The Patriot Post® · Some Dems Fight Back Against the DSA's Jacobin Revolution
As most Americans gear up and decorate to celebrate 250 years since the American Revolution this week, many leftists are commemorating and perhaps reenacting a very different revolution — the French Revolution.
The violent Jacobins who seized power in France in the years following the ratification of the American Constitution were vengeful and power-hungry. They carried sometimes legitimate grievances to their most gruesome conclusions in the Reign of Terror, even effectively cannibalizing their compatriots for insufficient dedication to the cause. The ultimate result of the French Revolution was the tyranny of Napoleon.
Obviously, this is a week for remembering — and learning from! — history, but I was reminded of the French debacle because of the rise of the Democratic Socialists here in America. After a spate of victories in New York and the District of Columbia, the Democratic Socialists of America are ascendant.
“You’re next!” they chanted in the Empire State last week, and the object of their warning was not Republicans, billionaires, or supposed American oligarchs, but New York Democrat and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. In other words, like the aristocratic Maximilien Robespierre in 1794, people who thought they were the Jacobin protagonists may find themselves staring down at a basket under the guillotine. The revolutionaries’ bloodlust will soon devour their own.
My colleague, Douglas Andrews, believes there’s good news here: Namely, that as Zohran Mamdani and his ilk win in certain cities or primaries, the GOP wins on a national scale because socialism has a low electoral ceiling.
Given that dour pessimist Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh is my spirit animal, I told Andrews that I’m far less optimistic. “I never get my hopes up,” Eeyore once said, “so I never get let down.”
When one of our two major parties embraces the stage four cancer of socialism, it’s not good for anyone. Then again, Democrats have been moving radically left for quite some time now, so you could argue that they’re merely exchanging the Spanish Flu for the Bubonic Plague. How’s that for an Eeyore perspective?
Straight-up Marxists serve as mayors in America’s three most populous cities — New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. A Marxist will soon run the nation’s capital city. Radical leftist influencer Hasan Piker promised, “The American empire is going to inevitably fall.”
How could that possibly be good news?
Columnist David Harsanyi agrees that the situation is dire:
For the first time in U.S. history, a significant bloc of Congress will openly hate the country it represents. We aren’t talking about anti-Americanism in an abstract or hyperbolic sense. The Zohran Mamdani slate that swept the Democratic Party primaries is explicit in its aim to dismantle the republic.
Members of Democratic Socialists of America want to abolish the police, prisons, and borders and “seize the means of production,” as the future congresswoman from New York’s 11th Congressional District, Darializa Avila Chevalier, once argued. The co-founder of a group that called for “nothing short of the total collapse” of the “American empire” with the goal to “eradicate America” and “Western civilization,” Avila Chevalier doesn’t deny she’s a communist. And why should she?
There’s a temptation to dismiss and whitewash the rise of the socialists. We shouldn’t.
Moreover, Harsanyi warns that “all energy on the Left is with the anti-American faction,” and the Democrats literally “invited communists into their party.” They are normalizing socialism.
On the flip side, some left-wingers and Democrat strategists see things more from my colleague’s perspective — this is very bad for Democrats. HBO comedian Bill Maher called Darializa Avila Chevalier “patient zero” of the “woke mind virus.” Not only does Maher think this is bad for Democrats, but he said, “If this is where [the Democrats are] going, my vote is in play.”
Indeed, it could be good for Republicans because, as CNN’s Van Jones warned, “The roof is collapsing on the Democratic Party establishment.”
Democrat strategist James Carville was, as usual, far more colorful. “I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the S word: schism,” he said. “Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no, we’re a coalition, we’re a big tent,’” Carville went on, but there’s “just some s**t that I can’t be in the same tent with.”
Carville’s fellow podcaster Al Hunt declared that the rising DSA candidates “are a great gift to Donald Trump.”
Thirteen supposedly moderate Democrats wrote an open letter declaring, “We are capitalists and not socialists.” Mamdani laughed that off, saying, “I mean, that’s great, but what’s a party if not its voters? I’m not interested in writing a manifesto or, frankly, in reading one. I’m interested in delivering.”
And sharpening the figurative guillotine blade. Mamdani and his fellow socialist Jacobins no longer have time or much patience for the old revolutionaries like Carville and the rest of what they deride as the “pundit class.”
Now, I may tend toward Eeyore’s perspective on a lot of things — always with a sense of humor about it — but I’ve been a part of your Patriot Post team for 22 years and counting because I love this country, and I fight for her every day.
Someone else who does that is Donald Trump. I have plenty of disagreements with the president, but I’ve never doubted his love for America. He also pledges to fight the “hardcore godless communists” taking over the Democrat Party. He called it “the most serious threat to our country since its existence.” He may be right.
He also had a warning for Democrat leaders: “If they fought them the way they fight Republicans or the way they fight me, they’d be victorious against the communists. But they don’t have the courage to do so.” Here, I hope he’s wrong. I hope America lasts as a bastion of Liberty for another 250 years, but that will depend on cutting out the cancerous rot of socialism.