By David Bittinger

May 6^th, 2026

Political consultants are about as theatrical as your average tax accountant. A notable exception is Democrat James Carville, a reptilian Louisianan angrier and more predatory than a snapping alligator. He set out his political strategy once: “When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil.”

Carviile rose to prominence in late-millennium America, a strange place politically and culturally. (The Goo Goo Dolls? The Backstreet Boys?) Seems wistfully strange now, but from 1998 to 2001, the federal budget actually ran surpluses. A major reason for that budget fitness was the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, which relaxed the U.S. defense spending binge that had economically crushed that communist empire. Thank principled President (1981 – 1989) Ronald Reagan for that.

Maybe also some grudging thanks to unprincipled President (1993 – 2001) Bill Clinton, who after a shaky first term won re-election through the political compromise strategy of triangulation. This gambit allowed Clinton to co-opt key policies of Republican “budget hawks” in Congress who came to power pledging balanced budgets — and delivered them.

Migrating Republican Dick Morris — a much quieter Clinton political consultant — was behind that strategy. President Clinton, a Democrat who would do anything for popularity, was triangulation-backed into alliance with his conservative adversary Republican House Speaker Newt Gingirich, forming a “team of rivals” more unlikely than Lincoln’s. That odd couple’s beautiful child was those balanced budgets, which today seem antique as etiquette guides. Maybe budget surpluses will reappear in an alternate universe.

Clinton’s loud weapon was his main political advisor Carville. He successfully coached Clinton on outmaneuvering Republicans, blaming a mild recession on President George H.W. Bush. That Bush promised in 1988 — “read my lips” — not to raise income taxes. But two years later, as an old-school budget-responsible fellow, he reneged on that promise. Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid” cartooned anyone who failed to recognize the imperfection of the current economy as dumb.

A Carville cartoon also defended America’s Lothario-In-Chief against the hurt accounts of his numerous female playthings from Arkansas to the Oval Office. In 1994 Carville commented on Clinton’s covert companions: “If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”

Always knowing which way the wind is blowing, Carville would never make such a remark in the 21st century. A consultant paid handsomely to advise and galvanize Democrats, his TV-worthy snarks change with the times. Just a few weeks ago he offered this one:

“If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one they should make Puerto Rico and D.C. a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F*** it. Eat our dust.”

Back in 1994 you could insult random obscure women as trailer park bimbos star-struck by Bubba Bill. But there’s an insult creeping through 2026 America that’s more depraved. It was articulated there by the Democrats’ lead hitman Carville.

Now Democrats can insult democracy itself (while claiming it’s the incumbent Republican president who is the existential threat to democracy). Carville is the Democrats’ barometer of aggression, of what they can get away with and laugh about. They can even dust off Supreme Court packing, which the grandfather of leftist absolutism FDR famously tried and failed at.

Democrat power brokers are peddling a new proposition in 2026, though it’s couched in fantasies about their own pluralism and the other side’s Nazism. Here’s their true proposition, free of euphemism:

Big fat government is no longer enough. Open borders feeding our global voter drives aren’t enough. Taxing and regulation reaching ever more deeply into every pocket and mom-and-pop business is not enough. No, all that is not enough anymore, not for Democratic Socialists, our aggressive new name.

The message is that America should be — like Chicago — a one-party state. The People’s Republic West.

Brace yourselves, those of you whose knowledge of “progressive” history has not been buried by The New York Times, big-city political machines, and the educational establishment that’s turned most teachers and professors into evangelicals of leftist dogma. The reds are rising again.

If you review the 32 years between Carville’s insulting his president’s paramours and his determination to subvert American democracy, you see how liberal hectoring has accelerated to Marxist-style hectoring and criminal enthusiasm. Sure, two Republicans managed to get elected president during that period (one of them actually a maverick New York Democrat) but those push-back victories were won against a tide of leftist mob rage that’s still rising.

Painful to review what would have seemed impossible not that long ago: America’s financial and cultural capital New York City electing a hardly-concealed communist mayor. Only 25 years after Islamist foes of Western civilization committed mass murder at the World Trade Centers, New York elected a — what?? A pro-Hamas foe of capitalism who in 2021 publicly urged comrades to pursue the “end goal” of “seizing the means of production.”

Did anyone express concern about this horror coming to New York? Actually, a couple great writers did.

“When we hear about rent control or gun control, we may think about rent or guns but the word that really matters is ‘control.’ That is what the political left is all about, as you can see by the incessant creation of new restrictions in places where they are strongly entrenched in power, such as San Francisco or New York.” — Thomas Sowell, 2008.

“The only way that he (Mamdani) could be stopped, if the left and the center and the right were to combine and say: ‘We don’t like each other. We have very little in common. But this man represents the destruction of our way of life.” — Victor Davis Hanson, as Zohran Mamdani’s smiley-faced Marxism approached to ruin New York in 2025.

So how did this happen, this dark ocean of Marxism overflowing New York and other cities? Another of the “Democratic Socialists” (crypto-Marxists) is now the mayor of Seattle. Another almost became mayor of Minneapolis, but was blocked by panicked Democrat power brokers as Bernie Sanders was strategically blocked in favor of Hillary back in 2016.

The Chicago version isn’t exactly Marxist; he’s too dumb to read political philosophy about seizing the means of production. He likes simpler subjects such as education, meaning teacher strikes, and reparations, meaning free money.

Even Thomas Jefferson’s home of Virginia, which in November, 2025 would not have seemed vulnerable to extreme leftist politics, elected as governor a woman posing as a reasonable centrist. Once elected, she ripped off the disguise to reveal a left-wing zealot immediately raising taxes, attacking illegal immigration enforcement, enforcing DEI discrimination, and pushing a one-party people’s gerrymandered republic.

A political “progression” turned the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to the one of Ilhan Omar and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. In just a few dumbed-down decades, it’s injected malignant cells of Marxism into traditional liberal grievance.

That might have happened because those grievances were at heart poses, and the claimed compassion was always fake. In the era of news delivered by decaying legacy media and prosperity focused on government beneficiaries, the left has shown that it truly believes in nothing except its own power.

This can’t be coherently debated because its advocates have moved beyond debate to threats of violence and actual violence, to suggestions of assassination producing actual assassination attempts, to elections and census counts set up by open borders to recruit many millions of non-citizens. To “F*** it. Eat our dust.”

Civil rights laws protecting necessary rights from discrimination have been succeeded by DEI laws aggressively discriminating against the villain race. Sports venues and locker rooms of girls have been opened to creepy men. Criminals have become victims and victims have become ignored. An immigrant community in Minneapolis was awarded a lavish crime franchise because they vote the right way.

Representative democracy’s free people and free markets have been warned by Carville. He’s something of a Paul Revere from hell. We better take him seriously.

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Long ago Bittinger moved from Chicago to a cheese-based land with Democrats not quite as nefarious as Illinois’. He misses proximity to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the occasional good White Sox game, but enjoys writing for JKN’s savvy subscribers and re-reading “A Confederacy of Dunces.”