Editors at National Review Online critique Democrats’ recent electoral choices.
Radical-left populism is no longer just an occasional outbreak among Democrats. It’s officially an epidemic. Tuesday night’s primaries in New York suggest that it’s already too late to stop the spread.
The symptoms have been growing for a long time since escaping the campus laboratory. The Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements arose in 2011–15, even while respectable Democrats sniffed that their party could never be taken over in the way that Tea Party insurgents for a time took over the GOP on a message of constitutional government and fiscal responsibility. The sniffing got all the more complacent when Donald Trump seized control of the Republican Party against the will of its leaders, while the Democrats’ party establishment fell in behind Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to stave off the socialism of Bernie Sanders — even as Biden meekly signed on to the Sanders agenda.
Following the rise of the “Squad” and the riot of leftism in 2019–2021, it seemed that Democrats were learning a few lessons. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their primaries in 2024. The party establishment flexed its muscles to stifle challenges to Biden in the 2024 primaries, then demonstrated that it had the juice to defenestrate him when he proved a liability. Progressive-run campuses kept anti-Israel disorder to a minimum during the fall 2024 election season. There was talk after the loss of that election that Peak Woke was over and that Democrats might need to back away from the toxic stew of socialism, transgender ideology, antisemitism, and radical rhetoric.
No more. Candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the avowed enemies of Israel were in the driver’s seat on Tuesday. … Defeats for George Conway and other candidates who ran on an anti-Trump brand rather than on leftist ideology suggest that the Democratic base is already beginning to look past the president to the direction of their own party. And it’s a frightening one.
