Republicans who gloat over the Democrats’ collapse into ideological absurdity should wipe the smirk off their faces — because this is no time for schadenfreude. The disintegration of one of America’s two major political parties into a self-loathing, grievance-obsessed cult is not merely a partisan misfortune; it is a national calamity. When one-third of the electorate views the United States as irredeemably wicked, the rot spreads far beyond party lines. It corrodes civic confidence, poisons the culture, and fractures the very foundation of the republic.

The numbers are staggering — and damning. According to Gallup, the share of Democrats who say they are “very proud to be an American” has collapsed from 90% to just 36% in twenty-five years. The patriotic majority that once anchored the Democratic coalition has been exiled by a new orthodoxy that preaches perpetual guilt and cultural self-flagellation. And these remaining thirty-six percent are, if anything, those most estranged from the party’s militant direction.

A center-left survey by Welcome drives the point home: 70% of Americans now believe Democrats are out of touch with ordinary citizens — up nearly twenty points from 2013. Just 39% of voters believe the party stands for the right priorities; a crushing 59% say it does not. The verdict is not partisan spin; it is empirical proof that Democrats have severed their connection to the working and middle classes, the very people they once claimed to champion.

For decades, America’s universities have been churning out a class of ideological zealots — graduates marinated in Marxist grievance and “woke” racial essentialism — who now define the modern Democratic elite. These are people who genuinely believe that America is a global villain, not a beacon of liberty; that its founding principles are rooted in “systemic oppression” rather than universal freedom; that the rights of confused minors to undergo irreversible surgeries outweigh parents’ rights to protect their children.

This is no longer the party of Roosevelt or Truman, nor even of the pragmatic Bill Clinton. It is a faithless and humorless sect, enslaved to a nihilistic worldview that measures virtue by the intensity of one’s contempt for the nation itself. They do not wish to improve America — they wish to atone for it, and in doing so, they are burning down every institution that sustains the nation’s civic life.

The disaster is no longer theoretical. Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, have cynically filibustered a temporary federal funding bill, plunging the nation into a month-long government shutdown. Why? To appease the champagne radicals who bankroll their campaigns and dictate their agenda. This self-inflicted paralysis punishes not the wealthy elites who demand ideological purity, but the “humble Democrats” — the federal workers, the single parents, the retirees — who depend on the very programs their leaders are holding hostage.

Even the Welcome report, authored by Democrats, could not be clearer: if the party hopes to survive, it must return to the bread-and-butter issues that matter to ordinary Americans — the economy, the cost of living, health care, border security, and public safety. Yet the Democratic establishment refuses to listen. Instead, it doubles down on the abstract crusades of its donor class: climate extremism, “democracy preservation” theater, endless battles over abortion, identity politics, and the pathological obsession with destroying Donald Trump at all costs.

Look at the evidence. In states where Democrats enjoy unchallenged power — California, Illinois, New York — the ideological fever has reached its breaking point. Crime is rampant, taxes are punitive, infrastructure crumbles, and small businesses are throttled by regulation and lawlessness. Working-class families flee in droves, replaced by the affluent ideologues who can afford to moralize from their gated enclaves.

Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York — once testaments to American vitality — are descending into dysfunction. Should Zohran Mamdani, the avowed socialist darling of the far-left, win New York’s mayoralty, the last vestiges of fiscal sanity will vanish entirely. These urban centers, once the pride of the nation, are becoming cautionary tales of what happens when ideology replaces governance and self-hatred masquerades as progress.

When the Democratic Party loses its moral compass, the consequences reverberate across the entire political ecosystem. The radicalization of one side invites equal and opposite extremism on the other. The void left by Democrats’ collapse into cultural nihilism risks pulling the entire nation toward polarization, paralysis, and institutional decay.