OMG--Socialism! The misleading panic attack on the part of the right and the center

in the face of the Democratic left’s recent electoral victories

https://prospect.org/2026/07/02/omg-socialism/


Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros speaks after winning the Democratic nomination during a primary election-night watch party at The Broadway, Tuesday, June 30, 2026, in Denver. Credit: Rebecca Slezak/AP Photo

In the past week, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won nine out of the ten state and federal primaries contested in New York, including upsets in two congressional districts. Pennsylvania Democrats chose socialist Chris Rabb as the party’s candidate for the state’s Third Congressional District. Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George will almost certainly become the next mayor of Washington, D.C. In Colorado, DSA-backed Melat Kiros won the primary for the First Congressional District, unseating 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette. These and other gains have led to borderline hysterical commentaries from the center and right, many of them self-interested, all of them misleading.

According to a Wall Street Journal editorial, “Traditional Democrats are now facing a hostile takeover from the socialist left, and so far few are willing to put up a fight.” This is false. Corporate Democrats are fighting, with millions of dollars in super PAC ads; they’re just losing. They have only money. Democratic socialists have committed activists as ground troops. Many commentators are also alarmed that the success of the economic left is often linked to a critique both of Israel’s policies of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank and of the excessive influence of AIPAC in domestic policies, often in bed with the corporate right and dark-money PACs.

These critiques invariably raise the specter of antisemitism. The Jewish Insider newsletter warned, “The Colorado results suggest that, far from being contained to a few scattered congressional districts in New York City, the momentum for far-left, anti-Israel candidates is only growing within the Democratic Party, especially within urban population centers.” I have yet to read any such critique which candidly acknowledges that the backlash might have something to do with Israel’s appalling behavior.

Even more nuanced commentaries get it partly wrong. Paul Krugman writes in a recent Substack post: “The fact is that very few Americans—even among politicians who call themselves ‘democratic socialists’—are really socialists. What many, I’d say a majority, of Americans support is what Europeans call social democracy—an ideology that is OK with living in a mostly market-driven economic system in which some people make much more money than others, but one that advocates policies to tame markets and inequality with progressive taxation, safety net programs, and regulations.” Since his liberation from the timorously censorial New York Times, Krugman has become an indispensable source of insight on all things economic. But here Krugman is partly off because he doesn’t pay enough attention to the politics.

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