Fear about “affordability” supposedly fueled the new, strident socialism. Yet inflation during Biden’s four years averaged almost 5%. It peaked at over 9%, while prices for some key staples rose by 30% over his tenure — all to silence from the Left. By contrast, annual inflation during Donald Trump’s first term averaged 1.9%. In his second term, it averaged 2.6% in 2025 — and may rise to 4.5% in 2026, given the war with Iran.
The socialists were not just quiet during Biden’s four years; they were responsible for the rampant inflation. They implemented an inflationary de facto third Obama term, ramming through the most radical and costly agenda in decades under the veneer of that cognitively challenged effigy, good ol’ Joe Biden.
So the current Jacobin takeover of the Democratic Party was not sparked by concerns about “affordability” — or at least not if by “affordability” we mean the middle-class struggle to buy a house, a car, or groceries.
Instead, the socialist moment was merely the logical culmination of years of boutique radicalism within the Democratic aristocracy — the ossified leadership of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Hakeem Jeffries, along with the aging Black Caucus, the incoherent Squad, the DEI crowd, the open-border zealots, and the radical greens.
Almost every weaponized scam and national hysteria in the last two decades was amplified and spread by mainstream Democrats: the farcical claim that the Wuhan-lab-hatched COVID virus came from pangolins or bats; the Duke lacrosse and Covington Kids hoaxes; the Jussie Smollett scam, the “Hands up, don’t shoot” lie; the deification of George Floyd, often portrayed with wings and a halo; Fauxcahontas Liz Warren, touted as the first Native American Harvard law professor; the radical diminution of in-person voting; the canonization of Trayvon Martin and Karmelo Anthony as blameless model children; and the mythology of a 1619 national founding.
Who allowed not just one, two, three, or four million border-jumpers into the country, but over 10 million — illegal, unvetted, viewed as an assumed new political constituency, and instantaneously dependent on the welfare state?
Who gave us three, four, five, or even more genders and biological males showering with teenage girls or female prisoners? Who sloganeered about “defund the police” and “no cash bail”?
All this was about as radical as it gets.
The Democratic establishment’s unhinged hatred of Trump mainstreamed radicalism even further and helped birth the socialist-cum-communist Frankensteinian monster that is now devouring its mad-scientist creators.
“By any means necessary” was a Democratic mantra over a decade ago. By 2016, the Democratic leadership and the Clinton campaign were hatching the Steele-dossier farce to warp an election. In 2020, the Democratic deep state — Antony Blinken, Mike Morell, John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Panetta, and others — had fabricated the farcical claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a hoax that, this time around, likely did alter an election.
The Democratic establishment, working with its appendages in Silicon Valley, had censored news attesting to the authenticity of Hunter’s embarrassing laptop contents.
Then came four unhinged years of lawfare: special counsel Jack Smith’s seizure of the communications of senators and congressmen, the Mar-a-Lago raid on Trump’s home, the effort to de-ballot Trump, and the five civil and criminal circuses that resulted in half a billion dollars in fines.
All those perversions of the legal system were accompanied by mainstream Democrats, retired generals, politicos and athletes shouting that Trump was a Nazi, a fascist, a Mussolini, a traitor, or a Putin asset. Meanwhile, a host of loudmouth actors, Democratic activists and celebrities competed with each other about how best to kill him.
Trump supporters were libeled by establishment Democrats as irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs and garbage.
Even an establishment figure like Rosa Brooks, a former Obama-appointed Pentagon lawyer, called for a military coup in Foreign Policy just 10 days after Trump took office in 2017.
Three would-be assassins got close enough to killing Trump to draw return fire from the Secret Service — near-death encounters that elicited both unapologetic applause for the attempts and lamentations that the shooters had failed from the now truly deranged social-media Left. Murderers themselves were normalized as leftist icons, as seen in the canonization of Luigi Mangione and the glee that followed in many Democratic social media circles after the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Yet did the establishment Democratic apparat calm these waters? Or did it set them boiling?
It was Chuck Schumer who threatened conservative Supreme Court justices. Does anyone recall Maxine Waters urging the public to bird-dog Trump administration officials and harass them whenever they were seen in public? Does anyone remember Nancy Pelosi, then-Democratic House Minority leader, greenlighting “uprisings” over ICE deportations? Then there was soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris egging on the George Floyd demonstrations, which, weeks earlier, had already turned violent and indeed deadly.
And who, as sore losers in 2016 and 2024, normalized the idea of dismantling the constitutional order — first by calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and later by planning to pack the court, end the filibuster, and admit two new left-wing states? So the socialists and communists did not really hijack the party. Rather, these youthful radicals were spawned and nurtured by aged Democrats. They became irate over their impotence and loss of influence — and simply upgraded the methods and message of their elders.
Socialists did not lower the bar for extremism; establishment Democrats had already destroyed that standard altogether.
After a decade of establishment Democrats destroying norms and traditions, deliberately dividing us by race, seeking to eliminate life-giving fossil fuels, and trying to implement dangerous crackpot ideas like critical race theory, critical legal theory, no cash bail, and defunding the police, the only change is that the socialist monsters have awakened.
America will soon see how this insanity works out.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.
