The radical left-wing takeover of the Democrats is nearly complete
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.
El-Sayed has impeccable credentials for a 21st-century internationalist progressive – or what right-wingers might call ‘a third-worldist’. A practising Muslim from the affluent suburbs of Detroit, the son of an Egyptian engineer, he captained the lacrosse team at Oxford, earned a doctorate in public health, and turned into a podcaster. He has a beard, a buff torso, and walks out on stage to the rap song ‘Changes’ by Tupac Shakur:
Can’t a brother get a little peace?
It’s war on the streets
And the war in the Middle East.
Instead of war on poverty
They got a war on drugs
So the police can bother me.
He insists he’s ‘a scientist not a socialist’ and rejects ideological labels. But that’s what a Trotskyite entryist would say. He has campaigned, done podcasts and even filmed a workout video with the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has said ‘America deserved 9/11’ and praises Mao Zedong as ‘one of the great leaders of this world’.
El-Sayed is not formally aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The group has, however, reportedly sent volunteers and resources to back him in Michigan, as well as to Francesca Hong’s campaign in neighbouring Wisconsin. Hong is an outright DSA member who is bidding to be America’s first socialist governor. She promises to ‘tax the rich, fund our schools, and stop AI data centres’ – and naturally she’s ahead in the polls.
The DSA is on a roll, having transformed in recent years from a club for fringe eccentrics into arguably the most effective political organisation in America. In January, Zohran Mamdani, a dues-paying member since 2017, became mayor of New York. His apparent moderation in office has disappointed hardliners, though he has imposed the rent controls he promised, and this week posted a dramatic face-to-camera address in which he called Bibi Netanyahu ‘a war criminal’ and appealed for his arrest.
Last month, three Mamdani-backed radicals won congressional primaries in his city. Perhaps the most colourful is Darializa Avila Chevalier, a DSA hardliner who wears funky spectacles, attended a pro-Hamas rally and wants to ban borders, the police and prisons.
Darializa, a graduate of Columbia University, is known to be an admirer of Assata Shakur, the late Black Panther, who was Tupac Shakur’s godmother or step-aunt or something (family is a white patriarchal concept).
In 1977, Assata was found guilty of murdering a state trooper in New Jersey. She then escaped prison, found asylum in Cuba and spent her last years in Havana writing impenetrable revolutionary prose. She’s now all the rage in trendy circles, having clearly been the inspiration for the female lead in Paul Thomas Anderson’s multi-award–winning film One Battle After Another. Radical chic never goes out of fashion.
Another DSA darling is the Ethiopian-born lawyer Melat Kiros, who last month won her congressional primary in Denver, having also campaigned for a US arms embargo on Israel, Medicare for All and the annihilation of ICE. At a recent event for the Tigrayan diaspora in Colorado, she called for ‘getting more people who have heritage in the global south into office’ in order to achieve a ‘reckoning’ for America’s ‘exploitative and extractive’ role in the world.
In the past, DSA members tended to emphasise the ‘Democratic’ rather than the ‘Socialist’ part, as if their worldview were informed by the European centre-left. Now, however, American socialists have learnt to ‘lean in’, as the feminists say, to their more native seditious temperament. Last week, the DSA released their new ‘Workers Deserve More!’ online platform. Complete with cutesy cartoons of red roses and clenched-fist salutes, the platform explains to the masses why the ‘capitalist oligarchy’ must be destroyed. ‘We push these demands to their furthest extent today,’ it says, ‘so we can fight for their fullest realisation in a socialist future.’
The platform makes Andy Burnham sound like a neoliberal sell-out. It calls for the closure of all US military bases overseas, the stopping of all sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, the abolition of prisons and universal free housing. ‘Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries,’ it says. ‘Abolish the Senate… replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.’
Tear up the US constitution, in other words, though interestingly the manifesto includes no mention of restricting the right to bear arms. That’s because guns may be necessary if democratic means don’t work soon. And as this week’s arson attack on an ICE building in New York and other recent outbreaks of left-wing violence show, some activists are done waiting.
The DSA vision is anathema to the vast majority of American voters. The Republican party sees in the group’s frightening rise an opportunity to ward off a humiliating thrashing in the midterms. Hold on to Donnie, for fear of something commie – that, essentially, is Team Trump’s message as November’s elections approach.
