"...upbeat, smug, and assured on their way to oblivion."

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness that in 2020, Democrats may

...be trapped by their own rhetoric and virtue signaling—and end up going the full McGovern in 2020.

...The rapid growth in domestic natural gas use has ensured that the United States has exceeded even most “green” European countries in meeting the now abandoned Paris Climate Accords.

U.S. energy production has all but eliminated the prior strategic stranglehold of the Persian Gulf states over U.S. Middle East policy or, for that matter, over American foreign policy itself.

Changing demography, little pushback from a younger generation of progressive secular Jews, and the socialist drift of the Democratic Party have all legitimized the idea that one can fixate on liberal and democratic Israel, one of 23 Middle Eastern countries, one of over 190 nations, and apply standards of social justice to it in a way not commensurate with criticism of totalitarian Cuba, Iran, or China—and then embed that bias within a larger progressive take on the “Palestinians.”

...anti-Semitism is a losing political issue, because it is never a static hatred. Once it begins, and is contextualized as “anti-Israel” or directed merely against larger “white privilege,” it only increases—and eventually will turn off most of the electorate. For Democrats to excise this hatred from their ranks, they would have to alienate anti-Semites. This they will not do—and thereby they will pay dearly for their appeasement.

...Apart from its abject immorality, infanticide is not a viable political position, and few politicians—many Democrats included—would wish to run in a general election condoning it.

...Will the impoverished white Tulare mechanic or the southern Ohioan custodian pay taxes for reparations for Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Spike Lee, Oprah, and Ta-Nehisi Coates?

Open borders and the end of ICE. Sanctuary cities and open borders are already hemorrhaging voters from the Democratic Party as Donald Trump proved in 2016. The news cycles almost weekly highlight yet another violent crime committed by an illegal alien, and somehow aided and abetted by the prior laxity of a sanctuary jurisdiction. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are not roundly despised by the Latino community; in fact, ICE officers are frequently Latinos themselves, and often are called into by immigrant communities to deport illegal alien gang members and criminals preying on those in their neighborhoods. Open borders and ending ICE are also not 51 percent issues—a fact that will become ever clearer as spring and summer caravans start pulling up at the southern border.

“Medicare for All.” Seniors, fairly or not, and logically or not, feel Medicare was a pact into which they paid while young in order to be eligible for payoffs they would receive when old. To open up Medicare for all will be felt by a growing Boomer retiring population as making a nearly insolvent Medicare available for none.

...Cancelation of student debt. The images of the archetypical college student have taken a hit in the progressive era of crybaby campus social justice warriors shouting down speakers, toppling statues, whining about safe spaces, microaggressions, and white-privilege obsessions.

“You owe us” taxes. A good way to lose donors and voters is to stick it to high-earners and do so with a certain bitter venom that they “owe” what they made to “us.”

...These nostrums are mostly socialist redistributionist schemes with no history of efficacy, but with ample evidence that they only impoverish and embitter, and they will return the Democrats in 2020 to 1972 and 1984—upbeat, smug, and assured on their way to oblivion.

...Barring a war or depression, the 2020 election, for all the Democrats’ effort to demonize, bleed, slander or impeach Donald Trump, will be as it always is: a Manichean choice. This time around it will be simply the Trump agenda versus socialism, as it was when an embattled Nixon claimed that 1972 was either “the silent majority” or “Woodstock Nation.”

In 1972, the Democrats fell into a Jacobin cycle as they vied to devour all but the most left-wing. In 2020 that prior effort will look counterrevolutionary—and we will see candidates say things and push agendas that we have likely never experienced before in this country.

Read more here.