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The rise of socialist candidates across the United States has reignited a long-running debate over how far left the Democratic Party has shifted, with political veterans from both parties telling Fox News Digital the movement’s success is the product of decades of ideological change that started with cultural institutions and that failing to confront it could have profound consequences for the country’s future.
“Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector, warned of ‘great brainwashing’ schemes to undermine America and the West some 40 years ago,” New York City Republican Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, who grew up in Soviet Ukraine, told Fox News Digital.
“What we’re seeing now is anything but ‘grassroots’; it’s the effect of decades-long campaigns to subvert American thought and way of life.”
That campaign, some experts argue, is the underlying reason behind the rise of socialist candidates like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the candidates he backed for Congress last month, as well as Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and the various other candidates who embrace socialist ideology.
THE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS ARE NO LONGER ON THE FRINGE
Fox News Digital spoke to several experts who warned about the spread of communism in the United States and explained how we got to this point. (John Nacion/Getty Images for Empire State Realty Trust; Taylor Hill/Getty Images; Joe Maher/Getty Images For Fane; Steph Chambers/Getty Images)
“Marxist schemes slowly mainstreamed once-fringe ideas like ‘America is systematically racist,’ or ‘all cops are bastards,’ and ‘capitalism is evil,’” Vernikov explained. “The biggest culprits are the education system, which is increasingly beholden to radicalized teachers’ unions, and moderate Democrat politicians who have refused to challenge – and in most cases embraced – their radical, anti-West peers. The next thing you know, we have a socialist mayor committed to the destruction of our value system and three of his cronies on their way to Congress.”
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who fled communist Cuba in the 1970s, told Fox News Digital the path to this point over the last several decades was blazed by the “long march through the institutions” where the “cultural left took over the K-12 school system, higher education, art houses, media, entertainment, and museums.”
NEWT GINGRICH: THE DECLARATION STILL TERRIFIES SOCIALISTS AND TYRANTS, HERE AND ABROAD
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., stands with Troy Jackson, left, who is running for governor of Maine, and then-Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner during a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour stop at the Collins Center for the Arts on the University of Maine campus on May 24, 2026, in Orono, Maine. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
Gonzalez, co-author of the book “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It,” pointed to a sweeping new White House report which concluded that the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) has become a taxpayer-backed institution of “ideological capture” and “extreme political activism.”
“People think America is exceptional because it is rich and powerful, which completely misunderstands American exceptionalism and the concept of exceptionalism. American exceptionalism is not at all about America being free, rich and powerful,” Gonzalez said.
“On the contrary, America is rich and powerful because of America’s exceptional nature. And that has nothing to do with being rich and powerful. It has to do with the fact that America derived its sovereignty from the concept of natural rights. They stopped demanding their rights as Englishmen and turned around and started demanding their rights as men under the concept of natural rights — that they have these rights that are endowed by the Creator with natural rights, and that these rights are eternal. Nobody has taught Mamdani this. Instead, they have taught Mamdani to hate America — that America is structurally oppressive and systemically racist — and that has been the message of these institutions.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers a speech to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States of America at City Hall in New York, N.Y., July 3, 2026. (Anna Connors/Pool via REUTERS)
As concerns about the growth of socialism and communism grow, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is adopting and rolling out an updated platform that cuts at the heart of what many conservatives view as America’s constitutional framework and public-safety system, including calls to abolish the U.S. Senate, replace the Electoral College, defund police departments and abolish prisons.
Gonzalez told Fox News Digital that if he had to put a date on when the left’s cultural takeover began to explode, it would be the 1980s.
“It started in earnest in the 80s because the members of the New Left that had been terrorists, like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers and so forth, they come out of hiding and they start taking over the teaching profession,” Gonzalez explained.
“They go into cultural areas and by the late 80s, you have the doctrine of Critical Race Theory, before that, you have critical legal theory and that takes over the law schools and then it gravitates to all faculties and then it comes to the Ivy walls in the second decade of the of the twenty-first century with Obama, Obama creates the environment for it.”
Much has been made in recent months about the disappearance of “moderates” within the Democratic Party and some attribute that to what Gonzalez referred to as the “decimation” of moderate Democrats in red and purple districts during the Obama years.
Obama, who moved in many of the same Chicago political and civic circles as former Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers during his early political career, is often accused by conservatives as opening the door to the far-left of the party with his rhetoric and big government policies like Obamacare. During Obama’s eight years in office, Democrats lost more than 1,000 elected offices nationwide, including 63 House seats, 12 Senate seats, 12 governorships, and roughly 940 state legislative seats, in one of the party’s most severe down-ballot declines in modern history.
