The primaries are over, and the November general election looms.
Clinton-era Democratic politicos such as 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 Democratic 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 Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries not endorse Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, also a member of the DSA’s New York chapter?
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 Democratic 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. So 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 Democratic 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 Democratic policies long before 2020. Biden’s Democrats — not the socialists — destroyed the southern border and admitted more than 10 million illegal aliens.
Long before the DSA and DSA-adjacent cohort of Mamdani, Hasan Piker, Abdul El-Sayed, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib began mouthing antisemitic talking points, prominent Democrats such as Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“diamond merchants”) and Reverend Wright (“them Jews”) had shown the party’s tolerance for licensed Jew-hatred.
The same pattern applies to political methods. Democratic officials gave wink-and-nod support to the violent Antifa and Black Lives Matter movements long before the Democratic Socialists became a major force.
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. 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.
More importantly, when the Democratic Socialists urge the next Democratic 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 Democratic leaders had already embraced the entire agenda during the first Trump administration, if not earlier.
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’s first campaign in 2016 — abandon boutique Democratic 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.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact at authorvdh@gmail.com.
