Victor Davis Hanson: America’s New Socialists Are Coming From the Upper Class
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 are witnessing in this year of 2026, for the first time really in over a century, a resurgence of socialism. And it’s a strange kind of socialism. It’s the democratic socialism of America. And what it is, the Democratic Party has been taken over by young zealots who do not believe in free-market capitalism.
They do not believe in the unique story of the United States. They do not believe in this 250th-year anniversary, in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the exceptional virtue and brilliance of the American nation.
It’s mostly a critical message they have, past and present. So, who are these people, and why are they coming into prominence?
In Maine, we have Mr. [Graham] Platner. He’s a former veteran. He’s running on—I don’t know what his ticket is. All he seems to do is talk about millionaires and billionaires and the privileged, and everybody’s being exploited.
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But notice he does not say, “I want to do the following. I want this particular program, and this is how I’m going to fund it.”
You don’t get any details. It’s mostly a critique of free-market capitalism and the American tradition and the American status quo.
In Michigan, we have Mr. [Abdul] El-Sayed. He was a health official for the city of Detroit, a very young epidemiologist with a Ph.D. He is even more critical. He adds an Islamist tinge to socialism.
He was the one that said, basically, “Don’t criticize the death of the supreme leader in Iran because my constituents might take offense,” meaning most of his Michigan constituent base is Muslim, and in that sense at odds with the majority of Americans who much welcome the news that this theocratic fascist in Iran was dead.
Then we have Mr. Bernie Sanders. He’s been around for years. He’s in his mid-80s now, a perennial candidate for president. He feels very happy that at the end of his life somebody finally is listening to his socialist message.
We have Mr. [Zohran] Mamdani. He is the mayor of New York. I don’t know what he was doing before he ran for office.
He had one term in the Legislature. He was a rap singer. He’s an immigrant from Uganda, the Indian American community, 1% of the population in Uganda. They’re sort of, to use Mamdani’s own phrase, settler colonialists in a foreign country. Then his parents, very highly educated, very successful, very wealthy.
One is an endowed professor. The other is a very celebrated and heavily subsidized filmmaker. And now he’s the mayor of New York and trying to implement a socialist agenda. What do they all have in common? Well, ideologically, they feel that they can take over the Democratic Party and, by extension, America.
And then they can raise taxes to an enormous level, raise entitlements, and do what [Barack] Obama had once promised—when, remember, he said he wanted to spread the wealth. And the idea is that we would have an equality of result, not equality of opportunity, and we would have millionaires’ and billionaires’ taxes that are now on the ballots in certain states.
We would see millionaires flee, as they are from California to red states.
It’s a pretty radical message. We haven’t seen anything like this since the perennial socialist Eugene Debs from, I guess it was, 1900 to 1920. He ran for president five times. The final time, in 1920, he was in prison. He got over a million votes.
But what else do these people have in common? They also tend to be quite well off.
Mr. Platner really hasn’t had a job. He has one client for his oyster business, and that’s his mother’s upscale restaurant. He works out of his father’s friend’s property. He’s been on a government pension-disability check from his war service. His father bought him a house.
Mr. Mamdani has been heavily subsidized most of his youth and early adulthood by his affluent parents. Bernie Sanders really didn’t have a job. But notice what I’m getting at. Now Bernie Sanders has three homes. The Squad, the so-called four or five representatives that are socialists in the Congress, are pretty affluent.
I mean, one day Rep. [Ilhan] Omar says she was worth $30 million. The next day, when she faced a storm of criticism, not so much. Bernie Sanders has three houses, as I said. It’s a very odd phenomenon that the people from the upper, upper-middle class are advocating for redistribution of wealth and property.
There’s another thing. These people are all what I would call a blue-state phenomenon. They rise up in either local elections, like Mr. Mamdani, a mayoral election in a city that’s 85% Democratic or left-wing, as far as the voters identify themselves. But they don’t do well in red states, and they so far have not won national elections.
In fact, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, they haven’t really won a statewide election. This is going to be very interesting to see if their support transcends the local environment of leftists from which they arose.
We have members of Congress who are socialists, but again, those are from congressional districts of about 750,000 people. We’ll see if we get socialists. Now, some of you are going to say, “Victor, of course, they don’t say they’re socialists,” but what was Kamala Harris but a socialist? What was Gavin Newsom but a socialist?
And you make a good point. We had in Virginia, Abigail Spanberger. We had Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey. We had Katie Wilson, the mayor of Seattle. They had one thing in common. They said to themselves, “Americans don’t like socialism. This is the land of the free and the home of the brave, and they like rugged individualism, blah, blah, blah.
“But I can’t run on that because I’m a socialist. But I can’t run on socialism either because they hate it. So what am I going to do? I’m going to mask my political views until I’m elected.”
And that’s what all three of those candidates did once they took office.
The locus classicus is, of course, Joe Biden. They’re always looking for a working-class person. Mr. [James] Talarico—he is a working-class evangelical Christian. Forget about his strident commentary about trans issues or gay issues that are at odds with the propensities and political feelings of Texans, or the fact he’s subsidized heavily by his parents.
But they always try to be a Graham Platner, a working person, because socialism is a boutique fetish of the upper-upper class. Marx and Engels were very well off. Most socialists, progressives come from the upper class.
It’s not any longer a grassroots movement. And we will see in November if this breaks with tradition. But if American history and protocol and tradition are any guide, once socialists run in statewide races or in national races, they are exposed for who they are, and it’s very hard to keep dissimulating and hiding their agenda.
And one thing we know from the history of America: It’s one of the few countries in the world that does not like communism. It does not like statism, and it certainly doesn’t like socialism.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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