Better in their words…

Source: Most Radical Democrats Aren’t Losing — And Most Democrats Aren’t Deradicalizing

People are as gullible as they have always been. Conservatives, as a whole, are not addressing the DSA “effort” very intelligently. mrossol

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER
AUG 12, 2026
Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), lost last night to David Crowley, a moderate establishment candidate. Polling before the race had shown Hong with a strong lead, and so her defeat came as a surprise. Not only that but it “revealed limits to the far left’s power,” argues Politico this morning, “and is undercutting the narrative of an emerging insurgency.”
But there is less to Hong’s defeat than meets the eye. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the nation’s most high-profile democratic socialists, refused to endorse Hong, and did not campaign with her. “Bernie, AOC, and most national groups stayed out,” a progressive Democratic strategist told Politico. “Abdul El-Sayed was a great foot forward, Graham Platner was not, and we didn’t need our political reputation hanging on this race.”
Other DSA stars, such as Melat Kiros and Chris Rabb, who had campaigned for progressive primary candidates in Michigan and Colorado, also refused to campaign for Hong. Said a Democratic operative, “There’s a reason the institutional left mostly stayed away… The people who made those calls are relieved.”



People attend a Michigan Unity Rally for Democrats who won their Primary election on August 7, 2026 in Detroit, Michigan. The rally brings together Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate Nominee Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan gubernatorial nominee and current Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and others. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
Hong’s defeat is still significant. Crowley had dropped out of the race before jumping back into it and surging past Hong. Her defeat shows that there are indeed limits to the appeal of Democratic socialists.
But Crowley had only been out of the race for ten days and he barely won. He left the race in July 8 and re-entered on July 18. One might argue that the drama around his re-entry gave him much-needed publicity and communicated that many Democrats felt Hong was too radical. With 99% of votes counted, Crowley defeated Hong by just a half of a percentage point, 39.8% to 39.3%. It’s not hard to imagine that, had AOC and Sanders campaigned for Hong, she might have won.
And Hong’s defeat overshadowed major victories for other progressive Democrats. In Minnesota’s Senate primary, Peggy Flanagan defeated Rep. Angie Craig, her moderate opponent, by 20 points. Notably, Sanders campaigned for Flanagan. Though Flanagan is not a DSA member, her positions are closer to the DSA than to moderate Democrats like Crowley. A progressive Democrat also won the primary to replace Craig. And another Sanders-backed candidate, Rebecca Cooke, won the primary for Wisconsin’s third district, 61% to 39%.
Hong’s defeat is thus the exception to the trend. Democratic Socialist of Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Senate Democratic primary last Tuesday despite millions in super PAC spending branding him too extreme. He defeated a candidate backed by the state’s governor and the Democratic establishment. The DSA has won in two dozen races during this year’s election cycle alone.
As Politico notes, many left-wing Democrats view Hong’s defeat as a good thing, as Crowely has a better chance than Hong of winning in the general election this November. An adviser to Democratic donors who advises progressive candidates told Politico that Hong’s loss is a “good thing for the movement.” The person explained that “This is a far better outcome, and says that it is so close that a progressive who doesn’t say the dumbest shit in the world, [like] Thanksgiving should not exist, would have won.”
What makes DSA’s rise so strange is that generations of scholars have concluded that American culture is anti-socialist. The German economist Werner Sombart famously asked in a 1906 study, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” Eric Foner, a left-wing historian, noted that “Marx and Engels themselves occasionally sought to solve the riddle of America, the land where, as Marx once put it, capitalism had developed more ‘shamelessly’ than in any other country.”
Sociologist Daniel Bell in his 1952 book Marxian Socialism in the United States that American socialists were too devoted to doctrinal purity to operate in practical politics. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, in their 2000 book, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States,concluded that “The American ideology, stemming from the Revolution, can be subsumed in five words: antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism.”
Current polling appears to confirm the scholarship. Gallup found last year that 57% of Americans view socialism negatively and only 39% positively, numbers that have barely moved since 2010. The Marquette Law School Poll found Wisconsin voters view “democratic socialists” unfavorably by 55% to 25%, with the DSA organization at 43% unfavorable. These numbers helped inspire a group of moderate Democrats to announce last week a multimillion-dollar ad campaign calling DSA a “mortal danger for Democrats.”
What, exactly, is happening? What’s behind the rise of DSA and other radicalized Democrats?
The Young, Organizing, and Machiavellianism



