HANSON: The socialist monster awakens

Almost every weaponized scam and national hysteria in the last two decades was amplified and spread by mainstream Democrats

Published Aug 01, 2026  •  Last updated 13 minutes ago  •  9 minute read

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds up bananas as he speaks at a food distribution center on July 27, 2026 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Mamdani announced that five upcoming city-owned grocery stores will offer a 30% discount on produce, meat, bread, and milk when they begin to open next year. Photo by Spencer Platt /Getty Images

Who caused unaffordability?

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Fear about “affordability” supposedly fueled the new, strident socialism.

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Yet annual inflation during former President Joe Biden’s four years averaged almost 5%. It peaked at over 9%, while prices for some key staples rose by 30% over his tenure – all to silence from the Left.

(By contrast, annual inflation during Trump’s first term averaged 1.9%. In his second term, it averaged 2.6% in 2025 – and may rise to 4.5% in 2026, given the war with Iran.)

The socialists were not just quiet during Biden’s four years; they were themselves responsible for the rampant Biden inflation. They had implemented an inflationary de facto third Obama term, ramming through the most radical and costly agenda in decades under the veneer of that cognitively challenged waxen effigy, good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.

So the current Jacobin takeover of the Democratic Party was not sparked by concerns about “affordability” – or at least not if by “affordability” we mean the middle-class struggle to buy a house, a car, or groceries.

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Instead, the socialist moment was merely the logical culmination of years of boutique radicalism within the Democratic aristocracy – the ossified leadership of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Hakeem Jeffries, along with the aging Black Caucus, the incoherent Squad, the DEI crowd, the open-border zealots, and the radical greens.

The grandees of the party also normalized the crazy mobs of BLM and Antifa long ago.

U.S. President Joe Biden stands with former President Barack Obama onstage during a campaign fundraiser at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on June 15, 2024. Photo by MANDEL NGAN /Getty Images

Democrats as Dr. Frankenstein

Almost every weaponized scam and national hysteria in the last two decades was amplified and spread by mainstream Democrats: the farcical claim that the Wuhan-lab-hatched COVID virus came from pangolins or bats; the Duke Lacrosse and Covington Kids hoaxes; the Jussie Smollett scam, the “Hands up, don’t shoot” lie; the deification of George Floyd, often portrayed with wings and a halo; Fauxcahontas Liz Warren, touted as the first Native American Harvard law professor (thanks to her grandfather’s high cheekbones); the radical diminution of in-person voting; the canonization of Trayvon Martin and Karmelo Anthony as blameless model children; and the mythology of a 1619 national founding.

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Who allowed not just one, two, three, or four million border-jumpers into the country, but over ten million – illegal, unvetted, viewed as an assumed new political constituency, and instantaneously dependent on the welfare state?

Who gave us three, four, five, or even more genders and biological males showering with teenage girls or female prisoners? Who sloganeered about “defund the police” and “no cash bail”?

All this was about as radical as it gets.

U.S. President Joe Biden listens as Vice-President Kamala Harris speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, May 13, 2024. With Biden ending his re-election bid and endorsing Harris, Democrats now must navigate a shift that is unprecedented this late in an election year. Democrats are set to hold their convention in Chicago in August. Photo by Susan Walsh /AP Photo

The Democratic establishment’s unhinged hatred of Donald Trump mainstreamed radicalism even further and helped birth the socialist-cum-communist Frankensteinian monster that is now devouring its mad-scientist creators.

“By any means necessary” was a Democratic mantra over a decade ago. By 2016, the Democratic leadership and the Clinton campaign were hatching the Steele-dossier farce to warp an election.

In 2020, the Democratic deep state – Antony Blinken, Mike Morell, John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Panetta, and others – had fabricated the farcical claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a hoax that, this time around, likely did alter an election.

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The Democratic establishment, working with its appendages in Silicon Valley, had censored news attesting to the authenticity of Hunter’s embarrassing laptop contents. (For an account of what the establishment was doing in 2020, read Molly Ball’s Time essay describing the “conspiracies” and “cabals” that worked behind the scenes to change voting rules and ensure a Biden victory through mail-in, no-ID balloting.)

Then came four unhinged years of lawfare: special counsel Jack Smith’s seizure of the communications of senators and congressmen, the Mar-a-Lago raid on Trump’s home, the effort to de-ballot Trump, and the five civil and criminal circuses that resulted in half a billion dollars in fines.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is seen with blood on his face surrounded by secret service agents as he is taken off the stage at a campaign event at Butler Farm Show Inc. in Butler, Pennsylvania, July 13, 2024. Photo by Rebecca Droke / AFP /Getty Images

All those perversions of the legal system were accompanied by a host of mainstream Democrats, retired generals, politicos, and athletes shouting that Trump was a Nazi, a fascist, a Mussolini, a traitor, or a Putin asset. Meanwhile, a host of loudmouth actors, Democratic activists, and celebrities competed with each other about how best to kill him – whether by shooting, stabbing, poisoning, beheading, burning him alive, or blowing him up.

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Trump supporters were libeled over the years by establishment Democrats as irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs, and garbage.

Even an establishment figure like Rosa Brooks, a former Obama-appointed Pentagon lawyer, called for a military coup in Foreign Policy just 10 days after Trump first took office in 2017.

