they really do want us dead.”

Over the past year, leftists have revealed exactly who they are — Brownshirts, every last one of them. They are now hell-bent on total self-destruction, racing toward the cliff-edge like demon-possessed swine, to throw themselves into the waiting waters below.

Leftism has been a curse on this country for nearly a century. Perverting the young, debasing our politics, undercutting the civility that all societies require, empowering the criminal, the evil, and the deranged, and now finally turning to violence and murder.

We’ve had enough. It’s time to put an end to it. That’s what Donald Trump and his people are working toward. I say Godspeed.