‘There is a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,’ averred the President in his 4 July speech celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. ‘It’s like a cancer, you got to cut it out.’
Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State and increasingly the favourite to be Republican nominee in 2028, has also sensed the moment. In a speech last week at his Department’s ‘Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism’, Rubio addressed radical leftism: ‘It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality, justice, liberation; an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and right, on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness.’ The State Department duly rolled out a new report which portrays the DSA as part of a Cuban-inspired subversion campaign ‘designed to turn America against itself’.
Yet the Trump administration is today best known for starting another unstoppable war in the Middle East, failing to bring down the cost-of-living and the kleptocratic tendencies of the First Family and its cronies. That’s hardly an ideal position from which to launch a noble defence of western values. The Cassandras of Never-Trump Republicanism always warned us that the Donald, with his unique combination of vanity and venality, would open the door to revolution from the left.
There is moreover a parallel, in style if not in substance, between the DSA’s rhetoric and the early radicalism of MAGA in 2016 – an eagerness to say the unsayable, to horrify the elite and shock the liberal media. America’s angry left and right have a symbiotic relationship, which is why DSA leaders are now happy to be grilled on Fox News, just as Trumpist talking heads seek out clashes on MSNBC and CNN. If legacy journalism hates you, you must be right.
Trumpism won by appealing to lower-income voters, especially in rural areas, who felt abandoned by globalism. Today’s New Left, by contrast, taps into something arguably more powerful: the rage of the downwardly mobile metropolitan middle classes, who feel impoverished by inflation and existentially challenged by Artificial Intelligence. The psephologist Nate Silver pointed out this week that some 40 per cent of ‘post-grads’ who earn less than $60,000 a year describe themselves as ‘very liberal’ – which in America means left-wing. ‘The sweet spot for the DSA,’ argued Silver, is among the ‘very college-educated but not particularly well-off’.
According to the horseshoe theory, too, the growing loathing of Israel, and the widespread resentment over Tel Aviv’s influence over Washington, means that populism makes unlikely bedfellows left and right. El-Sayed hinted at that on a podcast this month when he said that he ‘wouldn’t be surprised’ if followers of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the MAGA darling turned furious anti-Zionist who also bemoans the hellacious costs of healthcare, end up supporting him.
Michigan is not New York or Colorado, to put it mildly. It’s a blue-collar swing state which voted for Trump twice. That’s one of the reasons El-Sayed is careful to distance himself from some of the more inciteful leftist rhetoric and emphasise his love of America. It’s also why the attacks against him –many funded by pro-Israel groups – call him a terrorist sympathiser and ‘too radical for Michigan’.
El-Sayed’s views might once have made him utterly unpalatable to the Midwestern bourgeoisie. Today, however, he speaks to the growing number of disenfranchised Americans who have been, as he puts it, ‘working the same job for 20 years and feel like[they’re] on the cusp of losing it to a robot’.
At three well-attended rallies in Detroit, Lansing and Grand Rapids last weekend, El-Sayed was supported by Senator Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the two biggest stars of the American left. Under a ‘The People vs The Powerful’ banner, Bernie, AOC and Abdul together presented a DSA-lite platform that appears to bridge the narrowing gap between the Democratic mainstream and the leftist bank. They railed against the corruption of Trump and Washington, the power of the ‘special interests’, ‘corporate greed’ and ‘dark money’. They accused Israel of genocide in Gaza and denounced ‘unconditional US military aid’ to Tel Aviv, but stopped short of the DSA’s more outrageous positions.
Sanders, 84, is the retiring but not shy grandpa of American socialism. Never affiliated with the DSA, he came close to winning the presidential nomination in 2016, but was scuppered by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Machine. AOC, by contrast, is now 36, finally old enough to be Commander-in-Chief, and faces no comparable enemy. She refuses to rule out the possibility of a presidential bid (in other words, she’s running).
A proud DSA member, she nonetheless risked the ire of the group by refusing to boycott Israel entirely in 2024. Even Democratic strategists who despise her politics admit that she has become a more capable operator. If El-Sayed and Hong both win in August, and then again in November, her stock will rise higher still.
America’s choice in 2028, then, could well be Marco Rubio, the anti-communist Cuban Latino, or Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist Puerto Rican Latina. In an ever more unhappy age, she would be the change agent. Hasta la revolucion!
