When President Donald J. Trump not only won the 2024 presidential election, but won it with a popular majority, it seemed like the Left was finally dead.
We’d dutifully (and successfully) boycotted Bud Light; parents were making headlines as heroes in the fight against boys in girls’ bathrooms and sports; companies were quietly gutting their DEI departments; and even demographics traditionally the unquestionable property of the Democrat Party had decided the grass was greener and the promises better on the populist side of the fence.
The Left, we were told, had become a pitiful party full of bickering geriatrics who couldn’t even make up their minds about who was popular enough to run the party, mostly because every single one of them was absurdly unpopular with the voting public.
Then, Zohran Mamdani got elected as the mayor of New York City.
Mamdani, as every conservative outlet and the man himself likes to remind us, is a full-on Socialist — you know, the kind that wants to make groceries, public transportation, and housing completely free (never mind the fact that grocers, the subway, and broken plumbing all need money thrown at them). Like it or not, he’s struck such a big nerve that he’s no longer even close to alone in the political ring.
In fact, this last week has been a rather big week for self-avowed Marxists. On Tuesday, every Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) candidate who went up for a vote — many endorsed by Mamdani — won their respective primary races.
In New York’s 13th congressional district, Darializa Avil Chevalier will be the Democrat candidate facing off against Jomo Williams, the uncontested Republican who barely surfaces on the first page of Google search results. Chevalier, of course, is the founder of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a far-left student organization whose goal (in part) is to fight for “the total eradication of Western civilization” — a position that perhaps explains why she advocates for universal healthcare and the total abolishment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Then there was Claire Valdez, who won the Democrat primary in the race to become the next U.S. Representative for New York’s 7th congressional district (which includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens). The primary, it should be noted, was pretty much just a battle to see which progressive could outdo the other in liberal policies. Apparently, promising to “free Palestine … Abolish ICE,” provide “Medicare for all, housing for all, and unions for all,” did the trick.
And then, of course, there were the winners of the local races: Samantha Kattan and David Orkin both won their primary bids to become Assembly candidates, while Aber Kawas (who once blamed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Islamophobia and colonization) looks to be headed to the New York Senate.
Lest you think this is just a New York problem, last week Janeese Lewis George won her bid to become the Democrat candidate in the Washington, D.C., mayoral race. Lewis George is, of course, a member of the DSA and is promising — you guessed it — affordable child care, public social housing, and the establishment of workers’ unions left and right.
Republicans seem excited about this turn of events, if a bit confused. If there really is a “Bolshevik revolution” going on in the Democrat Party (as Rep. Richard Hudson reportedly noted in a closed-door GOP meeting on Wednesday), how hard can it possibly be to convince Americans that Marxist-embracing Democrats are hardly the right people to hold public office? After all, socialism doesn’t have a great track record.
Unfortunately, there’s something of a trap here: If we just label socialism as ineffective, we’ll have missed the point.
If there is one thing that Democrats — particularly the Marxists among them — tend to be better at than Republicans, it’s identifying issues people actually care about. Sure, the average American may think the rapidly ballooning national debt is a bad thing, but he’s probably more worried about the absurd bill he got from the hospital after his kid’s last ER visit, or the fact that ground beef went from a staple to a luxury sometime in the last five years.
Republicans (especially since they’re currently in power) like to tell Americans that the affordability crisis is imagined; it’s merely a “hoax,” cooked up by Democrats eager for power. And maybe it is, but it’s sure been effective. The fact is, Americans think they’re experiencing an affordability crisis, and as long as they think that, it might as well be true. The promise of free milk and eggs is pretty enticing.
Unfortunately, telling voters that socialism has never worked wherever it has been tried isn’t going to cut it. Instead, we need to come up with creative solutions to the actual problems and then communicate them.
Your ER bill is bloated? Well, that’s an insurance problem, so let’s completely restructure the regulations surrounding insurance until premiums come down and hospitals charge what it actually costs to deliver healthcare. Is beef expensive? Let’s work on figuring out how to incentivize ranchers to raise more homegrown cattle, and then tell voters exactly how that’s going to happen.
Most Americans aren’t revolutionary Marxists waving hammers and sickles about — if they were, we’d just have to wait until the United Socialist States of America crumbled under its own weight. Most of them just want to be comfortable. If we can give that to them, the sudden rise of nouveau socialism will come to an end as swiftly as it began.
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