The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have outgrown their radical phase, say the media and Democrats. On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) laughed off her past support for defunding the police. “I have a local city councilman that has this saying: ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she said. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani defended police, prisons, and jails to a radio host last Friday. “I’ve been very clear that we have our police force, we have prisons, we have jails,” he said. And Hong, who once tweeted “Cancel Thanksgiving” and “Abolish the Senate,” said last week that Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday and said elsewhere, “The governor cannot defund the police and I’m not here to govern by slogan.”
But there is less to these shifts in rhetoric than meets the eye. When ABC’s Jonathan Karl read AOC the national program’s planks, including abolishing the police, prisons, and the Senate, she declined to condemn them, sayingonly, “No, but I think that this is a free country.” While Mamdani said he supported the police he also walked back his plan to increase the number of police. Hong said that abolishing the Senate is “nonsensical and non-practical at this time” [emphasis added]. DSA co-chair Megan Romer similarly told The New Yorker, “I am not in favor of getting rid of police entirely tomorrow” [emphasis added]. In fact, Romer had affirmed in late July that DSA supports abolishing the Senate, ICE, and prisons and seizing large corporations.
To be sure, the DSA has genuinely softened its agenda in places. The 2024 program called to “end all immigrant detention and deportations,” while the 2026 version narrows that to ending detention and deportations by ICE specifically. At the DSA’s Chicago Socialists Summit, it distributed a pamphlet that did not call for abolishing the Senate and Department of War or defunding the police.
But the DSA’s actual platform, not its pamphlets, which it adopted in July, restates and even extends its most radical policies. It calls for “fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.” It demands Congress “Defund the Department of War.” DSA says it wants to “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” And, against Hong’s own statement, the DSA organization moved even further left on the Senate, saying it wants to “abolish the Senate” where in 2024 it had only called for ending the filibuster.
In other words, DSA is memory-holing, gaslighting, and ret-conning. The DSA’s Abdul El-Sayed, who won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, deleted his social media posts supporting police defunding. Hong deleted her Thanksgiving post, and her campaign claimed she “did not recall making” her 2021 “Abolish the Senate” post. Ocasio-Cortez told Karl that pandemic-era rhetoric reflected “a huge opening” of the Overton window and that the defund debates “were quite fruitful,” which is ret-conning, or misdescribing the past. Hong similarly presented her Thanksgiving position as a lesson in pluralism, saying, “I wanted to make sure that people understood that there are multiple views, but views can evolve.” Her actual 2020 words were “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621.”
And DSA candidates remain open about its strategy of incremental progress in service of a radical agenda. “We push these demands to their furthest extent today, so we can fight for their fullest realization in a socialist future,” the DSA Program says. Hong admitted that “These are beliefs that I held when I was in different positions myself, and right now I’m in the position of running for governor. I need to be sensible, sensible and practical on what we can achieve.”
In fact, extremism abounds in the new DSA platform. It says its demands are staged toward “fullest realization in a socialist future.” It characterizes DSA’s enemies as “not just individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital; not just this or that cop, judge, or president, but the entire anti-democratic structure of our society.” It pledges to “draft a new constitution” and build “a democratic socialist republic.” The platform demands“public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.”
Oliver Larkin, the DSA member challenging Representative Jared Moskowitz in Florida, called the platform “a fair representation” of the organization. Pennsylvania state Representative Chris Rabb, who is headed to Congress with DSA support, dismissed scrutiny of the DSA platform as an effort by “corporate and right-wing interests” to “split Democrats.” In other words, he is not saying the platform is wrong, just that the criticisms are unfair.
Meanwhile, Mamdani’s own DSA chapter condemned him in June for failing to deliver the “transformative approach to public safety” it believed he ran on. In 2020, Mamdani called the NYPD “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” and demanded the city “Defund this rogue agency.”
Mamdani himself is aggressively implementing plans for five city-owned grocery stores, which could bankrupt small businesses. The city will waiverent and taxes for the stores and thus will be able to take business from the often immigrant-owned stores that survive on small profit margins.
DSA is succeeding at a time when both parties are more unpopular than popular. The Democratic Party is viewed more negatively than the Republican Party. Gallup found that Democrats are now the only partisan group that views socialism more positively than capitalism, 66% to 42%. The DSA openly criticizes Democrats, saying in its program, “The Republicans are in on it, the Democratic Party is asleep at the wheel, and both are funded by the same criminal class of billionaires and war profiteers.” By ostensibly disavowing woke culture war positions, DSA candidates are effectively positioning themselves as an alternative to the Democratic agenda that failed in 2024.
And the statewide numbers cited above conceal the numbers that decide primaries. The same Marquette poll found that 54% of Wisconsin Democrats view democratic socialists favorably and just 10% unfavorably. Among very liberal Democrats, favorability runs 82% to 3%. The young break the same way. Hong wins 43% of Democratic primary voters under 30 and just 9% of those 60 and over. 
Meanwhile, DSA has mastered the mechanics of winning Democratic primary electorates, which is enough in many blue states. Primaries are low-turnout contests where organizations can beat popularity. El-Sayed prevailed with less than 50% of the vote. Hong leads her field with just 26%, while 45% of voters remain undecided. DSA co-chair Ashik Siddique described the DSA program as a hard-won consensus of an organization of over 120,000 members, many of whom volunteer to get out the vote in Democratic primaries. A delegate at the group’s 2025 convention said, “The whole kind of campaign operation is integrated into DSA. The data collection, the staff, the field leads.”
It appears some DSA leaders hope they can persuade voters to dismiss their prior claims as youthful exuberance. On CNN, Hong said, “I learned then you have some hot takes, sometimes bad takes, on Twitter, and I let my feelings out into the world.” This construction acknowledges some responsibility while distracting attention from the fact that she still holds most of her radical positions.
The Left’s strategy of concealing its revolutionary program behind a reassuring face is nearly 100 years old. In 1935, the Communist International abandoned sectarian isolation for the “Popular Front.” Communist Party USA chief Earl Browder rebranded his party with the slogan “Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism.” Browder wrapped Marxism in Lincoln and Jefferson. Party writer Granville Hicks packaged the friendly line for middle-class readers in his book “I Like America,” which he later called “a venture in propaganda.”
In “The Prince,” Machiavelli advised rulers that virtue was optional but the appearance of virtue was mandatory. “Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them,” he wrote. A prince should appear “merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright,” while keeping “a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.”
Calling Them Commies Isn’t Going To Cut It



