Pelosi/Breed
© TwitterHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi • San Francisco Mayor London Breed
That screeching noise you hear is not just the sound of Democrats wailing over their collapsing popular support. It is also the squeal of their tires as they race away from their anti-law-and-order policies in hope of avoiding an electoral smash against reality. They've suddenly realized that — surprise! — there aren't as many voters for murder and industrial-scale smash-and-grab thievery as there are for combating those increasingly prevalent crimes. The Washington Examiner's Sarah Westwood has reported that liberals are starting to embrace gun ownership and are backing measures to combat crime.

In an astonishing reversal, San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, launched emergency police intervention in the city's crime-wrecked Tenderloin district . This is the woman who cut police and sheriff budgets by $120 million to pander to 2020's Black Lives Matter rioters. The decision brought a rain of ruin down on her metropolis, and now even its left-liberal residents have had enough. Breed's rhetoric has, if anything, changed even more dramatically than her policies. Announcing a 180-degree turnaround, she said,
"It's time to rein in criminals who are destroying our city. ... And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies, and less tolerant of all the bulls*** that has destroyed our city."
Can other Democrats do the same and salvage the next election? Not likely. Even if a Democratic mayor here or there can perform such a volte-face, that option is not available to the party on a national level.

It would take Houdini to escape the bind that Democrats have put themselves in after allowing, indeed warmly welcoming, a large phalanx of extremists into their midst. Democrats wield power only because these radicals are there. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has 90-plus members and can demand far-left policies in exchange for its votes. Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn't actually disagree with them but knows they are massively out of step with public opinion. The problem is that she depends on them.

So neither she nor President Joe Biden can attempt a Sister Souljah moment, replicating former President Bill Clinton's successful, electorally calculated repudiation of a rapper who advocated black murder of white people. There is nowhere for the Democratic leadership to draw a bright line, for the post-modern Marxists are posted throughout the party. Alternatively, they're in the position of unpaid soldiers in a banana republic who have rolled their tanks onto the presidential lawn.

Extreme progressivism, with its attendant lunacies on immigration, spending, education, and a host of other matters, is alienating minority voters, without whom Democrats are doomed. In our magazine cover story this week, Jim Antle examines the switch among Hispanics to support the Republican Party. It started as a trickle a decade ago and looks like it's becoming a landslide. Republican hopes that Hispanics were culturally conservative turn out to be better founded than Democratic pipe dreams that minority voters would give the party of the Left a majority for a generation.