In the ever-expanding category of political behavior that is shocking but hardly surprising is Vice President Kamala Harris’s ostentatious snub of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he addressed a joint session of Congress on July 24.

She decided to set out on the campaign trail, where she garnered only a tiny fraction of the attention she got for dissing America’s most important Middle Eastern ally and friend. She secured none of the praise that would have come to her had she taken command of the august setting in which Netanyahu delivered a stirring invocation from the moral high ground of the House podium of the absolute good of liberal democracy and the utter evil of Islamist terrorism.

Harris could have gone much further and done much to stoke her presidential campaign if she had used this first day of her bid for the White House to execute a “Sister Souljah moment,” as Bill Clinton did in 1992 when he distanced himself from an advocate of violence against white people and secured the admiration and votes of decent people sickened by Leftist racial militancy.

If Harris had hosted the Israeli prime minister and shaken his hand while explicitly supporting the rightness of Israel’s existential fight against Iran and its Islamofascist proxies, she’d have made voters and the rest of the world sit up and note that a new and better America might be at hand. She’d have undercut accusations that she was on the side of antisemites and Jew killers and their contemptible supporters in America. She’d have separated herself from the lamentable administration of which she is, at least officially, still a part and suggested to voters that Democrats wanted a new start and therefore should be given another chance.

But no, instead of taking a principled stand on the side of civilization, she pandered to a mob of terrorism cosplayers who were on Capitol Hill while Netanyahu was speaking. These troglodytes hauled down and burned the American flag, hoisted Palestinian flags outside Union Station, and vandalized federal monuments with spray-painted slogans such as “Hamas is coming” and “Abolish the USA.”

It says much about the modern Democratic Party that it feels, perhaps rightly in terms of electoral math, that it needs the votes of people whose views should be beyond the pale of civilized discussion in our republic. It also, lamentably, says much about the state of America and the erosion of the principles on which it was founded that such a loathsome group has become too big to be safely ignored by the party of the Left.

Cynical calculation and genuine conviction jointly press Democratic Party leaders, President Joe Biden and now Harris, to take a knee to what was once just a fringe faction. The party relies on the votes of people whose ultimate goal is the abolition of America.

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Thus, the Democratic Party has become the unpatriotic party, the one whose leader 15 years ago went on an apology tour. It is the party of people either weakly ashamed of America or militantly opposed to America.

Either way, it is hardly the party voters should elect to power.