We're witnessing the total destruction of the Democratic Party as a viable national force. Comparing this destruction to the death of the Federalists and the Whigs isn't strong enough. It's more like the destruction of the British Liberal Party a century ago as politics became polarized between the Conservatives and Labour (and appropriate seeing as many fence-sitting figures like Jordan Peterson, Gad Saad, and Bill Maher identify as classical liberals or libertarians). The first great rending of the Liberals was in the 1880s, when the loss of the Liberal majority in the 1885 election lead Gladstone to cave to Irish nationalist demands to form a government. Liberal Unionists defected to the Tory camp and eventually merged with the Conservatives, leading to a period of dominance in which the Liberals only won four elections over the next 30 years, only one in which they won a majority, and only one in which they won the popular vote (1906, both cases). "Classical liberals" never bothered to read THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND, which explained why classical liberalism died in Britain as a political force. The last Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith attempted to tack to the left in the form of the People's Budget and the establishment of the British welfare state, but found themselves consistently outflanked by Labour (which had the backing of the unions) and were damaged by their insistence on Irish Home Rule, which nearly sparked a civil war between unionists and republicans. They were further undermined by World War I, which the Liberals were unable to prosecute effectively due to their autistic fixation on individual rights; Asquith was deposed mid-war in favor of David Lloyd George, a Liberal who drew the bulk of his support from the Tories. (To analogize this, imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had lost reelection in 1940 or 1944.) The Lloyd George/Asquith split permanently damaged Liberal unity, and when the Conservatives abandoned Lloyd George in 1922, both Liberal factions were swallowed up by Labour and the Tories. Anti-socialist Liberals defected to the Conservatives to combat Labour (Winston Churchill being one of the most prominent; he had served in all of the last Liberal ministries), left-Liberals defected to Labour, the remaining Liberals were wiped out electorally. We're seeing this happen to the Democrats. One victory---and it's really only one victory---last year has given the DSA a bad case of main character syndrome. NYC is foreign and leftist enough to elect a socialist mayor. Wisconsin isn't leftist enough to elect a socialist governor. Michigan isn't leftist enough to elect an Islamocommunist senator. Maine isn't leftist enough for a communist to dethrone Queen Susan. These are all places where Democrats have dominated statewide races in the Trump era, all places where the DSA candidates are trailing their Republican opponents by wide margins. "Vote blue no matter who" is a myth right-wingers tell themselves. Center-left and independent voters envision Democrats as being like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Hillary Clinton. They are NOT envisaging a durka durka jihadist, a mentally ill Korean who wants to abolish private property, or a cousin-fucking freak. The DSA's only natural constituencies are nons and the tiny fraction of downwardly mobile white millennials. The former are getting deported en masse. The latter are not enough to win nationally on their own. The DSA is a ginger group in the most literal sense, and if the Democrats weren't a party of incompetent nons and enfeebled old farts, they'd issue an ultimatum telling the DSA to disband or face expulsion. Left parties in other countries have done this, such as Canada's NDP expelling the Waffle in the 70s or British and Irish Labour expelling the Militant Tendency in the 80s. The DNC lacks the will or ability to do this beyond last-minute ass-covering measures like what they did to Graham Platner. The dead center and center-left are watching this and are either going to vote Republican or drop out of voting entirely, because for all their issues with Trump, they clearly view the DSA as the greater of two evils. Bill Maher, who's been a Democratic shill his entire career, said on his show last night that "[his] vote is in play" if the Democrats continue tacking to the left. Kamala Harris, the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee, is already courting the DSA in her blatantly obvious, soon-to-be-announced campaign. There's every indication that the DSA will continue their long march through the Democratic institutions, which will reduce the Democrats to a regional party of NYC, LA, and Chicago. Like the British Liberals, the American center-left is finished as an independent political force, and the bulk of its adherents will go to the Republicans.