The New Socialist Guillotine Is Coming for the Democratic Party

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

We’re watching a modern-day French Revolutionary-like takeover of the Democratic Party. We could call it the Reign of Terror or the Democratic guillotine.  

What I mean by that, in 1793 and ’94, when the French Revolution was well on its way to fruition, a group of radicals called Jacobins, led by the Robespierre brothers, hijacked that revolution and decided that they were going to go far, far to the left of the effort to abolish the monarchy and rename the days of the week, the months, start with a year zero concept, go out and attack private property, and execute people.  

Now, I don’t think the Democratic socialists are going to do that, but their takeover is similar to the Jacobin takeover. And what is their agenda? Their agenda is a radical Green New Deal, war on fossil fuels, open borders, no deportations, no deportations even for criminally convicted. 

In addition to that, cut the defense budget, defund the police, institutionalize diversity, equity, inclusion, chauvinism.  

We’re all going to go by our incidental affiliations.  

If you’re trans or gay or female or Black or Asian, that’s going to be what you identify in as, a large group of the victimized with complaints against the white male, etc., victimizer class.  

If you look closely at how that agenda manifests itself in the real world, it is anti-Semitic, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti— I’ll be candid, it’s anti-white if you look at the word white privilege, white chauvinism, white hate, all of this stuff.  

So how is it manifesting itself in real terms? Well, we recently had midterm elections, as you know, and most of the Left-wing Democrats—and remember, this isn’t the Democratic Party of Hubert Humphrey or JFK or even Bill Clinton. It’s far to the left. But that wasn’t enough for the new Jacobins and their guillotine.  

So I’ll give you a couple of examples. Dan Goldman was a Left-wing New York congressman. He’s famous for being probably the most recognized Trump hater in the House of Representatives. He got completely wiped out by Brad Lander, who was a declared Democrat socialist, but his agenda was a complete divorce from Israel, basically pro-Hamas, and confiscations in cases of private property, wealth taxes on unearned income or unrealized profits.  

And this pattern keeps repeating itself. 

We’ve seen the candidacy of Graham Platner in Maine, the one of Mr. [James] Talarico in Texas, Mr. [Abdul] El-Sayed in Michigan. And the result is it’s got the original revolutionaries scared to death, and they are moving as fast as they can away from the people that they used to court.  

So the Nancy Pelosi endorsement, the Chuck Schumer endorsement, even the Hakeem Jeffries endorsement is no longer coveted. In fact, they don’t want any part of it.  

Elissa Slotkin, the newly minted senator in Michigan who begged them all to come in—and she won a very close race against the Republican Mike Rogers last time around— she says we have to move on. She doesn’t want their endorsement anymore. No one wants their endorsement.  

Why does no one want their endorsement? Because they don’t have the House or the Senate or the White House, and they feel they’re yearning for power, and they want to get in there and institutionalize their power by insisting we never have voter ID, we go to completely mail-in balloting, we pack the court, we get rid of the filibuster if they don’t win the Senate, of course.  

We get rid of the Electoral College, we bring in new states and new Democrat senators, etc.  

So this all presents a dilemma for a lot of these people. What do you do if you’re a Jewish American, Mr. Scott Wiener, and you want to take over Nancy Pelosi’s seat, and you are the most fanatical Left-wing state legislator that we’ve ever had in California?  

And all of a sudden, this new Jacobin party says, Well, you’re for Israel. And then what do you do? You do what he does: No, no, no. Israel is genocidal. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.  

Dan Goldman thought that he didn’t have to give the mea culpa for his Israel support, but he did, and he lost. His opponent was Jewish, but unlike Mr. Goldman, he said that he had nothing to do with Israel. He didn’t like it. 

Got to remember that it’s emerging from these socialist Jacobins that their main interest, besides confiscation of property and redistribution of wealth, is a deep hatred of Israel.  

And so where did they all come from? Why now? Well, we have 53 million people that weren’t born in the United States, and this is a time when we don’t acculturate or assimilate anybody. And then we had DEI that separated us by race.  

We have a globalist economy that rewarded a particular group of people, and especially this movement is led by very wealthy people like [Zohran] Mamdani or George Soros or all of these candidates. Graham Platner is not poor. You look at them, they’re either affluent, upper-middle class, or very wealthy.  

And their constituency are illegal immigrants, immigrants in general, the poor who they promise lavish entitlements, and the disaffected middle-class kids that bought the line they had to go to college, ran up $1.8 trillion in debt, and can’t get a job, and they blame, blame, blame somebody other than their own poor choices.  

What else spiked them very quickly? Of course, they’re out of power. I mentioned that. And they’re angry they have no power except institutional. They control K-12, academia, corporations, and media, but that’s not enough for them.  

Number two, they hate Donald Trump. They despise Donald Trump. And most of these people get on television or media and think of ways they can, I don’t know, like celebrities, poison him, set him on fire, shoot him when he’s almost killed. That’s the way things go.  

They’re very, very radical in their hatred of Donald Trump. They hate everything he does.  

If he has the pool in Washington, the Reflecting Pool, then they would like to put on costumes and say, we’re for algae, not the pool. We want algae to take over Trump’s pool. 

And finally, on this 250th anniversary, they can’t say a good word about the United States. And remember, they don’t leave the United States. They’re like Joy Reid. You have a vacation home or, Sunny Hostin, you brag on TV about your son went to Harvard or how wealthy and refined you are.  

They like consumer capitalism, but they don’t want it for the middle class, just themselves.  

And then, like Trotskyites or Bolsheviks or any revolutionary period that we know of, the elite then carve out special exemptions for themselves, and they make everybody else, like lab rats, suffer from their experiment.  

What will happen very quickly? One of two things will happen. It will either be kind of a wave like the Obama 2008 win, when everybody said suddenly, I want nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. She’s an old fuddy-duddy. I have to have Barack Obama and hope and change.  

Well, you know how that went. As soon as he got elected, it was all race, race, race, divide, divide, divide, divide, apologize for America, but he won. 

Or it could be like 1972, George McGovern. He had the largest popular vote loss, I think, in the modern period in 150 years. He lost to Richard Nixon, who won 60.8%.  

Why? Because he hijacked the— He was a good man. He was a World War II veteran bomber pilot. He hijacked the Democratic Party and made them embrace a radical left agenda that, in the general election, turned off America.  

And they voted for someone who everybody thought would have no chance at one point in 1968. He had a close race, Richard Nixon, and Richard Nixon destroyed McGovern in that election. 

So one of two things are going to happen. I think it’s the latter, that they’re going to get into a big national election in 2026 and maybe as early as the midterms, and they’re going to lose a lot.  

They’re going to lose big time in 2026 if they nominate these socialists. And if the Republican Party exposes who these socialists are in these House races in 2026, I think they have an even shot at even keeping the midterms for the Republicans. And that would be quite a feat, since 38 out of the last 41 midterms, the in-party has lost seats.  

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