The primaries are over, and the November general election looms.
Suddenly, the Islamo-socialist podcaster Hasan Piker—who is now infamous for blaming America for 9/11 and warning Jews that “someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews”—is persona non grata on the Democrat stump.
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat nominee in the Michigan Senate race, once enlisted Piker to jump-start his lethargic candidacy. Now that he is locked in a close general election race against a strong Republican, El-Sayed dismisses the antisemite, who has suddenly outlived his usefulness, as a mere “social media person in California.”
Clinton-era Democrat politicos like Rahm Emanuel and James Carville insist that Democrats have divorced themselves from the hard-left democratic socialists.
Really?
If that divorce were real, why would so many Democrats be cheering a potential Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez presidential run in 2028? She is, after all, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America‘s New York chapter.
Did lifelong socialist Bernie Sanders not run twice for president—not as a third-party candidate, but in the Democrat primaries? And did he not nearly capture the nomination in 2016 and 2020 until terrified donors and insiders intervened to abort his candidacies?
Did House Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries not endorse Democrat mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, also a member of the DSA’s New York chapter? And did Jeffries not thereby choose Mamdani over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo?
Did California Gov. Gavin Newsom—the opportunist par excellence, multimillionaire, and presidential hopeful—not recently declare that “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work”? (Who, pray tell, are “we”?)
Has not nearly every major Democrat stalwart, including Senate leader Chuck Schumer, called for a “big tent” party that includes unapologetic socialists?
Many Democrats, of course, reject the socialists’ calls to eliminate the Pentagon, close prisons, and dismantle the Senate. But perhaps only because such wild fantasies cannot succeed, at least for now, and repel most American voters.
Where, then, did these largely young, inexperienced, and naive democratic socialists find their agenda?
Self-declared socialists now demand an open border and mass amnesty for illegal aliens; the abolition of police and prisons; war on fossil fuels; radical DEI mandates; free health care for all; wealth taxes on billionaires and even millionaires; deep defense cuts; and an end to military aid to Israel.
Yet these are hardly the socialists’ positions alone. They closely resemble earlier Democratic Party programs and demands. The socialists now talk a grand leftist game; during the Biden years, Democrats tried to enact much of the agenda the socialists later claimed as their own.
So, did newly radicalized Democrats spawn this socialist offspring, or did the socialists radicalize the old party of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton?
Who created whom?
The answer is demonstrably clear: Democrats radicalized themselves. Only later did an underfunded, motley socialist crew jump aboard their increasingly extremist bandwagon. By the time the Democratic Socialists of America became nationally known, the new Democrats had already supplied their model of governance.
When democratic socialists claim that “billionaires” owe their success to government, they merely echo President Barack Obama’s taunt to successful business owners: “You didn’t build that.”
Obama lifted that moronic socialist meme—like his “spread the wealth” line—wholesale from Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren. In 2011, Warren boasted that no wealthy American had succeeded on his own, reiterating the classic socialist rationale for confiscation: “The people” make success possible and must therefore be repaid.
In his first term, Obama sought to take over the nation’s health care system while concealing his socialist agenda. He partly succeeded through his now-failing Obamacare plans. His effort rested in part on the claim PolitiFact later named its “Lie of the Year”: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
Obama also cut more than $100 billion from defense. His “apology tour” and dismissal of American exceptionalism likewise anticipated these more recent socialist one-world talking points.
Who cooked up DEI?
Who but the Obama and Biden administrations vastly expanded government hiring and promotion by race, gender, and sexual orientation? Who unleashed the Justice Department to pressure the private sector to follow suit—until the Supreme Court declared much of this DEI tribalism unconstitutional?
Sanctuary cities and neo-Confederate state and local nullification of federal immigration law were mainstream Democrat policies long before 2020. Former President Joe Biden’s Democrats—not the socialists—destroyed the southern border and admitted more than 10 million illegal aliens. Until the 2024 election cycle, Biden had also effectively imposed a moratorium on deportations.
Long before forming the 2020 Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris advocated banning fracking, while Biden called for banning new fracking on federal lands and waters.
Long before the DSA and DSA-adjacent cohort of Mamdani, Piker, El-Sayed, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib began mouthing antisemitic talking points, prominent Democrats like Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“diamond merchants”), and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (“them Jews”) had shown the party’s tolerance for licensed Jew-hatred. More recently, more than 100 House Democrats voted to cut off all aid to Israel.
The same pattern applies to political methods. Democrat officials gave wink-and-nod support to the violent Antifa and Black Lives Matter movements long before the democratic socialists became a major force.
As early as August 2015, the Democratic National Committee officially endorsed BLM, while many Democrats defended Antifa.
In 2018, then-deputy DNC chief Keith Ellison posed proudly with an Antifa handbook and preened about “the book that strike (sic) fear in the heart of @realDonaldTrump.” By 2020, even FBI Director Christopher Wray was claiming that Antifa was more an “ideology” than a real organization of frequently unhinged and violent protesters.
During the post-George Floyd mania of 2020, then-Sen. Kamala Harris, soon to become vice president, praised calls to defund the police. She even boasted on national television that the weeks-old, increasingly violent demonstrations would not—and should not—cease before the election.
Some establishment Democrats went further, personally threatening violence. Who screamed outside the Supreme Court, warning the justices, “You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions”? Not a fringe socialist, but the Senate’s top-ranking Democrat.
And in 2018, Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters urged her followers to threaten and “harass” Trump Cabinet officials.
More importantly, when the democratic socialists urge the next Democrat administration to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College and the filibuster, and admit Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia as two new left-wing states, where did those ideas originate?
Mainstream Democrat leaders had already embraced the entire agenda during the first Trump administration, if not earlier.
And who is more lawless: the loudmouth, self-proclaimed radical socialists who talk of weaponizing state and federal power, or the still more radical Democrats who actually wielded it?
Who tried to remove a major Republican presidential candidate from ballots in more than 20 states?
Who sent FBI SWAT teams into Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate?
Who brought four farcical lawfare cases aimed at imprisoning Trump?
Who concocted the Steele dossier and spread the lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation?
The answer: mainstream establishment Democrats, acting without any help from a coterie of fringy, downwardly mobile white urban socialists who were then largely irrelevant.
The once-fringe democratic socialists became mainstream largely by imitating an increasingly socialist Democratic Party. They did not infiltrate the Republican Party, form a viable third party, or—even after Sanders’ first campaign in 2016—abandon boutique Democrat causes, from open borders to gun control, to concentrate on economic radicalism.
Instead, they adopted the modern Democratic Party’s media, messaging, and methods and joined it, first informally and then formally. Fittingly, they are not called the republican socialists, independent socialists, or simply socialists of America.
In sum, the socialists did not swallow the old Clinton Democrats; those Democrats were already gone. A party radicalized over decades instead welcomed younger copycat socialists who proved even more zealous and embittered than their elders—and gave them their first national home.
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AUTHOR
Victor Davis Hanson is a Daily Signal senior contributor, hosting a podcast, producing video commentaries, and writing a weekly column. He is the author of “The Counterrevolution The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement.” Follow on X VDHanson.
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