Four young Congresswomen – not even Senators – accomplished something that eluded years of Democratic Presidents and their woes.

Jimmy Carter in his malaise, Bill with Monica and his cigar, Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War – none of that was able to accomplish what these four young Congresswomen accomplished.

They destroyed the Democratic Party.

It was a perfect storm that began around the year 2020. China leaked a bioengineered virus from its biowarfare lab – probably accidentally – to produce worldwide mass hysteria and lockdowns of billions of people.

It gathered steam when a thug died in the hands of a white cop. Protests and riots ensued, weirdly exempted from the lockdowns.

At the time, the country was already weary of Donald Trump and his often productive but typically provocative antics.

These four Congresswomen seized the moment. Never great fans of America, they seized that time of weakness to destroy her, or at least act out their anger at her.

The death of the thug became emblematic of white police brutality. Never mind that this particular thug probably died of drugs, not a chokehold. Never mind that more Blacks die at the hands of Black police officers than at the hands of white ones. Never mind that the leading cause of death among young Black men is other young Black men. Never mind that the murder rate among Blacks is seven-times that of whites, and nearly all Black murders are at the hands of other Blacks.

Led by these Congresswomen, the Left decided that sticking to those inconvenient facts was . . .

RACIST!

The narrative was more important than any dumb facts. To disagree with their false narrative or their false charge of racism served only to prove you’re a . . .

RACIST!

Your only salvation was confession, and then they might let you off easy with just a few hundred hours of DEI training.

Oh yes, DEI. The Left’s long-standing reverse discrimination called “Affirmative Action” had failed, and their effort to sustain their failed discrimination was also failing.

So, the Left did what they do when their policies fail: They rebranded it. (See, e.g., communism rebranded as socialism, rebranded as liberalism, rebranded as wokeism, rebranded as progressivism.)

The new brand for “Affirmative Action” was “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” This new brand was the same as the old brand, except, this time, it was coupled with brainwashing.

You had to not only engage in reverse discrimination; you had to believe in it. You had to believe that the company (or college or whatever) was stronger if the guy down the hall had dark skin.

Painting the skin of employees a la Justin Trudeau blackface was not Kosher, but almost. You could hire into a company or admit into a college a privileged Black kid (or ¾ Black kid like Barack Obama’s daughters admitted to Harvard) and get full DEI credit.

The problem was that DEI, like Affirmative Action, tended to conflict with a meritocracy. But the DEI supremacists had a solution to that problem: Do away with merit. Merit became a code word for . . .

RACIST!

The only content of your character that mattered was the pigmentation of your skin. If that meant Boeing planes fall out of the sky because 2 + 2 = 4 regardless of the skin color of engineers who would like to say otherwise, well, that’s . . .

RACIST!

The planes are just . . .

RACIST!

While we’re at it, they thought, let’s do away with sex. A nominee for the Supreme Court announced rather proudly that she could not define “woman.”

That proved to be a slippery slope. Next thing we knew, people that everyone else defines as not women – you know, people with a Y chromosome, high testosterone levels, a penis and testicles – were calling themselves “women” and competing in women’s sports like swimming and even boxing. Unsurprisingly, in view of their testosterone levels and male musculature, they usually won. By a pool length or a knockout.

At which time they joined the women in the showers. If you complained, you were the sex equivalent of . . .

RACIST!

You were alphabet-people-phobic. For that, you get another few hundred hours of DEI training, and then you get cancelled. No soup for you, and no career either.

Two more things. Bear with me.

They spent taxpayer money like drunken sailor-ettes. The Orwellian-titled Inflation Reduction Act threw a trillion dollars in borrowed fuel onto an inflation inferno. That was after previous boondoggle bills literally paid people not to work.

So . . . you pay people not to work at producing goods, and then you wonder why demand seems to be outpacing supply to produce price inflation.

Ah, they knew that would be the effect. But it was worth a little inflation to get money out of the hands of people who earned it and into the hands of people who voted for them.

Speaking of people who vote for them, they opened the southern border. A gazillion people came. All were illegal, many were criminals, some were murderers.

But almost all had darkish skin. So, if you don’t like them illegally entering our country, and some of them committing criminal acts here, and many sponging off our welfare state, well, then you’re a . . .

RACIST!

It all worked for a little while. But reality has a way of intervening. Systems that disregard merit tend to become unmeritorious. They get reputations for that, and there are consequences. People get turned off by planes falling from the sky, applicants being evaluated on the basis of their skin, illegal immigrants whom we can’t call illegal, prices going through the roof, lockdowns keeping the kids in the damn house all day, teachers who won’t teach, and all the rest.

In the end, the Squad’s passion to destroy America failed because America is, even now, very powerful and basically sensible.

But they did destroy the Democratic Party. The people voted the bums out. Not the Squad – most of them are in safe Democrat districts – but their Democrat colleagues. Especially their senile President and his smiley, witless, joyless VP.

So far, the judgment of the people has been without regrets. My sense is that if the election were held today, the Democrats would lose even more resoundingly.

It won’t be easy for the Democrats to recover. In theory, they can change their policies, but it’s hard to abandon a position when you’ve already announced that to do so is . . .

RACIST!

It’s one thing to argue that your position is the better one on the merits. That argument allows for negotiation and compromise. It’s another thing to climb down from a moralistic perch where you shout that your opponent’s focus on merit simply proves he’s a . . .

RACIST!

We’ve never seen a political climate quite like the current one. The Democrats went way out on a race limb, sawed it off, and are now surprised that they and their limb – not the tree – have fallen.