While the conventional wisdom holds that the Republicans have become increasingly extreme, the Democrats keeping picking proud socialists to be their standard bearers, some of the most radical politicians in history on a major party ticket.
For at least a decade, the conventional wisdom has held that the Republican Party has become increasingly extreme, moving much further to the right than even beloved Presidents such as Ronald Reagan. As early as 1998, the Hoover Institution’s Christopher Caldwell claimed Republicans had become captive to their “southern base” and would usher in their own “obsolescence” as a result. In his view, “The Republican Party is increasingly a party of the South and the mountains. There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a midwestern or a California, base. Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed the ‘tipping point’ and begun to alienate voters from other regions. The most profound clash between the South and everyone else, of course, is a cultural one. It arises from the southern tradition of putting values—particularly Christian values—at the center of politics.” While Mr. Caldwell was clear to differentiate culture from policy, claiming that “Americans consistently tell pollsters that they are conservative on values issues,” he believed they had “narrowly defined values as the folkways of one regional subculture and have urged their imposition on the rest of the country.” More recently, a memoir from former moderate Republican Senator Lamar Alexander claimed the party was building a “new base” around that same time, “colleagues were beginning their political conversations with issues that thrilled the ‘new base’ — guns, prayer, abortion, marriage, and taxes.” In 2022, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman asked, “Why Did Republicans Become So Extreme?” claiming “Many political analysts have spent years warning that the G.O.P. was becoming an extremist, anti-democratic party.” In 2024, Bill Gindlesperger, writing for USA Today, asked, “Will we wake up soon and not recognize the Republican Party?” claiming that the “Republican Party has undergone substantial transformation.”
Throughout this period, the conventional wisdom tended to studiously avoid the Democrat’s own leftward lurch, pretending that the party which put John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton in the White House would do so today despite that most of their key achievements had long been repudiated, from low-tax economic policies to criminal justice reform. They did so even as public opinion polls clearly showed Democrats moving steadily to the left in recent years, meaning these were trends that should have been obvious if anyone was paying attention rather than playing politics in the endless pursuit of power. For example, as early as June 2014, the Pew Research Center found both parties had moved towards their respective ideological poles, noting that “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades…Over the past twenty years, the number of Americans in the ‘tails’ of this ideological distribution has doubled from 10% to 21%. Meanwhile, the center has shrunk: 39% currently take a roughly equal number of liberal and conservative positions. That is down from about half (49%) of the public in surveys conducted in 1994 and 2004. And this shift represents both Democrats moving to the left and Republicans moving to the right, with less and less overlap between the parties. Today, 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median (middle) Democrat, compared with 64% twenty years ago. And 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican, up from 70% in 1994.” Between 1994 and 2014, Pew Found that Democrats who claim to be “consistent liberals” rose from 8% to 38%, while Republicans who claimed to be “consistently conservative” only went from 23% to 33%.
For better or worse, the results of Tuesday’s primaries combined with some of this cycle’s prior and upcoming contests make it clear that studied avoidance is no longer possible. Democrats have not merely lurched left, they have fallen over the cliff to proudly embrace outright socialism even at the expense of incumbent office holders with more moderate or at least nuanced voting records. In a clean sweep across New York earlier this week, the most radical candidates prevailed in three key races, so much so that all three are or were members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Brad Lander, a former member, ousted two term Congressman Dan Goldman, Claire Valdez, an active member serving her first term in the state assembly, won an open seat primary against the party leaders’ favored choice, including such heavyweights as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, another active member who even the left-leaning explainer website Vox.com admitted has argued “deportation is wrong and supports prison abolition” prevailed against a five-term member of Congress, Adriano Espaillat. Interestingly, all three were handpicked by freshman New York Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, another former member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who had previously aired an advertisement declaring them members of his “team.” This prompted Vox.com and other media outlets to declare the Mayor a new powerbroker in American politics. As Vox put it, “Zohran Mamdani just became a congressional kingmaker” and CNN, “The new power broker: How Zohran Mamdani muscled NYC’s Democratic establishment.”
While the mayor’s staying power in that role is unclear – after all, beginning with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ meteoric rise in 2018, New York has had a habit of preferring insurrectionary candidates – the radicalism and socialism is not. Whatever your personal predilections to the collectivist ideology, there’s no doubt that these are not your father’s Democrat candidates as the saying goes. As mentioned earlier, Ms. Chevalier publicly declared that “all deportations are wrong,” has proclaimed herself a “prison abolitionist,” and refused to say that even stone cold murderers should be locked up. When prompted about her past statements regarding prisons, she demurred, claiming “I work at a public defender’s office where most of our clients are incredibly poor black and brown New Yorkers, and for so many, the crimes that they’re being indicted for are crimes of poverty, or the effects of poverty. What we have right now is a system in whenever harm happens, there’s more harm being perpetrated, not only on the folks who engaged in the harm, but also on the victims of the harm. I’m someone who has actually been the victim of crimes, of violence, and gone to the police as a young person thinking, doing the thing that society told me to do, and all that did was traumatize me more.” “But can you get a little less abstract?” the interviewer, Ben Smith asked. “Like she was watching a jury vote on the guy’s guilty, should he be sentenced or not?” “This is what I’m saying, is that when that happens, and as someone who has sat in so many courtrooms, to me, all of that is tragic,” she said after being pressed four times on a basic question about whether a murderer should be in jail, insisting somehow that we can build a system where murders simply do not happen, are in fact, impossible. “The fact that the murder happened is tragic. The fact that there was a circumstance in which that could even come to pass is tragic, and all of that is a reflection of systems that allowed that circumstance to be possible. And so, you know, I have always focused my attention on how do we create systems where that’s not even a possibility.” Previously, she described the American flag as a rag towel and admonished minority men who were attracted to white women, claiming they were “fetishizing ugly colonizer women.”
