A few months ago, it seemed the US Senate race in Maine was all set. Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, would be the heavy favorite in her race against Republican Susan Collins, finishing her fifth term in the Senate. But on April 30, Mills ended her campaign as it was clear that political newcomer Graham Platner would easily win the June 9 Democratic primary.
Platner, as the New York Times has called him, is a Rorschach Test. People see what they want to see in him. Democrats want to win, so they don’t see the guy who has an SS tattoo, and who has made statements like “I got older and became a communist,” along with other inflammatory posts on Reddit that he now has deleted. Instead, they insist that repeating his own words constitutes a “smear.” Declared the socialist publication Jacobin:
Opponents went all in on smearing Graham Platner as a Nazi based on a bad tattoo choice. It didn’t work. Maine voters decided they’d rather have universal health care and an end to reckless wars than a polished politician with an unblemished past.
While Platner has not openly called himself a socialist (although earlier in now-deleted social media, claimed to be a communist), he nonetheless has earned the hearty endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Jacobin, and Frank Bruni of the NYT. It is almost certain, come November, Maine voters will send Platner to the Senate, given the political conditions, even as he runs on a platform that echoes the current demands of the socialist wing of the Democratic Party.
There is no doubt that socialists are doing very well in the current electoral climate. Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory in the New York City mayoral election has electrified the socialist movement across the country, which also includes the election of Katie Wilson as mayor of Seattle. Says Jacobin:
Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York forced many political observers to think, for the first time, of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as a serious and potentially formidable force in American political life.
For the more than one hundred DSA members who assembled in New Orleans for the second How We Win national conference last weekend, that fact has long been clear. First organized in 2023 by the DSA Fund, Jacobin, and The Nation, the event has become a key gathering of socialist elected officials, legislative staffers, and organizers that showcases the breadth and depth of DSA’s growing political heft.
Indeed, Bernie Sanders lost narrowly in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, and it certainly is not beyond the imagination to say American voters might well have sent him to the White House in either of those elections, had he won the nomination. The growing influence of socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not going away anytime soon, and socialist ranks are growing in the US House of Representatives.
There is no doubt that the Democratic Party is moving toward the hard left. While the percentage of elected Democrat officials being officially socialist is still small, nearly all of them identify as progressives, and, in practice, there is little difference between a socialist and a progressive. One reason for the continuous swing to the hard left is obvious: Donald Trump, who never misses an opportunity to antagonize political opponents and whose presidency is unpopular enough to spell doom for the Republicans in November’s midterm elections. Trump’s behavior in office and his decision to levy ruinous tariffs and start a war with Iran certainly provide the ammunition that leftists can exploit. Furthermore, as Trump’s actions have helped set the economy into an inflationary tailspin, the leftwing Democrats have quickly offered “solutions.”
But there also is another and maybe more important reason why Democrats are embracing socialism: the growth of progressive non-profit organizations that are funded either by leftist foundations or tax dollars, and these organizations were in power long before Trump became POTUS 47. Alicia Nieves writes:
In the aftermath of the defeat of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, a growing consensus has emerged among Democratic strategists that the party needs more moderate messaging and candidates to win and hold federal power. But the departures of Thierry and Pizzo expose a difficult reality for Democrats: There is little room within today’s party for genuine moderation.
Over the past decade, progressive advocacy networks have steadily accumulated influence over Democratic politics, particularly at the state and local level. In many cities and states, elected officials are no longer setting their own course on policy. Instead, a relatively small but highly organized ecosystem of national advocacy groups, politicized unions, and ideological nonprofits exerts outsized influence over the party’s candidate selection, legislative and policy drafting, and internal discipline.
Progressive groups exercise growing leverage over primary elections and supply ready-made legislation drawn from think tanks and, increasingly, directly from the Democratic Socialists of America platform. Over time, this dynamic has produced a steady leftward shift in major Democratic strongholds. The policies that follow are often ambitious and coherent in ideological terms, but insufficiently grounded in political and economic reality. The visible consequences of these local governing decisions—including rising crime and homelessness, fiscal strain and governance mismanagement—now shape how many voters perceive the Democratic Party as a whole. The party’s current national brand problem does not arise from their actions in Washington, but from the bad outcomes in cities and states where Democrats hold power.
One cannot underestimate the significance of development. In the foreseeable future, the political party that controls governance in all of America’s largest cities and its most populated states is moving toward a radicalization not seen since the decade of the New Deal. While the party leaders claim to want legislation that most benefits America’s poorest people, those most likely to vote for Democrats are in this nation’s highest income brackets and have the highest levels of formal education.
