Democratic Party RIP
Your father’s Democratic Party is dead.
Even the party’s most unhinged liberal members of Congress are insufficiently liberal for its activist base.
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the party’s radical left wing, are nominating candidates to replace incumbent Democrats in safe congressional districts.
Democrats naïvely embraced the socialists, thinking they’d be “useful.” Instead, the users are being used.
Establishment Democrats lost total control of their party in metropolitan New York where radical “kingmaker” Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office in January. Mamdani considers himself a “member of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America,” emphasis on “socialist.”
Mamdani-endorsed candidates in primary elections showed America who’s actually running the Democratic Party.
Three Mamdani-endorsed socialist candidates swept their congressional primaries. The losers were two incumbent Democrats in safe districts and an establishment-endorsed candidate for an open, also safe seat.
In NY District 13, socialist candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier beat the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on an extra-constitutional platform of abolishing prisons, ICE and borders, defunding the police, and opposing the deportation of all illegal immigrants, including violent criminals. According to CNN, Chevalier has openly espoused communism. Claire Valdez won NY-7, promising citizenship and voting rights for illegal aliens, taxpayer-funded transgender medical treatments, and the elimination of private health insurance for every American.
Following the election, Mamdani stated that, now, DSA candidates “can get elected anywhere across this country for any position.”
Momdani may be right, at least in Democratic primaries. An Ethiopian-born socialist defeated a longtime incumbent in Colorado
No longer the party’s fringe, the DSA is mainstream. However, if DSAers were really Democrats, they wouldn’t be DSA.
Today, the DSA is ascendant, and institutional Democrats have no effective leader who can stop it.
Ranking Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries who represents New York’s 8th district, are putting a brave face on their endorsed candidates’ humiliations, but Schumer and Jeffries are in the DSA’s crosshairs.
At a NY watch party, DSA supporters chanted “You’re next!” when Jeffries appeared on TV.
The DSA would purge Schumer and Jeffries to consolidate power as surely as French Jacobins purged Girondins, and Bolshevik communists purged Menshevik Marxists. Revolutionaries Maximilien Robespierre and Leon Trotsky were eliminated – with prejudice – by former allies.
Facing a choice between disavowal and surrender, Schumer and Jeffries chose the latter. A craven Jeffries posted: “Congratulations to our newest members of the NYC congressional delegation,” including the obligatory jab at “far-right extremism.”
Ironic, huh?
Realistically, electing socialist candidates in safe Democrat districts won’t alter the math in the House. It merely substitutes DSA representatives for establishment Democrats. DSA members will be far bigger, even existential problems for Democrats.
DSAers are ambitious; they will not be congressional backbenchers content to “wait their turn”; they will not be quiet and “fit in”; they will hog cameras and microphones daily through November and the 2028 election; and Washington Democrats and media will be powerless to ignore or hide them from American voters.
Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat, delivered a stinging rebuke to his party, arguing that Democrats are “drifting firmly into communism.” Fetterman said Democrats are embracing candidates who are “anti-Israel,” “anti-American” and opposed to America’s core institutions.
Fifteen other principled Democrats – including only 10 of 213 House Democrats – also disavowed the DSA takeover of their party. They issued a “Promise to America,” stating that, unlike DSA radicals, “We are capitalist, not socialist. We want safety, not lawlessness. We are responsible, not reckless. We believe government should solve problems, not create them. We are mainstream, not extreme. We are proud, not ashamed of America.”
Congressional leadership – Schumer and Jeffries – did not sign on to their “Promise,” nor, curiously, has a single Pennsylvania House Democrat.
Is their oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and “bear true faith and allegiance to the same” meaningless?
Voters, especially old-school Democrats, have a right to know where Pennsylvania Representatives Chrissy Houlahan, Brendan Boyle, Dwight Evans, Madeleine Dean, Mary Gay Scanlon, Summer Lee, Chris Deluzio, and the Democrats who were nominated to challenge Republican House incumbents stand on their party’s radical takeover.
Ask them.
Those who fail to make public statements disavowing the extreme elements of their party are either cowards, terrified of radical backlash, or agree with the radicals.
Either way…
Contact columnist Jerry Shenk at jshenk2010@gmail.com
