The Radicals Inside the Tent
Mainstream Democrats hope far-left insurgents will settle down after arriving in Washington. They’re in for an ugly surprise.
By James B. Meigs
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“Free, free Palestine!” the crowd chanted when New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani arrived at the Tuesday night party celebrating the primary win of his close ally, Claire Valdez. Given the city’s paucity of Republican voters, Ms. Valdez is almost certain to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives come November. So are Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, two other insurgent candidates backed by the mayor.
Like Mr. Mamdani, all three upstart candidates have roots in the far-left Democratic Socialists of America. Their primary victories help cement Mr. Mamdani’s “status as a formidable kingmaker,” the Journal reports. Once they arrive in Washington, the new members of Congress will share an agenda much broader than protecting the parochial interests of New Yorkers. Ms. Valdez and Ms. Chevalier consider themselves part of a socialist vanguard. Their campaigns focused on claims that Israel is committing a “genocide” in Gaza. As the “Free Palestine” chants suggest, their closest supporters also believe this election reflects a global radical movement.
The New York candidates join other far-left hopefuls, including the scandal-plagued Graham Platner, competing for a Maine Senate seat, and Pennsylvania DSA member Chris Rabb, running for the House. They’re following a path blazed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and, later, by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who both began as insurgents but became progressive powerbrokers.
Mainstream Democrats typically regard such far-left newcomers warily at first—especially when the outsiders challenge sitting officeholders. But history shows that the party leaders, and liberal institutions in general, eventually come around. Glossy media outlets now cover Mr. Mamdani as if he’s a winsome K-Pop star: he’s “charismatic and relatable”; he has “Kennedy-like charisma.” While they might be leery of some far-left rhetoric, traditional Democrats covet the young and unaffiliated voters these candidates attract. They want every tool available to challenge MAGA. The party quickly coalesced behind Mr. Platner, for example, despite his many black marks. Eager to retake both houses of Congress, Democrats will want to believe their new allies aren’t scary extremists but simply passionate idealists—akin to excitable college protesters. They’ll assume the young radicals will settle down once they get inside the big Democratic tent.
That’s a dangerous mistake. The DSA Class of 2026 isn’t coming to nudge the Democratic Party to the left. It’s coming to burn it down. “The DSA hates the Democratic Party more than they hate the Republicans,” longtime political correspondent James Kirchick said on a recent episode of the Commentary magazine podcast. This hostile takeover of the party follows an old script, Mr. Kirchick notes. The Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky urged his followers to play down their radicalism and join more mainstream socialist groups which they could then take over. This tactic, now called “entryism,” allows a small group of radicals to wield outsized influence, especially after they purge the moderates from the groups they come to dominate.
The DSA—along with the Answer Coalition, the Party for Socialism and Liberation and other far-left groups—has pursued entryism for years. DSA members aren’t especially secretive when it comes to expressing their true goals. But they can trust the media to put a benign spin on their views. The Democratic Party may soon wish it had paid more attention to the DSA playbook.
City Journal investigative reporter Stu Smith does the work most journalists scorn, attending far-left events and reading turgid position papers. Earlier this month, he reports, top DSA leaders met to update the group’s political platform, a document innocuously titled “Workers Deserve More!” It’s a doozy.
Mr. Smith writes that the new platform commits the DSA to “scrapping the U.S. Senate, ‘abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,’ defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and ‘replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.’ ” DSA members should work to “win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic,” the document continues. Along the way, the DSA wants to abolish the Electoral College, nationalize major industries and redefine marriage.
The DSA isn’t advocating “reform” here. This is a plan to dismantle America’s entire constitutional system of government. The DSA then wants to put all levers of power under the centralized control of some reformulated Congress. Of course, following the logic of entryism—and given the DSA’s long-game strategy—the group’s leaders no doubt assume that they and their allies would control this future governing body. Unabashedly echoing Lenin and Mao, the platform acknowledges that such sweeping changes would require “building a new society from the ground up.”
Mainstream liberals often assume that “democratic socialists” only want to make the U.S. more like Norway or Sweden. The DSA’s plan is something closer to a Soviet model, one in which a nominally democratic central committee—a Politburo, if you will—exercises unchecked control. Obviously, this chilling vision is absurdly unlikely. But that doesn’t mean we should discount it. The DSA’s growing contingent in Congress could play pivotal roles in efforts to dilute the Supreme Court, end border enforcement, undermine U.S. defense and, of course, demonize Israel.
Much has been made of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle some of the guardrails around our democracy. Though of course nowhere near as powerful, the DSA’s true believers have more extreme goals. But first they will have to dismantle the Democratic Party. When establishment New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries appeared on screen to congratulate Ms. Valdez at her victory party, the crowd shouted back, “You’re next!”
Mr. Meigs is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.
Free Palestine = Genocide. They know that.
The DSA is scary and its potential takeover of the Democratic Party -- and Congress -- is more frightening still.