It is not difficult, these days, to see the neo-communist flipside of “Democratic Socialists” — once they find power.
Indeed, the more the ossified Democratic Party claims that its growing cadre of socialist renegades are not really socialists, the more they act like — and even appear comfortable being called — communists.
With every new policy they propose, the socialists have been dropping the pretense that they are not Marxists.
Declaring capitalism a failure? All the socialists now do that.
Confiscating private property? New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani claims he will do just that if New York’s landlords, in his opinion, are poor custodians of their own property.
Dismantling the Constitution? Almost all Democrats have long called for destroying the 238-year-old Electoral College.
And now the socialists openly brag that, when they take over the Democratic Party and then the nation, they will, as good Bolsheviks, go much further: destroying the Senate, destroying the Pentagon, prisons, the police and our borders.
And they want to take over utilities, break up or absorb corporate agriculture and own major industries.
Apparently, socialists believe that with a snap of their fingers they can destroy key elements of the US constitutional order.
They also seem to have taken their cue for such radical change from “mainstream” Democrats — for example, Kamala Harris.
Now in her third vain bid for the presidency, she has adopted the doctrine of “if you can’t beat them, join them.”
So Harris now promises that if she is elected, she will pack the court, admit two new blue states (to snag four liberal senators), end the filibuster and junk the Electoral College.
How she plans to amend the Constitution to that effect she never tells us.
Like all good Marxists, these “ends-justify-the-means” leftists show an utter lack of principle: If two new red states wished to join the United States, they would lecture us on the sanctity of a 50-state union.
If they were a permanent Senate minority, they would, as in the past, honor the filibuster.
How about making “enemies of the people” lists and forcing sales of private property?
Mamdani just sent out a public list of nearly 1 million New York homeowners.
He sent official warnings to 17,000 of these property owners that, if they cannot prove they have lived full-time in their own properties, the city will levy a huge surtax on them to drive home the point that no one should own a second high-value home.
Are show trials next for those who decline to reply?
Mamdani has flipped the American tradition of “innocent until proven guilty.”
Almost 20,000 New Yorkers are now automatically presumed guilty of being house-hoarding, capitalist leeches who owe the exploited classes tens of thousands of dollars a year in reparations, unless they can prove themselves innocent.
Welcome to Mamdani’s revolutionary court.
Recently, on cable news, the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Megan Romer, was asked about her group’s agenda.
Far from denying its communist radicalism, she gleefully confirmed it all — from destroying the border to ending prisons, the military and the police.
But it is in Spain, and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s corrupt and unpopular regime, where we see what one-eyed-jack socialists can do when they are finally in power, especially when they are hated and on their way out.
Sanchez has given amnesty to 600,000 illegal aliens. One result was that 60,000 Muslim men from North Africa in a single day recently swarmed Spain’s colonial outpost at Ceuta, demanding amnesties — while looting and vandalizing businesses and attacking Spaniards.
Why do European socialists and American leftists, once elected, destroy borders, create conditions of mass chaos and welcome in millions of illegal aliens — poor, often angry and unassimilated — from the Third World?
Aside from their belief that the capitalists and their bourgeois hirelings deserve violence and upheaval, they hate the fact that capitalism is too class-fluid to furnish a permanent exploited proletarian underclass.
And so they import a huge victim class, and virtue signal their purported moral superiority.
Then they spend lavish social largesse upon the influx, and, in quid pro quo fashion, thus bind their imported underclass with their welfare-state assurances.
Socialist candidates (as opposed to registered socialist activists) hide their communist-adjacent agendas during elections.
But once in office and drunk with power, they find socialism too wishy-washy and go full communist.
They destroy borders, institutions, names, dates, statues, norms, customs and traditions to replicate the illiberalism and concomitant failures of a new Haiti, West Bank or Morocco in the West.
In sum, to make a new socialist America, you must first destroy everything that made Americans — and all that they hold dear.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.