Their delusional caucus is about to balloon in Congress. In time, it will be up to conservatives to persuade voters that there is a better course.
Their delusional caucus is about to balloon in Congress. In time, it will be up to conservatives to persuade voters that there is a better course.
‘W e’re all socialists now,” Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson declared in the early summer of 2019. We weren’t, but Samuelson’s confusion was understandable. His misconception was common among his fellow Democrats.
The 2018 midterms were still an exhilaratingly fresh development, as was the rise of a new group of self-described socialists and socialism-adjacent figures — Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, part of the “Squad,” among them. The party’s influencers swiftly bought into the socialist hype, and the far left made the most of their sudden celebrity. With AOC taking the lead, progressives swung for the fences — arguing forcefully for a wholesale renovation of America’s civic and social compacts.
America’s health insurance industry would be nationalized. Each of its residential and commercial structures would undergo a mandatory green overhaul. The U.S. would federalize the banking system through the post office. Student debt would be canceled. College and career transition training would be provided by taxpayers. A make-work job would become a federal guarantee, as would a universal cash benefit. Public housing would expand rapidly, as would the bureaucracy overseeing it. Organized labor leaders — not members — would enjoy outsized influence over public policy. The border wall would come down.
The Democratic Party’s establishmentarians who mouthed support for these proposals assumed the enthusiasm they saw online and in media represented the sentiments of the broader electorate. They were wrong. As Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 Democratic primaries demonstrated, the socialists didn’t even reflect the preferences of the Democratic base.
The pandemic obscured the verdict Democratic primary voters rendered as the streets lit up with the violent passions of the far left. Once again, the activist throngs persuaded Democratic stalwarts that extremism was a recipe for political success. But after the party underperformed in that year’s congressional elections, then-Representative Abigail Spanberger issued her famous rebuke: “We have to not use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” she warned.
And yet, the socialists’ time would come. Indeed, it seems to be here, now.
The socialist-curious Squad’s numbers in Congress held relatively steady this decade. It waxed with the addition of Greg Casar, Summer Lee, and Delia Ramirez, and it waned with the defenestration of figures like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. Next year, however, the socialist caucus within the Democratic Party will balloon like a dying star, adding a vast new collection of socialist lawmakers to its ranks.
After ousting longtime Colorado Representative Diana DeGette, 29-year-old Melat Kiros won her race on a platform that included nationalizing the private health insurance industry, canceling all medical debt, slavery reparations, and establishing a federal stake in all new housing developments to the tune of 30 percent. Amazingly, she did so while articulating almost verbatim Osama bin Laden’s logic for the September 11 attacks.
Like Kiros, New Jersey’s Adam Hamawy backs Medicare for all, debt cancellation, government-run childcare programs, and abolishing federal law enforcement agencies like ICE. He argues that all this and more can be paid for by both extracting wealth from America’s productive citizens and pulling back from America’s defensive commitments abroad. By that, we can assume that Hamawy — a longtime associate of the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a character witness on his behalf, and a volunteer with a Bosnian charity identified as an al-Qaeda front — means initiatives that relate to combating Islamist terrorism.
Pennsylvania’s new third district representative, Chris Rabb, will take office on the back of what he said should be America’s “Universal Basic Guarantees.” Among them are health insurance, food and water, public transportation, high-speed internet, childcare, a job, and an income. Rabb flew under national media’s radar for much of the campaign, save one occasion in which he claimed that we “all know” the 2025 massacre of Australian Jews on Sydney’s Bondi Beach was committed by attackers who “were likely Zionists themselves.”
You might be detecting a trend. You might also be asking yourself why it is that so many of these advocates for a dramatic expansion of American government also seem to exude empathy for anti-Western terrorists. Well, hang on. You haven’t yet seen how deep that trend goes.
Michigan’s DSA-backed Representative-elect Donavan McKinney wants his version of a state-owned monopoly on health insurance to extend coverage even to abortions. He, too, would wipe away medical debt in service to his overall goal, “the redistribution of resources.” And he, too, is possessed of a special animus toward Israel — one so consuming that he’d “resume funding for UNRWA and other NGOs that aim to help end the famine” in Gaza. The nonexistence of a “famine” in Gaza and UNRWA’s admission that many of its employees participated in the October 7 massacre seem not to bother him.
