Since the French Revolution, leftwing politics, as distinct from the liberal sort, have been essentially about revenge, including in Great Britain with the founding of the Labour Party in 1900, an event recently characterized by the Daily Telegraph as an act of vengeance. Then, leftist vengeance meant class vengeance. While it remains so to some degree, it has lately been greatly expanded, complicated and fortified by identity politics, in which class resentments are compounded and confused by innumerable others hitherto unimagined — and some, indeed, almost unimaginable. Most began as aspects of what was called “grievance” politics, which over the past decade or so has matured as revenge politics: the politics of a bitter, irrational, infantile, implacable, wholly gratifying and fulfilling rage. As the Democratic Party has moved rapidly and resolutely leftward over the past six or seven years, the Donkeys’ political agenda has been narrowed and reduced to one of programmatic revenge: “Let a thousand flowers bloom.”

Since the 1960s, the American left (inspired and aided by the agents of leftism abroad, in Europe, South America, the Soviet Union and in China) had been searching for a fundamental, essential constitutional weakness in American society and the American polity that they could develop as a fatal flaw by exaggerating and exploiting it. What remained of the Old Left thought it was capitalist economics. The New Left agreed, but added what it saw as authoritarian capitalist culture. The inventors of the 1619 Project thought they had discovered it in slavery. In recent years Democrats had a brainstorm and decided it was repressive identity politics. As they were also the institutional propagandists on behalf of multiculturalism and mass global immigration, destructive inspiration came naturally to them here. Americans loved capitalism. Slavery had been abolished a century and a half before, and relations between blacks and whites in the United States were improving drastically — obviously so. Many other countries had histories of economic inequality and slavery, including European and American ones; neither was unique to the United States. …

The new American revolutionists, having tried so many stratagems based on what they saw as America’s “exceptional” sins and vulnerabilities — and failed — decided to begin again with the most fundamental, permanent and obvious of all of them: human nature, with its readiness to believe that people who differ from you also hate you, are directly responsible for your problems, and against whom consequently you should avenge yourself.