Communists

An all-time favorite whipping boy of the American Left is the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Most readers wouldn’t recognize the group by its proper acronym — HCUAA — but they certainly know the Left’s reordered, twisted acronym: the dread “HUAC.” That translates to the “House Un-American Committee.” Improperly rendered, yes, but the label has stuck. You can succeed at such propaganda when your ideology pervades the media, Hollywood, academia, the culture — what we at The American Spectator have long called the Kultursmog.

It is not difficult, these days, to see the neo-communist flipside of “Democratic Socialists” — once they find power.

Indeed, the more the ossified Democratic Party claims that its growing cadre of socialist renegades are not really socialists, the more they act like — and even appear comfortable being called — communists.

With every new policy they propose, the socialists have been dropping the pretense that they are not Marxists.

Socialist Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens by roughly a point with nearly all votes counted in Michigan’s Democrat primary for U.S. Senate.

El-Sayed campaigned on things like Medicare for All, investing in “affordable” housing, and abolishing ICE. He previously called for defunding the police. His campaign website says he believes “in an economy built by and for working people.”

Vice President JD Vance perfectly explained why Democratic Socialist Abdul El-Sayed defeated his moderate opponent in Tuesday’s Senate primary election.

During an interview on Fox News, Vance noted that “the base of the Democratic Party just wants radicals. It wants these DSA types. It wants people who hate even the idea of private property ownership.”

Peter Turchin has a theory called elite overproduction. A society trains more people for high-status positions than it has positions to give them. The surplus doesn’t disappear. It becomes a pool of credentialed, underemployed people who did everything they were told and received less than they were promised.

A movement’s demographics are not incidental to its politics — they are close to the whole explanation. Turchin traced the pattern to revolutionary France, where a surplus of law graduates shut out of the aristocracy’s professional class became disproportionately represented among the revolution’s leaders.

Just like our Real Estate Rich Elbow People.

Socialism is au courant in America today, though in its 21st-century form, it is less a rebellion of the proletariat than a by-product of the capitalist elite. Through its continued efforts to decrease the returns to human labour and by financing the very groups and ideologies increasingly dedicated to its overthrow, socialism has found fertile ground.

Far-left CNN reports that “about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as democratic socialists,” per the latest polling.

This is a big problem for an increasingly radicalized Democrat Party that continues to move further and further to the left and far out of mainstream thinking on issues like abolishing prisons, abolishing the U.S. Senate, sexualizing and queering little kids, defunding the police, open borders, socialized medicine, annihilating Israel, and outright property confiscation.

Megan Romer likes to spend her free time sewing costumes for school plays, picking blackberries in her backyard in rural Cayuga County, N.Y., and watching her partner play the fiddle in folk bands.

In her day job, she is seeking to overthrow capitalism.

Romer, 42 years old, is the national co-chairwoman of the Democratic Socialists of America, the far-left organization whose candidates have swept to victory in several recent high-profile races by preying on Democratic incumbents. The next showdown comes next Tuesday, when Congressional primaries in Missouri and Michigan again pit Democratic socialists against incumbent Democrats.

Tuesday 4 August could prove to be a turning point in American political history. If Democratic primary voters in Michigan choose Haley Stevens, a moderate, as their Senate nominee, the party establishment should stagger on, perhaps up to and beyond the presidential election of 2028.

It’s more likely, however, that the Democrats will elect Dr Abdul El-Sayed, a pro-Palestine radical who supports Medicare for All and the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. El-Sayed’s victory would confirm that the hard left is the coming force in national politics, and suggest that the long-anticipated socialist takeover of the oldest party in the US – the party of Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman and Bill Clinton – is finally under way. Just as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement began to devour a rotten Republican party in 2015, a vengeful left-wing populism seems ready to swallow the much-loathed Democratic elite. The only part that’s missing is the element of surprise.

The Democratic Socialists of America are having a moment. In fact, they’re having a season. DSA candidates are winning nationwide in Democratic Party primaries, knocking off incumbents while running on some of the most deformed and deranged platforms in recent political memory. Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic young socialist in Gracie Mansion, is the new leader of the DSA pack. Terrifying as it may be, Zo may be the closest thing the entire activist left has these days to a kingmaker.