Watch the reaction to the primaries in New York last week and you will hear a word that would have ended a campaign a generation ago: socialism. Candidates now say it with pride. Commentators warn, accurately, that the platform beneath it, abolishing borders, defunding the police, seizing private property, is something far more radical than the politics most of the public grew up with.

Here is the question almost no one is asking: where did these ideas come from? They did not appear overnight on a ballot. They were taught. For two decades, they were cultivated, rewarded, and treated as obvious in American classrooms, first in our universities and then downstream into nearly everything else. The ballot box is the last stop, not the first. By the time an idea reaches an election, it has already won the lecture hall.