How watermelon radicals made Democrats the party of appeasement

The case for a military strike in Iran is stronger than any we’ve seen in decades.  The ethnonationalist, imperial regime in Tehran enslaves and murders its own by the tens of thousands, threatens genocide on infidels throughout the region and promises death to the United States. Yet the Democratic Party is pulling out all stops to block President Donald Trump from continuing this war of liberation.  Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer calls the attack “unpopular, immoral and illegal.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries says it “will end in failure” — ignoring its unprecedented initial success in decapitating Iran’s leadership and destroying its defenses. California Gov.Gavin Newsom calls it “illegal” and “dangerous.” The hyperbolic rhetoric seems unschooled and unhinged, as well as factually wrong and legally dubious.It’s likely to remind already skeptical voters that Democrats cannot be trusted on national security matters.How has the bold internationalist party of Franklin D.

Roosevelt and John F.Kennedy become so small, petulant and inward-looking in the face of an undeniable global threat?That question makes Democrats like me and, I suspect, Pennsylvania Sen.

John Fetterman feel like strangers in a foreign land inside our party.To be sure, some of this reaction is raw reflexive opposition to everything Trump. If the president found a cure for cancer tomorrow, Democrats would likely oppose it. Part of the pathology, too, is due to the Democratic Party’s intellectual capture by a left-leaning “diplomatic class” that believes even terrorists can be persuaded, through more “process” and cash payments, to abide by the international “rules-based order.” That delusion led us to the ill-fated JCPOA nuclear deal, whereby Tehran played us as chumps.But another explanation can be found in a growing extremist movement inside the Democrats’ activist base — a radical cadre of socialists and Islamists that’s being...