U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) rallies with U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) during a campaign rally in Ferndale, Michigan, U.S., July 25, 2026. REUTERS See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google Voters’ “affordability” fears are supposedly fueling the Democratic Party’s new, strident socialism.
Yet annual inflation during former President Joe Biden’s four years peaked at over 9%, while prices for some key staples rose by 30% over his tenure — all to silence from the left.
The socialists weren’t just quiet during Biden’s term; they were themselves responsible for his rampant inflation.
They had implemented an inflationary de facto third Obama term, ramming through the most radical and costly agenda in decades under the veneer of Biden’s cognitively challenged waxen effigy.
So the current Jacobin takeover of the Democratic Party was not sparked by concerns about “affordability” — at least not if “affordability” means the middle-class struggle to buy a house, a car or groceries.
Instead, this socialist moment is merely the logical culmination of years of boutique radicalism within the Democratic aristocracy.
Almost every weaponized scam and national hysteria in the last two decades was amplified and spread by mainstream Democrats: the farcical claim that the Wuhan-lab-hatched COVID virus came from pangolins or bats, the deification of George Floyd, the radical diminution of in-person voting, the mythology of a 1619 national founding and more.
Who allowed over 10 million border-jumpers into the country — illegal, unvetted and instantaneously dependent on the welfare state?
Who gave us multiple genders and biological males showering with teenage girls or female prisoners?
Who sloganeered about “defund the police” and “no cash bail”?
The Democratic establishment’s unhinged hatred of Donald Trump helped birth the socialist-cum-communist Frankensteinian monster that’s now devouring its mad-scientist creators.
“By any means necessary” was a Democratic mantra over a decade ago.
By 2016, the Democratic leadership and the Clinton campaign were hatching the Steele-dossier farce to warp an election.
In 2020, the Democratic deep state fabricated the farcical claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a hoax that, this time around, likely did alter an election.
Then came four unhinged years of anti-Trump lawfare.
All those perversions of the legal system were accompanied by a host of mainstream Democrats, retired generals, politicos and athletes shouting that Trump was a Nazi, a fascist, a traitor or a Putin asset.
Three would-be assassins got close to killing Trump — near-death encounters that elicited unapologetic applause for the attempts.
Murderers themselves were normalized as leftist icons, as seen in the canonization of Luigi Mangione.
Yet did the establishment Democratic apparat calm these waters?
It was Chuck Schumer who threatened conservative Supreme Court justices, sounding more like a pink-haired anti-ICE street protester than a US senator.
No surprise that two years later a left-wing would-be assassin turned up at Kavanaugh’s home.
Maxine Waters urged the public to bird-dog Trump administration officials and harass them whenever they were seen in public — “in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station.”
Then there was soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris egging on the violent George Floyd demonstrations: “This is a movement, I’m telling you . . . And everyone beware, because . . they’re not going to let up, and they should not.”
So today’s young socialists and communists did not really hijack the party: They were spawned and nurtured by aged Democrats.
They became irate over their impotence and loss of influence — and simply upgraded the methods and message of their elders.
They did not storm the party parapets, but were invited in by a party that had already radicalized itself — amid its hatred of Trump and its growing estrangement from the majority of the American people.
Socialists did not lower the bar for extremism; establishment Democrats had already destroyed that standard altogether.
The only change is that the electrified socialist monsters have awakened.
They have mocked their stagnant creators, reenergized the old messages, and now simply seek to replace the messengers.
Now, the new socialists think, hardcore leftists no longer have to hide their agendas for fear of losing elections.
In their folly, they attributed Harris’ 2024 implosion not to her clumsy efforts to disown and disguise her radical past (including the most left-wing voting record in the Senate), but to her not being left-wing enough.
In other words, they’re convinced a milquetoast socialist lost in 2024 not because she was too radical for America, but because she was not socialist — or indeed, communist — enough.
So the crazed new socialists are brazenly broadcasting the old agendas: open borders, mass amnesties, defunding the police, ending fossil fuels, seeking to destroy the Senate and Supreme Court, scapegoating whites and white “privilege” — and adding a new element, anti-Zionism and indeed antisemitism.
America will soon see how this insanity works out.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
