On September 5, I posted ‘Today’s Democrats aren’t those your grandparents admired’.

One of my readers, H E, has given me permission to repost his comment, which is worthy of its own entry:

Very good writeup about the current ideology and tactics of the Democrat party. The Democrat party has been taken over completely by Marxist radicals, now calling themselves “Progressives” . The party is a monolith, there are no “Conservative Democrats” or “Centrist Democrats” represented in it. As you said, the current Democrat Party is not the party of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy.

As a 62 year old American, I can look back and see that many of the actions of the today’s “Progressives” are not new, they go back 50 years to the late 1960s. At that time, radical groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers murdered policemen and blew up government buildings. But back then, there were countervailing forces in society that pushed back against the radicals and stopped them. In response, the radicals changed tactics. They infiltrated society in order to gain control of the levers of power and to neutralize any entities that might oppose them. Today we can see that they have mostly succeeded in this regard: the administrative and judicial branches of government are dominated by radicals, and the mass media, academia, mainstream religious organizations, and labor unions now serve the Progressive agenda.

In response to the Trump presidency, Progressives have dropped their façade and come into the open about their policies and goals.

One can no longer deny the following facts about American society:

-There is an entity which can be referred to as the Deep State comprised of unelected government officials, businessmen, and military officials who secretly manipulate and direct national policy in accords with the Progressive agenda.

-The Democrat Party is the political arm of the Deep State.

-There is little effective difference in the agendas of the establishment Democrat and Republican parties. Both parties serve the interests of the Deep State.

-The mass media is the propaganda arm of the Deep State. Its purpose is to broadcast the Deep State’s narrative of events and to shut down public discussions that go against the narrative.

-Academia and the education bureaucracy indoctrinate the youth into the values of the Deep State.

I could not agree more.

I am close to H E’s age and clearly remember the notional Progressives’ antics from 50 years ago. Who could have imagined that they would be at the forefront of American politics today with even more madness?

The one element I would add to this list is the infiltration of the Church by these people. That started over a century ago in the US with Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel and continued in the 20th century with the Communist Party’s ‘honeyed words to the church people’.

Decades earlier, in 1840, an Italian Jesuit coined the term ‘social justice’. In the 20th century and today, using Antonio Gramsci’s passive revolution tactics, a number of theologians and professors, such as the late Joseph Buttigieg — Democrat candidate Pete Buttigieg’s father — pushed for ‘social justice’ and ‘change’ in the Catholic Church.

There were secret agents in the clergy, too, in the decades preceding Vatican II.

Today, many Democrats — Catholic and Protestant — are working to help illegals via church agencies. Even the Salvation Army is at it, intimidating an Epoch Times reporter who was at the border earlier this year.

The Democrats are bad news.