During Obama’s presidency, as moderate Democrats were losing elected offices across the country, several high-profile left-wing movements emerged, including Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. The country also witnessed widespread protests, and, in some cities, riots, following high-profile police shootings, including the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown.
How did the Democratic Party go from pragmatic bipartisan leaders in the 1980s and 1990s to the schism between socialists and moderates that exists today? Gonzalez suggested patriotism is the underlying issue.
“I would go back to pre-Bill Clinton,” Gonzalez said when asked about the last time the Democratic Party had leaders who could stand up to the socialist wing. “I would say Tip O’Neill, and Dick Gephardt, these are people that I strongly disagreed with when I was alive back then, I disagreed with them on Central American policy, but they loved the flag, they loved America, they loved capitalism. Tip O’Neill would not have put up with Mamdani’s balderdash on collectivism or seizing the means of production.”
A Gallup poll released in late June found Americans’ national pride has fallen to its lowest level in the survey’s 25-year history, with just 53% saying they are “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. The survey also found a sharp partisan divide: 93% of Republicans said they were extremely or very proud to be American, compared to 27% of Democrats, continuing a trend of widening differences in national pride between the two parties.
Veteran Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf told Fox News Digital the political divide in the United States now essentially boils down to two groups: those who love the country and those who don’t.
Protesters carry Communist Party USA flags during a May Day rally in Minneapolis, Minn. (Derek Shook/Fox News Digital)
“If you hate this country, it doesn’t matter whether you are a Republican or a Democrat,” Sheinkopf said. “If someone hates the country, you have an obligation to do whatever you can to stop them. And the people telling you they hate this country mean they hate its residents as well. They hate differences, they hate multi-ethnic societies, they hate Western democracy, and they’re going to do whatever they can to stop it. If you look at the DSA website, it’s pretty clear.”
As far as what can be done to reverse the spread of communist ideology within the Democratic Party, Sheinkopf said Democrats need to ” engage in real partisanship as opposed to blabathons” while focusing less on Trump and more on engaging with “programmatic arguments” on substantive issues.
“Low turnouts benefit the enemy, the enemy are the enemies of democracy and people have to stop thinking about it as Republican or Democrat,” Sheinkopf said, referencing the low turnouts in places like New York City where socialists have seen major victories.
Sheinkopf explained that in addition to the failures of leadership within the Democratic Party, his generation did a “crappy job” warning their children of the dangers of socialism, and instead installed the “religion called social justice.”
“What it is, is the beginning of the fall of Western civilization by its disruption and that’s the idiocy that people fail to understand,” Sheinkopf said.
A Fox News poll released in March found a record 38% of registered voters said it would be a good thing for the United States to move away from capitalism and toward socialism, up from 32% in 2022 and just 18% when the question was first asked in 2010, underscoring a growing openness to socialist ideas even as a majority of voters still oppose such a shift.
Communist and socialist organizations have also become increasingly visible at high-profile demonstrations over the past year. During May Day protests in Minneapolis this spring, members of Communist Party USA and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization marched alongside other activist groups carrying communist and socialist banners while participants called for a “revolution” and displayed anti-capitalist messaging, Fox News Digital extensively reported.
Similar scenes have played out at demonstrations in New York City, where communist organizations have openly distributed literature, displayed communist flags and promoted Marxist ideology at larger anti-Trump protests.
The political shift has gotten the attention of President Donald Trump, who earlier this month in a speech at Mt. Rushmore described communism as “the greatest threat” facing the United States.
“It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11,” Trump said. “We’re not going to let this happen to us. Believe me, we’re not letting it happen, because communism is the enemy of free people.”
Historians estimate communist regimes, many of which described themselves as socialist states, in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and elsewhere were responsible for the deaths of more than 100 million people during the 20th century through executions, forced labor, famine and political repression.
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Protesters affiliated with the Revolutionary Communists of America hold a banner during a May Day march in Minneapolis, Minn. (Derek Shook/Fox News Digital)
“This needs to be taken very seriously,” Gonzalez told Fox News Digital. “Mamdani tells you about collectivism, that’s one of the ways you know he’s a communist, he doesn’t tell you what follows collectivism, the gulags follow collectivism and Marx himself tells you why the gulags follow collectivism.”
“Marx in the manifesto says when you take people’s property away, they get awfully angry and they’re gonna fight back and you’re gonna need, ‘despotic inroads.’ This is what the English translation of the German says, despotic inroads. In other words, you’re going to need to be repressive. And that’s gulags. And that follows collectivism. America needs to understand there is a specter haunting America, and it’s communism. They need to wake up to this.”
