Actually, he's not inaccurate to characterize it as war

Jimmy Hoffa's remarks in a warm-up speech prior to the MEC taking the stage in Detroit don't shock me. Not that I'm inured and blase about the matter.  It's just that I've considered the Democrat party and the American / Western left in general to be, since the early 70s, when the radicals decided to come back into the fold and "work within the system" and go to law school and journalism school and infitrate everything from think tanks to the churches to the corporate world, or become community organizers, to be the enemy of basic human freedom. 
Of course, this is a war. It's about very basic matters, such as the freedom to keep that which one earns or otherwise acquires lawfully.  It's about the preservation of common sense and the definitions of basic terms such as "gender," "family," "rights," "workers" and "investment."
I'm currently reading The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, the fresh look at the unfolding of the Great Depression.  One's jaw drops upon really absorbing just what a massive enlargement of the federal government FDR and such associates as Rex Tugwell, Ray Moley, Harold Ickes and David Lillienthal wrought.  And, of course, one can go back further, as Jonah Goldberg has done in Liberal Fascism, and see just how radical the progressive vision of Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson et al was.  Or one can fast-forward to the 1960s, and look at what LBJ inflicted on America with his Great Society programs.
But it was when the radicals, who as late as 1968 still considered themselves so outside the conventionally defined national debate (outside the convention - I just caught my own inadvertent pun), decided to take an incremental, from-the-inside approach that the finishing touches were put on theAmerican left's boldness.  They were now ready to use their hip new fantasies, such as environmental doom, flexibility in the definition of human sexuality, the morally relativistic refusal to defend any kind of notion of Western civilization, and the deconstruction of the basic notion of what art is, to marshall all the elements that had been coming down the pike for nearly a century and - well, go to war.
And while I always have and always will forthrightly assert that the MEC is a revolutionary socialist, I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that I think he is some kind of departure from a Democrat party that had prior to him been genial and decent.  We would have been at this juncture eight years earlier had Al Gore won the 2000 election, or four years earlier had John Kerry won in 2004.  If we'd had a less principled Republican as president in the 1980s, Tip O'Neill's sabotage of the fight against Soviet communism would have prolonged the Cold War or possibly brought about our defeat in it.
So let's all get any flinching that we need to do over with now.  Go ahead and envision just how nasty and vicious the national political scene is going to get over the next fifteen months.  Get your brain around it. And then resolve to win. No.  Matter.  What.