Three would-be assassins got close enough to killing Trump to draw return fire from the Secret Service – near-death encounters that elicited both unapologetic applause for the attempts and lamentations that the shooters had failed from the now truly deranged social-media Left.

Murderers themselves were normalized as leftist icons, as seen in the canonization of Luigi Mangione and the glee that followed in many Democratic social media circles after the murder of Charlie Kirk.

A memorial for Turning Point USA CEO and co-founder Charlie Kirk is seen at Utah Valley University, Saturday, Sept. 13, 2025, in Orem, Utah. Photo by Lindsey Wasson /AP

Yet did the establishment Democratic apparat calm these waters? Or did it set them boiling?

It was Chuck Schumer who threatened conservative Supreme Court justices, screaming in front of a mob outside the court’s doors, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

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Schumer sounded more like a pink-haired anti-ICE street protester than a U.S. senator.

No surprise, then, that two years later a left-wing would-be assassin turned up at Kavanaugh’s home, along with crowds of enthusiastic protestors.

Does anyone recall Maxine Waters urging the public to bird-dog Trump administration officials and harass them whenever they were seen in public?

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out, and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Then US President Joe Biden presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to US Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on May 3, 2024. Getty Images

Does anyone also remember Nancy Pelosi, then-Democratic House Minority leader, greenlighting “uprisings” over ICE deportations?

“I just don’t know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country. Maybe there will be.”

So spoke the radical owner of two mansions, who entered Congress with little net worth and will leave it worth over $100 million. A Tip O’Neill she wasn’t.

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Then there was soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris egging on the George Floyd demonstrations, which, weeks earlier, had already turned violent and indeed deadly (despite what the “fact-checkers” asserted):

“This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And that should be – everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.”

U.S. Vice-President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally at Burns Park in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Oct. 28, 2024. Photo by DREW ANGERER /AFP via Getty Images

After four months of rioting in 2020 – which left 25 people dead and 1,500 law enforcement officers injured, inflicted $2 billion in damage, and saw a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic church set ablaze – who gave the perpetrators a pass, with 14,000 arrests followed by few convictions and fewer jailings?

What happened during the violence against ICE in 2025-26? Did the Democratic apparat at least pretend to deplore the violence, or did it instead egg it on?

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And who, as sore losers in 2016 and 2024, normalized the idea of dismantling the constitutional order – first by calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and later by planning to pack the court, end the filibuster, and admit two new left-wing states?

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The Frankenstein monster awakens

So the socialists and communists did not really hijack the party. Rather, these youthful radicals were spawned and nurtured by aged Democrats. They became irate over their impotence and loss of influence – and simply upgraded the methods and message of their elders.

The upper-middle-class Mamdanis, Pikers, and AOCs did not storm the party parapets but were invited in by a party that had already radicalized itself – amid its hatred of Trump, its growing estrangement from the majority of the American people, and its fury at becoming increasingly powerless without the White House, Congress, or the Supreme Court.

Socialists did not lower the bar for extremism; establishment Democrats had already destroyed that standard altogether.

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Given all that, the Democratic Socialists of America scarcely had to be invented.

After a decade of establishment Democrats destroying norms and traditions, deliberately dividing us by race, seeking to eliminate life-giving fossil fuels, and trying to implement dangerous crackpot ideas like critical race theory, critical legal theory, no cash bail, and defunding the police, the only change is that the now-electrified socialist monsters have awakened. They have mocked their stagnant creators, reenergized the old messages, and simply sought to replace the messengers.

Gone or going soon were the old white people like Pelosi and Schumer – despite their pathetic efforts to appease the Jacobins. In their place arose a cohort of upper-middle-class, degreed but otherwise poorly educated white urbanites, furious that their empty university certificates, student debt, inflated sense of self, and precious titles and jobs – but low salaries – had not delivered the affluent lifestyles enjoyed by lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers and other professionals in their urban circles who had real jobs.

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Hillary Clinton speaks during the Democratic National Convention Monday, Aug. 19, 2024, in Chicago. Photo by Charles Rex Arbogast, File /AP Photo

The downwardly mobile whites who formed 85% of the official ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America were joined by first- and second-generation immigrants, many from failed socialist states.

These were ingrates who, once safe and prospering in America, learned that boutique radicalism and identity chauvinism won cultural acceptance and conferred DEI leverage in their blue-state urban circles – and so sought to dismantle the very host nation that had saved them.

For both groups, anger was fed by envy of others with more stuff and by furor at a Middle America that plowed ahead, ignoring both their supposed talents and their hyped plight. And the Democratic Party provided the radical model – which, in their youthful ignorance, the new socialists pledged to enhance and exceed.

No longer, they thought, would hardcore leftists have to hide their agendas for fear of losing elections. In their folly, they attributed Harris’s 2024 implosion not to her clumsy efforts to disown and disguise her radical past (including the most left-wing voting record in the Senate), but to her not being left-wing enough.

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In other words, a milquetoast socialist had lost in 2024 not because she was too radical for America, but because she was not socialist – or indeed, communist – enough.

The crazed new socialists bragged that they could win by loudly and brazenly broadcasting the old agendas: open borders, mass amnesties, defunding the police, ending fossil fuels, attacking – and now seeking to destroy – the Senate and Supreme Court, and scapegoating whites and white “privilege.”

To this old mainstream Democratic farrago, they added one new element: openly embracing anti-Zionism and indeed antisemitism.

America will soon see how this insanity works out.

– Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing [email protected].

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