U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks at a news conference after a House Republican Conference meeting in the U.S. Capitol Building on July 21, 2026 in Washington, DC. House GOP Leadership spoke to reporters about a range of topics surrounding government funding and the upcoming midterms. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Moderate Democrats and Republicans have responded by defending capitalism and defending capitalism. In June, 15 moderate House members published a letter saying, “We are capitalist, not socialist.” ABC showed a montage of Republicans calling DSA communists. Rep. Lisa McClain saying “Let’s call it what it is. It’s communism.” Rep. Steve Scalise said “Communism is on the ballot this November.” House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “We’re not going to turn this country into a communist experiment.” The AP reportsthat Republicans are making warnings about socialism their closing midterm message.
But Mamdani, El-Sayed, and others survived the name-calling. There are 212 Democratic House members and the 15 of them who signed the June letter constitute 7% of them. Affordability triumphed. Marquette found President Trump’s approval at 21% on gas prices and 24% on inflation and the cost of living is the number one concern among Wisconsin voters. Trump senses this, which is why he attacked oil companies on television last week, saying “they’re making too much money” and demanding they “cut the retail price.”
A better approach starts with solving the real economic problems that give DSA its opening. High grocery, rent, and health care costs drive the movement’s growth, and Ocasio-Cortez said as much on Sunday when she pivoted every question about DSA’s radicalism to “how we’re going to bring their bills down.” Only after offering real solutions should critics dismantle DSA’s fake ones.
And opponents of the DSA must focus voters on the real-world impacts of progressive and DSA policies, from defunding (or diverting funding from) the police to the trans medical scandal to not requiring the homeless to come inside. After Mamdani did the latter, at least 15 homeless people died outside in the cold, according to the city’s medical examiner. Opponents of DSA need to make the consequences of their policies more concrete and visible.
The DSA has not outgrown their radical phase, they have just hidden it. Its member use highly conditional language, talking about abolishing the Senate “at this time” and not defunding the police “entirely tomorrow.”
“Woke 1 was crazy,” admitted AOC. Yes, and DSA never repudiated it. And Woke 2 could be even crazier.