How soon will it take the Democrats to return to their roots?

OPINION:

Democrats have always been progressive elites by nature. Hillary Clinton’s characterization of the masses as “deplorables” and Joe Biden’s honing of that description as “virulent … dregs of society” attest to that.

Why are Democrats like that? In the early 20th century progressives became intrigued with social Darwinism, eugenics and survival of the fittest. Rather than fighting the capitalist rich, they thought it might be best to eliminate the poor.

From 1907 to 1932, Democrats advocated for social cleansing, rooting out the “unfit,” such as criminals, imbeciles, “useless” or inferior people. In Indiana they passed a law requiring sterilization of “criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” They devised a plan to sterilize 10 percent of the American population while the Democrat-controlled Southern state legislatures passed laws prohibiting interracial marriages.

In 1924 they pushed for and saw enacted an immigration law intended to keep undesirable migrants out of the country. In the early 1930s, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, petitioned the government to set up a code “for the better distribution of babies to protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.” Democrats in the “Solid South” promoted this superior race mentality by creating the white supremacist crowd called the Ku Klux Klan.

But the racial problems in the 1950s Deep South caught up to Democrats. A rising iconoclast group called the New Left used “white guilt” to pressure President Johnson and a Democrat-controlled Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Act and the Immigration and Naturalization Act. Ironically President Lyndon Johnson, with support from his colleagues on the other side of the congressional aisle, had to drag his fellow Democrats across the finish line, kicking and screaming.

The New Left needed a political presence to become truly effective. Since the Democrats controlled government and had buckled under their pressure, the Far Left descended on the 1968 Democratic Convention to insert themselves into the political process. However they were relegated outside the convention center where their demonstrations cost the party the presidential election. After that George McGovern led a reform commission that ended “presidential election by middle-aged, middle-class white men,” and began catering to minorities and women.

Across the aisle, Republicans decided to capitalize on Democratic fractures. When the Republicans trounced the opposition in 1972, Nixon’s War on Drugs targeted blacks.

Consequently, the party of Abraham Lincoln, which 100 years earlier had pushed to end slavery, now assumed the mantle of “white versus black,” or as it has morphed over time, white versus minority. On the flip side, the party which earlier in the century wanted to eliminate the “unfit” now welcomed them with open arms for the votes they brought with them.

Today Democrats exploit this role reversal under the mantra of “identity politics,” pitting white privileged men against everyone else — victims. They cloak this divide-and-conquer strategy with an all-inclusive narrative that features diversity and multiculturalism, open borders and socialism.

But what if the Democratic dreams play out? Look at the 7,000 plus caravan coming this way, a motley collection of illegal immigrants well supported by Democrats.

According to the U.N. World Population Prospects, the developed world contains a little over one billion people. This number is expected to remain constant, but the world population of 7.3 billion today is expected to climb to 9 billion by 2050.

Developed countries have prospered better than others because of capitalism, technological innovations and a strong work ethic. But also because they have limited their populations to a workable size. Yet given the above scenario, what if there were open borders and socialism in an all-inclusive world? Would the global population even out across the earth? Hardly. Many, if not most, would try to move to places offering better conditions, especially the United States which is the Number 1 destination in the world for migrants.

As the world population rises, though, it will be harder to support everyone through socialism. A dwindling percentage of the people will generate wealth, not to mention the lack of reinvestment and incentive government control will bring. Imagine, though, if just another billion people were to migrate to countries that offered social services. These countries would collapse economically.

What then? Ironically elite Democrats would abandon socialism and open borders in a heartbeat. Their narrative would quickly pivot to population control, eugenics and birth control, throwbacks to their earlier 20th century thinking. But by then America would look much differently, both population-wise and economically: 400 million people and less than two percent annual growth. It would be too late for Democrats to turn back the clock.

• Robert A. Taft is a former deputy assistant secretary of Commerce for international operations, CEO of the World Trade Center Association of Florida, and consultant with the Defense Intelligence Agency.