A Socialist Wave Continues Crashing Through America’s Big, Blue Cities

Democrats are quickly moving away from denying their socialist connections to openly embracing them.

That’s a lesson to be learned from a clear trend taking hold in America’s most populous, blue bastions.

Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist member of the District of Columbia City Council, looks to be the favorite to become the next mayor of Washington after winning her primary in what has been a banner year for the socialist Left.

“In a city that leans overwhelmingly left and with no real challengers on the ballot, Lewis George will likely win November’s general election for mayor and is poised to replace current Democrat Mayor Muriel Bowser, who on occasion worked with President Donald Trump over the last two years but ultimately opted not to pursue a fourth term at the city’s helm,” Fox News reported Thursday.

And here we have another good argument in favor of eliminating “home rule” in the District.

This would make Washington the third major city to be taken over by an avowed socialist in less than a year.

 And whatever happens in the Los Angeles mayor’s race going forward, the options are now a socialist insurgent and an incumbent who was politically trained in communist Cuba.

The Democratic Party has lurched so far to the Left that in its most secure bastions it’s being taken over by open socialists and Marxists. And there seems to be little resistance.

Even the corporate, legacy media has acknowledged this trend of rising socialism, though their narrative is that it’s largely happening because of President Donald Trump.

There’s a kernel of truth in this, but only in a roundabout way.

It’s clear now that in the wake of the 2024 electoral disaster the Democrat establishment lost much of its credibility with the party base. Their strategy of putting forward candidates like former President Joe Biden who would simply provide the “moderate” face to an extremist agenda lost much of its luster.

In many places, Democrats are still running that playbook with a fair amount of success. But losing to Trump caused certainly caused a shakeup on the Left. The Bernie Sanders wing is no longer contained. The party base—especially the hordes of young wokes–want full-throated leftism.

They are using the enthusiasm and organization of groups like the Democratic Socialists of America to outhustle and replace the old party establishment. And so far, it’s working, at least in places that Democrats already comfortably control.

They are now going to lean into ideas like wealth and property confiscation, into the concept of borderless society that rejects any kind of immigration law enforcement, into many of the radical ideas that the party may have wished for but shrewdly kept quiet about.

Now they will bring you Leninism with a great, big phony smile.

Merging city government with the Democratic Socialists of America brings them much closer to making their ideas a reality on both the local and eventually the national level. That’s the real target, after all.

They are creating a government-backed activist army ready to take over and fundamentally transform America. And they have no intention of being confined to just big, blue dysfunctional cities. They want to bring their horrendous agenda to the whole world like any good comrade.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that many of the DSA’s ideas are downright apocalyptic if they ever come to pass, and they have a decidedly national and international bent to them.

City Journal’s Stu Smith wrote an excellent piece about the recently updated DSA platform. It’s as extreme as one would suspect of a group that still believes that true socialism has yet to be tried.

Smith wrote that its radicalism “gives a glimpse into how the equivalent of the DSA’s board of directors—some of whom have appeared to moderate—actually think about politics.”

They explicitly want to overthrow the Constitution to create what they call “real democracy.”

This isn’t the old “free and fair regular elections” democracy that most Americans have grown fond of, it’s more of the “two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner” type democracy that the Founders fretted about.

To summarize, the platform called for replacement of “the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” the abolition of prisons, the Department of War, the Electoral College, and amnesty for all illegal aliens.

Again, these are close to what are now considered “mainstream” Democrat ideas. And that’s what makes them so dangerous. They are taking the most noxious ideas of the Left and supercharging them.

Even if the socialist insurgents can’t win outside the deepest blue bastions for now, the Democratic Party must accommodate their momentum and popularity with their activist class.

If this trend continues, they soon won’t be the insurgents anymore. They’ll be the establishment. They’ll have the control of a national party with a very clear goal of finally bringing socialism to every corner of the country.

And America to its knees.

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Send an email to Jarrett.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Jarrett Stepman.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.