by Victor Davis Hanson,

• Among the elite, the Democrats’ “blue wall” states were once considered a testament to the wisdom of the Electoral College. When that wall crumbled in 2016 to Donald Trump, the Electoral College suddenly was blasted as a relic of our anti-democratic Founders.

• The nine-person Supreme Court was once beloved. On issues like abortion, school prayer, same-sex marriage, pornography, and Miranda rights, the left cheered the court as it made the law and ignored legislatures and presidents.

Republican court picks—Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, Lewis Powell, John Roberts, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Potter Stewart, and Earl Warren—would often flip leftward. How could they not be swayed by the greater brilliance of their liberal colleagues?

From affirmative action to Roe v. Wade to Obamacare, apostate Republican justices for a half-century greenlighted legislating from the bench.

In response, was there any serious right-wing talk of packing the court with six additional justices to slow down its overreaching left-wing majority—or of a mob massing at the home of a left-wing justice? Certainly not.

But now?

Suddenly a narrow constructionist majority has returned matters of abortion to the states. And the once-beloved court is being slandered by leftist insurrectionists as illegitimate.

Every sort of once-unthinkable attack on the courts is now permissible.

Confidential draft opinions are leaked illegally. A senior senator threatens justices by name at the doors of the court. The homes of justices are surrounded by heckling protesters. And the very life of a justice is threatened by a would-be assassin close to his home.

• Consider also the Senate filibuster. Former President Barack Obama not long ago ranted that it was racist and a 180-year-old relic.

Obama’s logic was infantile. When Democrats were in the Senate minority, he was giddy that the filibuster could slow down the Republican majority. Indeed, while a senator, Obama himself filibustered the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

• Can the Jan. 6 committee issue some universal declaration that defeated candidates should not question the integrity of an election, much less call for it to be ignored?

Apparently not. In 2016, a defeated Hillary Clinton claimed the winner, Donald Trump, was illegitimate—this from the architect of the entire Russian-collusion hoax.

• On racial matters, the left is most intellectually bankrupt.

During the recent confirmation hearings of an African American nominee to the Supreme Court, federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the left alleged that tough questioners were racists and sexists for “bullying” Jackson.

Yet she got the kid-glove treatment compared with the character assassinations of past conservative nominees. Brett Kavanaugh was smeared as teen-aged rapist and targeted by former Democratic media heartthrob Michael Avenatti, now an imprisoned felon.

Currently, loud mobs of affluent, young white women have been circling the home of African American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—just 1 of 5 court justices who voted to let the states decide the status of abortion.

• In the left-wing mind, the buffoonish Capitol riot on Jan. 6 was an “insurrection.”

Yet, the much larger May 31, 2020, riot that sought to storm the White House grounds and sent the president into a bunker was the sort of mob violence that “was not going to stop,” in the words of now-Vice President Kamala Harris.

The recent pro-abortion mob assault on the Arizona state Senate, the left insists, was an apparent cry of the heart.