ROME — The Democrat Party is radicalizing so quickly that it makes even the Clinton and Obama administrations seem centrist, states former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in an op-ed Wednesday.

“Tuesday night’s debate was one more reminder that we are living through the death of the Democratic Party,” Gingrich declares, as we watch it mutate before our eyes into the “Democratic-Socialist Party.”

We are living in “a historic moment in which a once-great American party is transformed into an anti-American engine of radical change,” Gingrich observes. “In 2020, every Democratic candidate will be faced with the challenge of defending a national party which is now the Democratic-Socialist Party.”

In Tuesday’s debate, candidates were falling over each other to establish their far-left creds, leaving behind the platforms of the last two Democrat administrations as a vestige of relative moderation.

“Imagine that any candidate last night had had the courage (or lack of sense) to actively defend President Bill Clinton’s policies on welfare reform, capital gains tax cuts, balanced federal budgets, or his 1996 State of the Union assertion that ‘the era of Big Government is over,’” Gingrich muses.

The same goes for Barack Obama’s original 2008 position that “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman” or his stated opposition to “any limitation on the right to buy private insurance.”

“When the last two Democratic presidents are no longer defendable, something profound has happened,” Gingrich observes.

Imagine further that one of the candidates had said he or she were against abortion, Gingrich continues. “The result might have been a riot – and at a minimum an expulsion of the heretic.”

Or imagine if one of the candidates had argued that our schools “should not be centers of anti-American indoctrination dictated by left-wing unions,” he asserts. “They would be booed off the stage.”

Almost overnight the Old Democratic Party has given way to an almost unrecognizable radical caricature of itself, which is more and more overtly socialist and less and less democratic.

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now the spiritual leader of House Democrats, and every major Democratic presidential candidate has endorsed radical Green New Deal-type proposals that would expand government, destroy the energy industry, radically change America, and plunge the economy into a depression,” Gingrich notes.

“The Democratic-Socialist Party wants to outlaw private health insurance, punish the successful (especially the wealthy), and expand government control over virtually everything,” he says.

Their proposals range from “wanting to confiscate guns” to “forcing the radical California gender curriculum in every state” to “removing the tax exception for every church, synagogue, and mosque that defines marriage as between a man and a woman,” he notes.

They also include providing taxpayer-funded health care to people living in the country illegally, open borders, and tax-paid sex-change operations in prison, he adds.

The dizzying pace at which the party has been revolutionized calls for thoughtful Americans to pause and ponder the historical significance of what is happening before our eyes, Gingrich suggests.

It is “a wrenching, defining moment for the party of FDR and JFK as it is conquered by the party of AOC, Sanders, and Warren,” he concludes.