National Review Online
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
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. Darializa Avila Chevalier toppled incumbent
Representative Adriano Espaillat, the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic
Caucus. Claire Valdez defeated Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, the
handpicked successor of retiring Representative Nydia Velázquez, by 20 points.
Brad Lander, a former DSA member, thrashed incumbent Representative Dan Goldman
by 30 points in a race targeting Goldman’s support for Israel, which apparently
now outweighs his Ahabesque enmity towards Trump. 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.
Goldman, in a burst of the sort of esprit d’escalier that
only seems to reach candidates after they have been defeated, warned in his concession speech that “antisemitic tropes
and stereotypes — some of which I heard personally on this campaign — will
ultimately be the undoing of our democracy if we all don’t lean in and speak
out, even if it’s not politically expedient.”
We know: Democrats having terrible ideas is a
dog-bites-man story. But even by those standards, these are wild-eyed radicals.
Chevalier is the most perfervid example, with greatest hits that include demanding “No. more. police. at.
all. Ever,” insisting that “a world without borders — just like a world without
prisons or police — is possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward,”
bragging that “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my face on the American
flag behind me,” and insisting that “Israel doesn’t exist!”
The victory of candidates such as Chevalier and Valdez
accelerates the shift in the Democrats’ coalition. Both ran much better with
more affluent and white voters to overcome their weakness with poor,
working-class, black, and Hispanic voters. These candidates and their
supporters reflect a particular social class that throughout history has been
uniquely dangerous: people who come from wealth and/or education who are
underemployed, downwardly mobile, and resentful of a society that doesn’t give
them the rewards they see as their due. It is no accident that many of the
Democrats’ new candidates are grown adults still sponging off their parents. It
is also no coincidence that the Jew, always a favorite scapegoat of envious and
conspiratorial minds, has assumed such a central place as this movement’s
favorite hate object.
We have seen too much in the past decade of the excesses
and dangers of right-wing populism, but as any sort of mass political movement,
it appeals primarily to a desire to preserve or restore the existing order.
That places outer limits on how far such movements can go in America without
frightening away their base of popular support. The furies of left-wing
populism, by contrast, aim at the destruction of the existing order. They feed
on old Soviet and European ideologies and Marxist tropes laundered through the
professoriate. They are content to form alliances of convenience with factions
such as Islamist radicals, even if it means subordinating qualms about the
latter’s social views to their shared animus toward Western civilization. They
are traditionally driven by a vanguard of the young, idle, and discontented.
Revolutions the world over remind us of how far those impulses can rage before
they burn out.
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