Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,
Win some blue-state and blue-city races, and the cocky new socialist Jacobins believe that they have either already taken over the Democratic Party or will soon absorb it. And in reaction to these new swarms, an increasingly terrified and ossified old Democrat guard either limps away from the hive or invites them in to take over more.
It is fascinating but ultimately depressing to watch old-style Democrats say or do anything to avoid the new mob of Robespierres. Democrat candidates who recently begged for a Schumer/Pelosi/Jeffries endorsement now are telling them to get in line at the guillotine.
Jewish American Democrats are terrified that what happened to the primaried and defeated Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, an arch-Trump hater, could befall them. Goldman’s obnoxious showboating hatred of Trump and championing of neo-socialist agendas offered no defense against the Jacobins’ antisemitism and hatred of Israel.
A number of Jewish Democrat candidates, like wannabe California congressman Scott Wiener, are backing off from Israel and now join the “genocide!” mob. Wiener hopes that the throng will reward his new anti-Israel position by overlooking the now inconvenient fact that to the anti-Semitic Democrat base he is still Jewish.
Some of the rich, likewise, think they can escape the guillotine – the various proposed taxes on “billionaires” and “millionaires” on their net worth or unrealized capital gains or plans to confiscate private properties deemed “not in the people’s interests.” They will either flee to Florida or join the mob and hope their donations spare them from the blade.
The hard socialist agenda, which lacks even 50 percent popular support, is often recognizable despite efforts to conceal it until after elections. Given the clickbait lunacy of these socialists’ mindset, their true views often trickle out from prior social media posts, hot mics, leaks, and occasional temper-tantrum outbursts (cf. Mamdani’s “monsters” or Talarico’s “I hate Christianity” or Platner’s litany of unapologetic racist, antisemitic, and misogynistic outbursts).
In general, the socialist challenge is to “fundamentally transform America” into a statist, inert redistribution machine – nuttier than socialist Europe, a prescription for North Korean-style poverty, and completely unrecognizable to the Founders and most contemporary Americans. As far as we can distill, here are their agendas:
- The New Demography: Open borders, massive, unaudited new immigration ending the distinction between mere residence and citizenship.
- Dismantling the “System”: Packing the court, destroying the Electoral College, ending the filibuster, bringing in new left-wing states, defunding the police, ensuring same-day registration/voting, no voter ID, foreign nationals residing here being eligible to vote.
- The Islamization of America: Ending America’s traditional friendship with Israel and realigning the U.S. with the West Bank, Hamas, Hezbollah, and their autocratic and illiberal, terrorism-sponsoring Muslim regimes. Restoring massive USAID subsidies to fund left-wing takeovers abroad and mainstreaming now overt harassment of Jews at home.
- Old Communism: The government takeover of housing and utilities, targeted expropriation of private property, new punitive taxes on net worth and unrealized capital gains. Wild talk of nationalizing airlines and all health care.
- Statism: Massive new entitlements, free college, canceling $1.7 trillion in student loans, more federal acquisition of private lands, rent freezes.
- Reparations: Compensation for victims of alleged “white privilege,” institutionalization of radical identity politics, and racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation chauvinism. Third world hatred of supposed white oppressors, justifying reparatory preferences for the non-white “oppressed.”
- Globalism: Pledging solidarity with socialist/communist movements abroad while despising Western civilization in general and the U.S. in particular.
Once “Mayor” Zohran Mamdani took control of New York, he began promising to confiscate rental properties from landlords and to focus on “white” neighborhoods, and he no longer disguised his innate hatred of Jews.
Governor Spanberger of Virginia dropped her moderate false face and began radically ramming through hard-left executive orders to ensure more DEI, higher taxes, and anti-ICE hysterics. After being elected, Seattle Mayor Katie Willson gushed “bye-bye” to the billionaire entrepreneurs who are fleeing from Washington state’s new “millionaire’s tax.” She mocked their departure and cared not a whit that her now-socialist city would further descend into a West Coast Detroit or Baltimore.
Socialists hide their revolutionary anger with banal pleasantries. We have become well accustomed now to the “socialist smile,” emblemized by the grinning Mamdani or the faux-happy face of James Talarico. Usually, the new touchy-feely socialists chuckle loudest when a rare reporter presses them on their past lunatic harangues, which are then laughed off as hysterias from paranoid right-wing minds.
Sometimes socialists embrace the hard commissar style, like the perpetually venomous Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, who ridicules journalists, lies flagrantly, and takes back none of his hate-filled rants.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) perpetually screams rather than talks, usually venting her monotonous hatred for the Jewish state. Her latest socialist champions are the Antifa criminals just sentenced to long prison sentences for their conspiracy to murder ICE officers.
The more Ilhan Omar is caught trafficking in antisemitic tropes, denying alleged immigration fraud schemes, or filing preposterous federal financial disclosure forms, the more defiant her shouts of “racist” become.
The newly emerging socialists, like recent congressional nominees Darializa Avila Chevalier or Analilia Mejia, can never explain why their parents left socialist paradises in Latin America to come to cutthroat capitalist America.
