Originally posted August 7, 2026.

Hello to the Trotskyite tactic of “Entryism”

Tired of eating gummy mashed potatoes while listening to Uncle Joe monopolize the conversation? Well, perhaps you can relax this coming November. It seems that the Socialists are coming for America’s “painful” holiday.

Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Senate primary on Tuesday. In New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, the self-identified Democratic Socialists nabbed nominations or buried incumbents in House races. Furthermore, writes Kimberley Strassel in the WSJ, they are running New York City and Seattle, and will soon add Washington to the roster.

The front-runner in next week’s Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor is socialist Francesca Hong, who has expressed her desire to get rid of both the police and the “painful” Thanksgiving holiday.

What’s Fascinating?

Mr. El-Sayed seems to be in lock-step with Bernie Sanders:

• Government-run healthcare
• an end to border enforcement
• wealth confiscation
• hatred for Israel
• climate alarmism
• structural changes aimed at influencing Supreme Court outcomes
• free government everything

Democrats’ “Big Tent-ism”

A leftist media, perhaps nervous, danced around the “socialist” label, relabeling Mr. El-Sayed as “progressive.” Trying to spare his party the socialist label in the Michigan race, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer helped direct millions to Mr. El-Sayed’s competitor. That failure had Chuck brushing himself off, standing upright, and suggesting the El-Sayed agenda is another flavor of liberal politics, further proof of the Democratic Party’s “big tent-ism.”

Chuck led the way, running from the socialist label, followed closely by El-Sayed himself, declaring several times, “I’m not a socialist” before he dove headfirst into an explanation of why we need socialism and shared resources.

El-Sayed Is Not Alone

Ms. Strassel tells WSJ readers.

Will Lawrence, who won the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s Seventh Congressional District, is reassuring voters that he let his DSA membership “lapse” within the “last month.”

Truly Bolshevik

What the socialist platform wants:

• “public ownership” of large corporations and “essential industries,” “aggressive wealth taxes,”
• defunding the “Department of War,”
• “publicly owned social housing,”
• abolishing police and prisons “fully,”
• abolishing the Senate,
• making the Supreme Court and president subordinate to Congress.

Ms. Strassel adds, its promise of a “classless” “world without war or poverty” is in keeping with the honeyed vows of failed socialist experiments through history, all of which ended in one-party dictatorship.

With its views becoming more radical, it’s no wonder the DSA, despite being around for decades, has never sought its own ballot line, despite the artful “democratic” in its name.

It’s why Mr. Sanders, notes Ms. Strassel, runs as an “independent” in Vermont and why the DSA is instead deploying the timeworn Trotskyite tactic of “entryism”—in which a smaller, radical political faction infiltrates a party to spread its ideas and attain public office.

This isn’t equivalent to the GOP’s tea-party movement. Those were grassroots conservatives demanding Republicans hold true to their stated ideal of limited government. Democratic socialists want to dismantle the Democratic Party’s longtime positions on regulated capitalism, U.S. defense and support for institutional norms, and replace them with Hugo Chávez-style governance.

Not Working

Many readers, scratching their collective heads, now ask, why is the Democratic Party allowing this to happen? To date, the only defensive tool the Party has used is its bank account to fend off socialist candidates running against its own candidates.

Voters are in an anti-establishment, anti-incumbent mood, writes KS.

They are unhappy with high prices, economic uncertainty and gridlock and want change. The only Democratic candidates offering anything new—however terrifying—are the socialists.

The Democratic Party has been stuck for more than a decade in a reactive anti-Trump loop, made worse by its unwillingness to offend its extreme leftist base, continues Ms. Strassel.

So instead of offering a full-throated defense of traditional Democratic ideals and criticizing socialism, they sit silent as the left pulls the party ever further. Instead of building on the work of center-left policy think tanks that are toiling to provide the party a modernized agenda that could appeal to a broad range of voters, it nominates socialists.

That Mr. El-Sayed won only narrowly in a Democratic primary is proof that many Democrats are crying out for a noncrazy version of the El-Sayed energy.

If Democratic leaders hope to save their party from a socialist takeover, they’ll have to find a backbone to do it themselves. No one is coming to save them.