“For decades, we have been sold a lie: that the U.S. empire defends freedom, advances democracy, and protects human rights,” read the campaign literature for Claire Valdez, representative-elect for New York’s seventh district. The unscrupulous have misled you into believing that America was a force for good in the world, but it might be if it adopted her core principles: unions for all, housing for all, Medicare for all. One of Valdez’s fresh ideas for America is to nationalize the airlines, giving Americans what they clamor for: fewer choices at a higher cost. With the Treasury drained of funds that could support America’s role on the world stage, Valdez believes it should then dismantle itself. The first step would be to pull an old Bolshevik thread: Puerto Rican independence (even if the Puerto Ricans themselves object).
New York’s new representative from the 13th district, Darializa Avila Chevalier, may be the most dogmatic member of this highly ideological cast. Along with advocating all the other “universals” to which her colleagues aspire and “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords,” Chevalier is a prison abolitionist. She famously agonized over the impossible conundrum of what a just society should do with an unrepentant murderer. Her befuddlement stems from her conviction that America is not that sort of society. And she means business. The Columbia University–based group she co-founded advocates efforts to “undermine and eradicate America” by translating “resistance in Gaza [into] unrest and violence in America.”
The new crop of socialists will form a potentially crucial bloc not just in the House of Representatives. The radical left is getting a boost in the Senate, too.
Minnesotans, in all their wisdom, will send Bernie Sanders ally Peggy Flanagan to represent them in the upper chamber of Congress. She, too, ran on eliminating private health insurance, “tearing ICE apart,” banning investors from purchasing certain properties, packing the Supreme Court, and restricting the public’s right to engage in political speech.
Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed does not describe himself as a socialist, but the socialists in his orbit don’t seem to have noticed. Who could blame them? He argues that his version of Medicare for All is some strange new species of capitalism. He opposes almost any government program that moves public money into private pockets, including school vouchers. And he, too, would abolish ICE and pack the courts. But it’s foreign policy that gets El-Sayed out of bed in the morning. Specifically, his desire to reimagine “the currently existing state of Israel” and cut off its access even to defensive munitions with no offensive application. After all, if Israeli civilians are more vulnerable to deadly terrorist attacks, perhaps Jerusalem will be more reluctant to defend itself with vigor.
The rise of the socialist left in Congress was, of course, preceded by its ascent at the municipal level. For the better part of a year, a new generation of urban radicals — from New York City’s Zohran Mamdani to Seattle’s Katie Wilson — have busied themselves not with the basic functions of a city but with how to transform their metropolises into showroom examples of why life is better when the public sector crowds out the private. And like their congressional counterparts, they are obsessed with the foreign in their endless pursuit of civilizational models that exist as alternatives to the intolerably racist, sexist, and exploitative status quo that prevails in America.
But in that, there is a note of hope for those who seek to arrest the march of the socialists through America’s governing institutions. The voters who backed Mamdani and Wilson didn’t elect them so they could erect Soviet-style universal groceries that put small-business owners out of work or make their cities safe for their unfortunate and deeply misunderstood criminal elements. That is, however, the course they and other far-left luminaries have taken. Accordingly, their voters are increasingly displeased with their representatives’ misplaced priorities. The socialist left in Congress may encounter a similar predicament.
The activist set doesn’t want marginal, incremental reforms — the sort of thing that the Constitution encourages. They want radical change, attacks on the very system’s foundations, and a comprehensive agenda designed to erode America’s global influence from within. By contrast, most Americans just want consumer costs to go down. When the socialists fail to deliver for the majority, the American right should be there to explain why our experiment with “the warmth of collectivism” failed, as it typically does.
It will not have failed because the left cannot execute statism with the GOP’s organizational mastery. It will have failed because the engine of American prosperity is the individual, and the primacy of the individual must remain paramount if future generations are to enjoy the covenant we were only fortunate enough to be born into. Even in an election as lopsidedly Democratic as the 2026 midterms, there’s a reason why only one-third of exit poll respondents expressed anything like a positive view of “socialism.”
The socialists have forgotten — or, perhaps, never learned — why America is great, and they’ve convinced millions that they’re onto something. But they’re not. And when that becomes apparent, it will be up to conservatives to persuade voters that there is a better course — one unshackled to the state, in which your fate is yours to command.
Only an American right that is a jealous steward of liberty will present a compelling contrast with the control freaks rising to the top of the Democratic Party’s ranks. And after a couple of years, as socialism’s bleakness descends across the American continent, that contrast might start to look pretty good to American voters.