VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The socialist monster awakens

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

Yet annual inflation during former President Joe Biden’s four years averaged almost 5 percent. It peaked at more than 9 percent, while prices for some key staples rose by 30 percent over his tenure — all to silence from the left. (By contrast, annual inflation during Donald Trump’s first term averaged 1.9 percent. In his second term, it averaged 2.6 percent in 2025 — and may rise to 4.5 percent 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.

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.

Almost every weaponized scam and national hysteria in the past 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; 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.

Who allowed not just 1, 2, 3 or 4 million border-jumpers into the country, but more than 10 million 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”?

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.

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.

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.” 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 Brett Kavanaugh’s home, along with crowds of enthusiastic protesters.

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

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.

The only change is that the now-electrified socialist monsters have awakened. They have mocked their stagnant creators, re-energized the old messages and simply sought to replace the messengers.

Gone or going soon were the old white people such as 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 had not delivered the affluent lifestyles enjoyed by lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers and other professionals in their urban circles who had real jobs.

The downwardly mobile whites who formed 85 percent of the official ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America were joined by first- and second-generation immigrants, many from failed socialist states who sought to dismantle the very host nation that had saved them.

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 and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact at authorvdh@gmail.com.