Nor do they explain to us why and how such a supposedly toxic, racist nation would extend such generous scholarships and DEI preferences to both. They suffer from the Joy Reid/Ilhan Omar/Rashida Tlaib/AOC socialist syndrome: parents flee socialist paradises of indigenous peoples to ensure their children might thrive in a settler/colonialist and capitalist U.S. whose magnanimity they interpret as proof of guilt that is therefore to be reciprocated not with gratitude but with ever more venom.
And once the second-generation socialists joined the privileged elite classes of America, these boutique radicals decided to tear down the very system that nurtured them, without ever expressing a wish to return to the socialist paradises of their parents’ homelands.
What drives the sheer hatred of the new upscale socialists, and why are they in vogue now?
There are three constants in all these new socialists, as we have seen recently from the recent nationwide primary elections, as well as the daily street theater.
One, they hate the United States – loathe its foundation, hate its maturation, and despise the current American nation. They detest especially the middle classes, who lack both the romance of the dependent poor and the supposed “refinement” and “culture” of their own elite socialist aristocracy. And the more they demagogue “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” the more they feel that the river of exemptions, set-asides, preferences, and special considerations will flow to them from a supposedly guilty nation.
The socialists’ hatred of America is becoming clearer as middle America embraces the 250th anniversary of the nation, highlighted by throngs of World Cup tourists who cannot praise highly enough the decency, amicability, and prosperity of America between the coasts. So, what is a perennial socialist PhD candidate, or a failed “community organizer,” or NGO flack to do when millions happily suffer from “false consciousness” and have failed to listen to their Marxist handlers?
The socialist architects of the current Jacobin takeover see no contradiction in that, like moths harkening to flames, they cannot get enough of the American good life, conspicuous consumer consumption, and merit badges of success like their Ivy League-branded kids, letters and titles after their names, and the right zip code for their first and second homes.
Every socialist buffoon reminds us almost daily of Alexis de Tocqueville’s droll warning that most people would prefer everyone to be absolutely equal and worse off than all better off, but with some better off than themselves.
The socialists’ hatred of America is also revealed in their envy. Unlike the poet Hesiod’s notion of a “good” envy – embodied in the American tradition of emulation and admiration of those richer than themselves – they buy into the “bad” envy of wanting to destroy those who are brighter, more successful, richer, and more essential to America than themselves, whether an Elon Musk, a Larry Ellison, or a Jeff Bezos.
Second, socialists still have little current power other than their control of institutions such as K-12 education, academia, the media, foundations, the bureaucracies, the corporate boardrooms, professional sports, entertainment, and popular culture. Perhaps they wish to end up like the lifelong government employee, Bernie Sanders, who for a half-century shook his two upraised fists at America, screamed at the greed, and ended up with three homes and membership in the millionaire class.
Socialists and communists have no confidence in winning over the majority of the American people, at least outside blue-city and blue-state districts. Hence, their efforts to change balloting laws, destroy the border, import angry, poor, new constituents, stage violent street confrontations, and either celebrate or contextualize assassinations from the attempts on Trump to the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Sane Democrats would reexamine 2024 and conclude the party was far too left-wing and the antidote was a return to the winning formulas of Bill Clinton. But unhinged socialists and communists would claim that 2024 was lost because they were not far-left enough. So we are to believe that Americans scared of Harris’s poorly disguised radicalism can be won over by scaring them even further? A communist in 2028 can win over America when a socialist in 2024 could not?
Third, Donald Trump has driven the Left so crazy that they have gyrated from Obama’s four-mansion socialism to unapologetic hardcore Trotskyism. Why? Their pathological hatred transcends Trump’s background, his appearance, his accent, his tweets, and even his appeal to the despised “clingers, irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs, and garbage.”
Of course, Trump is a conservative, so he suffers the same left-wing slurs of “fascist” and “Nazi” that met Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But in his second term, Trump, quite unlike most Republican presidents, is not addressing just symptoms but also the causes and fuel of the socialist project.
Trump did not just jawbone the “fake news” but cut off subsidies to NPR and PBS, suing the media when they deliberately engaged in baseless character assassination. He did not just close the border but began deporting the criminal cohort of Biden’s 10 million illegal entrants, sought to end birthright citizenship, made would-be refugees apply for entry in their home country, ended catch-and-release, and will wall off or electronically secure the entire southern border from the Pacific to the Gulf of America.
He did not just rhetorically critique DEI; he banned it from the federal bureaucracy. Unlike past Republicans, Trump did not merely critique elitist campuses; he leveraged them to behave like normal people – taxing endowments, banning racist DEI protocols, prohibiting grant surcharge scamming, and demanding they abide by the Bill of Rights. He slashed the left-wing USAID money machine rather than just whining that it subsidized America’s worst critics abroad.
In other words, the socialists are enraged not just because they despise the U.S. and lack the power to turn America into Cuba or because they have not yet stabbed, poisoned, shot, decapitated, or blown up the hated Trump, as their followers, celebrities, and a few of their leaders have so often boasted.
The real rub is that Trump is their flip side – not a revolutionary but a counterrevolutionary. He seeks to overturn root and branch the entire 100-year progressive project and ensure America’s insidious slouching toward socialism ends with his term – for good. The more they brag about our collective socialist tomorrow, the more Trump incessantly dismantles socialism today.
So far, they haven’t stopped him yet – but their lidless eyes never close.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare.
