VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The new socialists: Elite, ungrateful and toxic as ever

Win some blue state and blue city races, and the cocky new socialist Jacobins believe that they have either already taken over the Democratic Party or will soon absorb it. And in reaction to these new swarms, an increasingly terrified and ossified old Democrat guard either limps away from the hive or invites them in to take over more.

It is fascinating but ultimately depressing to watch old-style Democrats say or do anything to avoid the new mob of Robespierres. Democrat candidates who recently begged for a Schumer/Pelosi/Jeffries endorsement now are telling them to get in line at the guillotine.

Jewish American Democrats are terrified that what happened to the primaried and defeated Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, an arch-Trump hater, could befall them. Goldman’s obnoxious showboating hatred of Trump and championing of neo-socialist agendas offered no defense against the Jacobins’ antisemitism and hatred of Israel.

Some of the rich, likewise, think they can escape the guillotine — the various proposed taxes on “billionaires” and “millionaires” on their net worth or unrealized capital gains or plans to confiscate private properties deemed “not in the people’s interests.” They will either flee to Florida or join the mob and hope their donations spare them from the blade.

In general, the socialist challenge is to “fundamentally transform America” into a statist, inert redistribution machine — nuttier than socialist Europe, a prescription for North Korean-style poverty and completely unrecognizable to the Founders and most contemporary Americans. As far as we can distill, here are their agendas:

1. The new demography: Open borders, massive, unaudited new immigration ending the distinction between mere residence and citizenship.

2. Dismantling the “system”: Packing the Supreme Court, destroying the Electoral College, ending the filibuster, bringing in new left-wing states, defunding the police, ensuring same-day registration/voting, no voter ID, foreign nationals residing here being eligible to vote.

3. The Islamization of America: Ending America’s traditional friendship with Israel and realigning the United States with the West Bank, Hamas, Hezbollah and their autocratic and illiberal, terrorism-sponsoring Muslim regimes. Restoring massive USAID subsidies to fund left-wing takeovers abroad and mainstreaming now overt harassment of Jews at home.

4. Old communism: The government takeover of housing and utilities, targeted expropriation of private property, new punitive taxes on net worth and unrealized capital gains. Wild talk of nationalizing airlines and all health care.

5. Statism: Massive new entitlements, free college, canceling $1.7 trillion in student loans, more federal acquisition of private lands, rent freezes.

6. Reparations: Compensation for victims of alleged “white privilege.”

7. Globalism: Pledging solidarity with socialist/communist movements abroad while despising Western civilization in general and the United States in particular.

Socialists hide their revolutionary anger with banal pleasantries. We have become well accustomed now to the “socialist smile,” emblemized by the grinning New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani or the faux-happy face of James Talarico. Usually, the new touchy-feely socialists chuckle loudest when a rare reporter presses them on their past lunatic harangues, which are then laughed off as hysterias from paranoid right-wing minds.

Sometimes socialists embrace the hard commissar style, such as the perpetually venomous Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, who ridicules journalists, lies flagrantly and takes back none of his hate-filled rants.

The newly emerging socialists, such as recent congressional nominees Darializa Avila Chevalier or Analilia Mejia, can never explain why their parents left socialist paradises in Latin America to come to cutthroat capitalist America.

And once the second-generation socialists joined the privileged elite classes of America, these boutique radicals decided to tear down the very system that nurtured them, without ever expressing a wish to return to the socialist paradises of their parents’ homelands.

What drives the sheer hatred of the new upscale socialists, and why are they in vogue now?

For one, they hate the United States — loathe its foundation, hate its maturation and despise the current American nation. They detest especially the middle classes, who lack both the romance of the dependent poor and the supposed “refinement” and “culture” of their own elite socialist aristocracy. And the more they demagogue “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” the more they feel that the river of exemptions, set-asides, preferences and special considerations will flow to them from a supposedly guilty nation.

The socialists’ hatred of America is also revealed in their envy. Unlike the poet Hesiod’s notion of a “good” envy — embodied in the American tradition of emulation and admiration of those richer than themselves — they buy into the “bad” envy of wanting to destroy those who are brighter, more successful, richer and more essential to America than themselves, whether an Elon Musk, a Larry Ellison or a Jeff Bezos.

Socialists and communists have no confidence in winning over the majority of the American people, at least outside blue city and blue state districts. Hence, their efforts to change balloting laws; destroy the border; import angry, poor, new constituents; stage violent street confrontations; and either celebrate or contextualize assassinations from the attempts on Donald Trump to the killing of Charlie Kirk.?

Trump has driven the left so crazy that they have gyrated from Barack Obama’s four-mansion socialism to unapologetic hard-core Trotskyism. Why? Their pathological hatred transcends Trump’s background, his appearance, his accent, his tweets and even his appeal to the despised “clingers, irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs and garbage.”

Of course, Trump is a conservative, so he suffers the same left-wing slurs of “fascist” and “Nazi” that met Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But in his second term, Trump, quite unlike most Republican presidents, is not addressing just symptoms but also the causes and fuel of the socialist project.

Trump did not just jawbone the “fake news” but cut off subsidies to NPR and PBS. He did not just close the border but began deporting the criminal cohort of Joe Biden’s 10 million illegal entrants, sought to end birthright citizenship, made would-be refugees apply for entry in their home country, ended catch-and-release and will wall off or electronically secure the entire southern border from the Pacific to the Gulf of America.

He did not just rhetorically critique DEI; he banned it from the federal bureaucracy. He slashed the left-wing USAID money machine rather than just whining that it subsidized America’s worst critics abroad.

In other words, the socialists are enraged not just because they despise the United States and lack the power to turn America into Cuba or because they have not yet stabbed, poisoned, shot, decapitated, or blown up the hated Trump, as their followers, celebrities and a few of their leaders have so often boasted.

The real rub is that Trump is their flip side — not a revolutionary but a counterrevolutionary. He seeks to overturn root and branch the entire 100-year progressive project and ensure America’s insidious slouching toward socialism ends with his term — for good. The more they brag about our collective socialist tomorrow, the more Trump incessantly dismantles socialism today.

So far, they haven’t stopped him yet — but their lidless eyes never close.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact at authorvdh@gmail.com.