Both progressives and socialists are united in their drive to impose high minimum wages, pass wealth taxes and re-establish high marginal tax rates, pass radical environmental laws to fight climate change, levy price controls, impose abortion on demand funded by tax dollars, provide government-financed surgeries to enable young people to “trans” from one sex to another, encourage more immigration from poor countries, and, most of all, create a socialized healthcare system financed entirely by government. These things are non-negotiable; it is rare to find an elected Democrat at any level of government who doesn’t hold to all or most of these political tenets.
Furthermore, the undisputed leaders of the Democratic Party are Sanders, AOC, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Charles Schumer—who hopes to be the Senate Majority Leader after the midterm elections this November—currently trails in a hypothetical primary with AOC. None of these politicians is seen as anything close to being moderate. And we can expect the Democratic Party five years from now to be even more radical, as socialists and their progressive allies continue to make political gains, especially in Democratic Party-controlled cities and states.
Leftist Successes Are Political, Not Economic and Social
One might think, given the electoral successes of leftwing Democrats, that their policies have been successful in transforming the economic and social landscapes of the cities and states where they govern. Think again. From wildfires in LA to declining economic prospects in Seattle, to economic and social decline in Chicago, things are getting worse in the deep blue cities and states.
This development brings up the question of whether a decline in economic activity is creating fertile ground for new socialist and radical progressive candidates, or if the socialist measures themselves are responsible for economic and social decay. The best answer would be to say that both are true.
One should remember that, given the Federal Reserve’s active monetary and economic intervention since the end of the Bill Clinton administration, major sectors of the US economy have not operated in a free market atmosphere for more than a quarter century. We have seen the bursting of numerous financial bubbles, from the tech bubble of the late 1990s to the housing bubble that collapsed in 2008, and Fed policies since then which have enabled the central bank to make massive purchases of housing securities and long-term government bonds in order to continue a low-interest regime and to prop up a housing market that would enjoy a financial correction otherwise.
This era differs greatly from the situation in 1980, the last time the economy suffered from high inflation and diminished expectations. At that time, the Jimmy Carter administration already had enabled deregulation of vast swaths of the economy, including transportation, telecommunications, and banking. For all the ballyhooed free market policies pushed by Ronald Reagan’s government, by 1980, Carter effectively had repealed much of the New Deal and had set up the nation’s economy for a major expansion. Reagan managed to bring down marginal tax rates to levels that encouraged both short and long-term capital investment, although he increased spending, thus leading to an era of then-large federal budget deficits.
None of that political infrastructure exists today. The Trump administration is as hostile to free markets as are the most radical Democrats. If anything, both parties are looking to repeat some of the worst policies the Franklin Roosevelt administration pursued in the 1930s. And it is important to note that FDR’s political victories failed to translate to economic success, but it is just as important to point out that, in many ways, the economic chaos that FDR created translated to political success because the voting public had become convinced that only government intervention could save the economy.
While FDR’s political wins seem to be paradoxical, they are not, and we see the same thing on the political horizon for this new crop of socialists and leftist progressives. In the past three decades, the Federal Reserve System has triggered one asset bubble after another, and the government’s heavy-handed and utterly irresponsible actions when covid hit the scene which triggered rounds of inflation that have not abated much. The government’s debt has reached ruinous levels with no end in sight.
None of this bodes well for the economy, and especially young people who already are burdened with the kind of education debt that people from my generation could not have imagined. Furthermore, more than 20 years of federal policies aimed at forcing up housing prices have “succeeded” well beyond reason, as people are forced to devote increasing shares of their income just to have a roof over their heads.
The irony, of course, is that government intervention has created one financial crisis after another, yet people are convinced that we live in an “untrammeled” market. This is the kind of atmosphere in which popular socialist politicians like AOC can thrive and even aim for higher office. She declared in a recent interview:
They assume that my ambition is positional; they assume that my ambition is a title or a seat, and my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go; Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever. Women’s rights, all of that.
She is right. If single-payer healthcare becomes a monopoly, then no matter how substandard the care and no matter how much the system breaks down, the government would never get rid of it. As I noted last month, Canada’s single-payer system has been running aground, so the “solution” is to get people who might be in chronic pain or need surgery just to get the medical authorities to legally kill them. But no one in Canada is calling for a return to private medical care.
Conclusion
Nearly a century ago, Federal Reserve monetary manipulation ultimately led to the collapse of the stock market bubble. Instead of allowing markets to work and the economy to heal itself—as had been the case with every economic downturn before—American presidents Herbert Hoover and FDR intervened directly into economic matters and gave this nation more than a decade of double-digit unemployment and economic and legislative chaos.
While Hoover became a political pariah, FDR’s power and prestige only became greater, despite the near-total failure of the New Deal. It seems we are in a similar situation. Socialists do not thrive politically because socialism works or makes life better for people living under it. They thrive because they can convince people that they care about them and that they want to make their lives better. That they don’t economically succeed—and never will—no longer seems to matter to the voters.
