I spent part of this summer in New York, and the city that once called itself the capital of the world is visibly fraying. Cracked roads, broken sidewalks, neglected buildings, and a subway so hot and filthy that it is hard to breathe in. This is the city where the new radical Left has become a governing force. And during Pride Month, I saw where that force comes from.
I saw the Soviet flag. Not as irony, not as a museum piece — as a demand. Young Americans carrying the hammer and sickle, in shirts calling for socialism to be built here and capitalism to be torn down. I grew up under the real thing. I reviewed the KGB archives in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1996 with my own hands. I know what that flag cost the people who lived beneath it. To see it waved as a fashion statement in the richest city on earth is not nostalgia. It is amnesia, organized and on the march.
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For years, the comfortable story in Washington was that the Democratic Party remained, at heart, the party of President John F. Kennedy, or at least of former President Bill Clinton. That story is no longer true. The party’s institutional machinery is being captured, methodically and structurally, by a faction that calls itself the Democratic Socialists of America. This is not a label I am pinning on them: Many members openly identify as socialists and Marxists, and the group’s revolutionary caucuses describe themselves as communists outright.
From the margin to the mainstream
Start with Zohran Mamdani, a proud DSA member who now runs the largest city in America. His rise was no fluke. In June, all three congressional candidates he endorsed in New York’s Democratic primaries advanced to November, and two knocked out sitting incumbents — Brad Lander unseated Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), and Darializa Avila Chevalier toppled five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY). When Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) appeared on screen at one victory rally, the crowd jeered and chanted, “You’re next,” to his face. The defeat was so total that the National Republican Congressional Committee sent his office flowers and a condolence card. When your opponents send sympathy bouquets and your own base cheers your political funeral, the takeover is no longer subtle.
The numbers tell the rest. Before Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) normalized the word “socialism” in 2016, the DSA had roughly 6,000 members. It crossed 100,000 in February 2026. More than 250 DSA members now hold elected office across dozens of states, over 90% of them elected after 2019. They have turned the low-turnout primary into a weapon — a tool to clear the field of moderates in deep-blue districts where the general election is a formality.
Read their platform
So that none of this rests on my opinion, read what they wrote. The DSA’s national platform, “Workers Deserve More,” is not a wish list of generous programs. It is a blueprint for dismantling the American constitutional order, and it exists in writing.
The DSA wants to abolish the Senate — its complaint being that Wyoming holds the same two votes as California, which has more than 60 times the population. But the founders built the Senate precisely to stop a temporary majority, concentrated in a few dense states, from voting away the rights of everyone else. They want to replace the president and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress” — abolishing the separation of powers entirely. Strip away the jargon, and that is the architecture through which one disciplined majority captures the courts, the bureaucracy, and the state in a single motion. This is not my theory. It is how authoritarian regimes are born.
The rest follows the same logic: defund what the platform calls the War Department and close overseas bases, vacating the field for Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran; abolish “the carceral forces of the capitalist state”; end sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran; abolish ICE with blanket amnesty and no visa caps; and place the largest corporations under public ownership — not Scandinavian social democracy, but the Soviet command economy of shortages and collapse. The stated final goal, in their own words: draft a new constitution and create a “democratic socialist republic.”
The phrase contradicts itself, and Friedrich Hayek argued why 80 years ago. Once the state owns the economy, it must decide everything for everyone — and the moment people disagree, it reaches for force. The Road to Serfdom was not a prophecy — it was a description, confirmed every time it has been tried. No country has ever held socialist control of the economy and democratic freedom at the same time. One always devours the other.
The parasite strategy
Why doesn’t the mainstream party simply reject a faction this radical? Because the DSA is too clever for that. It learned from the failure of third parties and refuses to be one. It operates inside the Democratic Party rather than outside it, like a parasite inside a host — winning low-turnout primaries in safe blue districts where the average Democrat is not paying attention. That is how it entered the legislatures of New York, California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, and planted Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) in Congress.
Centrist Democrats face a dilemma, and the movement feeds on it. Challenge the DSA openly, and they risk the energized activists who decide low-turnout primaries. Stay silent, and they surrender the party’s center one race at a time. Mamdani shows the technique: a card-carrying member who softened his line on defunding the police for the cameras while elevating the same movement’s candidates into power. The softened message is not a retreat from the agenda. It is the delivery system for it.
What the country actually wants
Here is the part the radicals would rather you ignore. Pew Research Center’s June political typology shows their core faction, the leftward progressives, makes up only about 7% of U.S. adults. They win because they are loud and disciplined, while the sensible majority is passive. The largest Democratic-leaning group, the order and opportunity Left at 18%, is economically liberal but wants secure borders and rejects abolishing the police or the Constitution. The center does not want what the DSA is selling. But the leftward progressives are also the youngest group in the typology — and as centrist Democrats age out, this faction becomes the party’s center of gravity. Give it a decade, and the platform stops being radical and starts being mainstream.
BEFORE YOU CELEBRATE SOCIALISM, LEARN WHAT IT DID TO MY FAMILY
The radical Left is a loud, organized minority that wins because the reasonable majority stays home. That is the whole game. The answer is not panic, and it is not resignation — it is the patient, unglamorous work of persuasion, the same discipline the other side has practiced for a decade.
I have seen where the other road ends. I carried its flag out of the archives in Tbilisi. Americans should not have to learn it the way my generation did.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former member of the Georgian Parliament and a former senior official in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs. He is based in San Francisco.
