At this writing, legacy and social media are filled with stories about President Donald Trump’s phenomenally successful address before Congress Tuesday night, and congressional Democrats’ pathetic and embarrassing display. In addition to Rep. Al Green’s antics and the little protest paddles Democrat senators and representatives waved, they also refused to stand or applaud for anything, including Trump’s recognition of 13-year-old DJ Daniel, who has been fighting brain cancer. Daniel hopes to become a police officer, and Trump made him an honorary member of the Secret Service during his speech, prompting Daniel to break into a broad grin and hug Secret Service Director Sean Curran, who presented Daniel with his “official” badge.

It was a moment of loud cheering and some happy tears. But Democrats sat in sullen silence. (With one notable exception: Democrat Rep. Laura Gillen stood and applauded for young DJ, to her credit.)

Ever since the November 2024 election, pundits and politicians on the Left and Right alike have been marveling at the Democratic Party’s spectacular collapse. By way of example, Claremont Review of Books senior editor William Voegeli wrote a recent piece for the publication titled “Now What? The Democratic Party after 2024.” Voegeli’s thoughtful essay examines the many causes of Democrats’ defeat last year, and the problems the party faces mounting a successful return to relevance.

Voegeli is honest; he states, for example, that Democrats’ blanket condemnation of Trump voters as white supremacists, racists and fascists is belied by the evidence. Most notably, he writes that “the Democratic brand has been damaged by close association with the social justice agenda, terminology, and worldview,” which, he admits, is “highly popular with the subset of voters who identify as progressives,” but “offend(s) a much larger portion of the electorate.”

2024 made that clear enough. Voters across almost all demographics rejected the “progressive” stances on illegal immigration, crime, the economy and allowing gender-confused males into girls’ bathrooms and sports teams.

Voegeli quotes more moderate Democrats like Reps. Ritchie Torres and Adam Smith, who are frankly furious at the party’s lurch to the hard left. The problem, according to Voegeli, is that most Democrats “are reluctant to antagonize the party’s social justice vanguard” — a powerful and well-funded collection of foundations, donors, intellectuals and activists who exert outsized influence on the Democratic Party.

Voegeli and others refer to this as “the shadow party.”

Although there are “shadow” actors on both sides of the aisle, Voegeli writes, “The Democratic shadow party is not only more formidable than its Republican counterpart but wields greater power within its own party’s coalition.”

While Voegeli correctly identifies the component parts of the Democrat’s “shadow party,” he never really explains how Democrats got to a point where the voices with the greatest power and influence are demanding that the party and its politicians take positions a majority of Americans find abhorrent.

In fact, it is because Democrats’ “shadow party” consists of people and institutions who are completely unaccountable to the public.

Academics, for example, play a far larger role in Democrat policies than in Republicans’. And academia is filled with tenured “intellectuals” who can peddle socially destructive ideas with little fear of consequences.

The same can be said of think tanks, foundations and “aid” agencies — institutions that we’ve recently discovered have been gorging themselves on billions of taxpayer dollars. These organizations are hidden behind the scenes and operate within a bureaucratic matrix that no one fully understood or had complete access to — at least until Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency crew got access and started making revelation after shocking revelation.

And then there is what I call the “Obama approach” to law enforcement: bypassing the accountability of the legislative process by simply refusing to enforce existing law. Former President Barack Obama could not get Congress to pass the immigration amnesty legislation he wanted, so he just put the word out - we’ll be selectively enforcing immigration law. The Biden “administration” — a puppet presidency run largely by Obama holdovers — pumped that up on steroids.

State and local governments run by Democrats have taken a similar approach. They give illegal aliens “sanctuary.” Prosecutors (many of whom were elected with funds provided by the “shadow party” actors) refuse to prosecute crimes, release criminals back on the streets, don’t protect property from thieves or squatters.

Voting has been affected. In California, it’s illegal to ask for identification as a condition of voting. Fourteen states do not ask for identification or proof of citizenship and residency. Without those requirements, elections are easily manipulated and virtually unauditable.

And when something happens that the Left doesn’t like and couldn’t control (despite their best efforts), it’s time to go ask a federal judge — appointed for life — to issue a nationwide injunction.

These practices have given Democrats decades of political dominance. But that has now become their undoing.

They have grown so accustomed to answering to no one that their policies have become utterly divorced from reality: Shoplifting is no big deal. Criminals are just misunderstood. Citizenship doesn’t matter. Government should be able to censor speech. Foreign students here on visas should be able to destroy property, disrupt classes and terrorize Jewish faculty, students and staff. Men are women and women are men if they say they are, and biological males have no physical advantage over females, so let them take the awards in sport. Put sex offenders in women’s prisons and little girls’ locker rooms; anyone who complains about the injuries (physical and otherwise) to actual women is the problem. Children can consent to chemical castration or surgical mutilation. Schools exist to instruct students about their teachers’ sexual preferences and foster gender dysphoria, and parents have no right to know what’s going on in the classroom or in the curriculum. (We can teach porn to your kids, Mom and Dad, but you can’t read it aloud at a school board meeting.)

It was only a matter of time before this whole ridiculous edifice came crashing down. These absurd and destructive ideologies are terrible and wrong, and Americans hate them. This would have been obvious long ago had anyone — anyone — responsible for the creation and dissemination of these ideologies been accountable to the electorate.

But they weren’t. Now, Democrats are facing the consequences.

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