For their parts, Ms. Valdez and Mr. Lander might be a little less radical, but not by much. Mr. Lander, for example, has bemoaned his plight as a white man, claiming “As a white man, [the work of racial justice] starts by listening as honestly as I can to Black people about the anger and pain they are feeling, and the system of white supremacy and systemic racism it reflects. That is not easy, because it implicates me.” Ms. Valdez has called for ICE to be abolished, massive wealth taxes, a government takeover of the entire healthcare industry with Medicare for All, and in an ideal world, she would dismantle the private housing market as well. Both have claimed that Israel conducted a “genocide” in Gaza with Mr. Landers being criticized specifically for maintaining close relationships with acolytes of the rabidly antisemitic Louis Farrakhan, including Linda Sarsour. Nor are these the only radicals Democrats have chosen to be their standard bearers in the midterm elections. While Nazi-tattoo bearing Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, another proud so-called “democratic socialist” has gotten most of the attention, Texas’ James Talarico isn’t exactly mainstream either. He’s a seminary student and supposed theologian who once declared, “I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity,” claimed that science acknowledges six genders, and also questioned his whiteness, saying “For me, prophetic voices like Jesus have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity, my own certainty, my own ego. It’s a never-ending process, and it’s a painful process.” Meanwhile in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed is hoping to become the Senate standard bearer and is doing so by cavorting with the notoriously radical Hasan Piker, who has claimed the United States deserved 9/11. As his likely Republican opponent, Mike Rogers noted, “From calling to defund the police and make Michigan a sanctuary state, to attempting to abolish private healthcare, and now campaigning with an antisemite who claimed ‘America deserved 9/11,’ one thing that’s for certain: Abdul and the Democrats are too radical for Michigan.” Mr. Al-Sayed also claimed that many of his constituents were likely sad at the news that Iran’s tyrannical leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed at the start of the conflict, claiming that he wouldn’t comment on it under these conditions.
If there’s any doubt that these candidates represent a remarkable shift towards radicalism, consider that the former progressive standard bearer and self-proclaimed socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, mentioned earlier, is now being perceived by at least some of being too mainstream, too wedded to the establishment. As progressive influencer Krystal Ball put it on X, “Last night also demonstrates the problems with AOC’s don’t rock the boat strategy. Since she has refused to endorse against sitting members, she is on the sidelines of a movement that she herself helped to kick off and logically should be leading. Missing the entire Dem Tea Party at the federal level because the once insurgent is now a de facto incumbent protector.” Others in the Democrat Party, such as Senator Cory “Spartacus” Booker are hoping that they can take advantage of this new socialist energy without suffering any consequences from letting radicals run wild. When asked by CNN whether he was concerned about ideological tensions, the Senator from New Jersey claimed, “One of the things that make the Democratic Party great is it’s a big tent party. We need to stay that way.” Clearly, Senator Booker and others seem to believe they can both distance themselves from the radical policy positions of their colleagues – remember when they claimed defund the police wasn’t really defund the police, then promptly moved onto abolishing ICE and now prisons – and remain in their own positions of power. Apparently, they’ve never heard of the old expressions, if you play with fire, you will get burned, and the revolution always eats its own.
Though the future is, as ever, known, two additional things are worth noting. First, at what point are we supposed to take these socialists and their radical positions seriously? As alluded to earlier, for years Democrats have been happy to pretend that things don’t really mean what they actually mean. Defund the police wasn’t defund the police, but what about abolish ICE, prisons, and private housing? Are those serious policy proposals? On CNBC recently, Democrat Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester was asked when socialism has ever worked. She responded by asking if that was a question for the next time she was on, meaning they are not remotely interested in providing an answer. There’s also a legitimate question to be had about the process, one that affects the very nature of our democracy. To date, the less extreme wings of both parties have managed to avoid removing the filibuster, packing the courts, or creating more states, but will that continue to be the case with more and more Democratic Socialists of America in power? Second, there’s another old expression about minding your own store. For more than the past decade, Democrats have been obsessed about, if not outright deranged over the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, finding unparalleled extremism wherever they looked on issues both large and small, from battling the drug cartels to painting the Washington, DC Reflecting Pool. During that time, their own party was infiltrated by some of the most radical, unhinged politicians in the history of the United States and now, it appears to be on the verge of being overrun. The so-called adults in the room that presided during the Presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, replaced with American hating, socialist hacks, and yet they’ll still do nothing except hope that they can catch this tiger by the tail without getting their own faces bit off. Why does something tell me this isn’t going to end well for anyone?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 