ANALYSIS – Alert: Socialists Have Seized Control of the U.S. Democratic Party
By Angélique Bouchard
The growing influence of socialist candidates in the United States has reignited a long-standing—but now increasingly urgent—debate: how far has the Democratic Party shifted to the left? Veterans from across the political spectrum told Fox News Digital that this transformation is no accident. Rather, they argue, it is the product of decades of ideological change that began with the gradual capture of cultural institutions. Ignoring this phenomenon, they warn, could have profound consequences for the future of the country.
“Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB defector, warned some forty years ago about large-scale ‘brainwashing’ operations designed to undermine America and the West,” recalls Inna Vernikov, a Republican New York City councilwoman who grew up in Soviet Ukraine. “What we are witnessing today is not a genuine grassroots movement; it is the result of decades-long campaigns aimed at subverting American thought and the American way of life.”
This analysis echoes that of Roland Lombardi, historian and director of Le Diplomate media:
“Too often we forget that much of today’s left-wing radicalism is, in my view, the ideological heir to the influence strategies developed during the Cold War—indeed, the illegitimate and degenerate offspring of communism. Woke ideology, deconstructionism, cancel culture, and other related movements represent not a clean break with the past, but rather the latest stage of an evolution whose roots lie in decades of Soviet cultural and psychological warfare.
Beginning in the 1960s, the KGB and the Soviet Union’s ideological apparatus concluded that permanently weakening Western societies from within would be far more effective than confronting them through direct military conflict. By investing in universities, intellectual circles, cultural institutions, media organizations, and activist networks, they sought to erode the historical, cultural, and civilizational foundations of the West.
From my perspective, the ideological landscape we see today is the delayed outcome—emerging decades later—of that long-term strategy. In other words, the effects Yuri Bezmenov warned about were never meant to be immediate or revolutionary; they were intended to mature gradually and bear fruit long after the Soviet Union itself had disappeared. In that sense, the ultimate objective was never primarily military. It was to lead Western societies to question—and ultimately dismantle—their own civilizational foundations from within.”
According to several experts, this long-term process helps explain the rise of figures such as New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, the congressional candidates he has endorsed, Seattle mayor Katie Wilson, Bernie Sanders, and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.
The Long March Through the Institutions: Systematic Cultural Subversion
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who fled communist Cuba in the 1970s, sees this phenomenon as the result of the “long march through the institutions.” The cultural left has taken control of the K-12 school system, higher education, art houses, media, entertainment, and museums.
Gonzalez, co-author of the book NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It, cites a sweeping new White House report that concludes the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History 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,” Gonzalez explained. “America is rich and powerful because of America’s exceptional nature. It derives its sovereignty from the concept of natural rights. Nobody has taught Mamdani this. Instead, they have taught Mamdani to hate America—that America is structurally oppressive and systemically racist. That has been the message of these institutions.”
According to Gonzalez, the decisive turning point came in the 1980s. Members of the New Left, some of whom had been terrorists like the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers, came out of hiding and entered the teaching profession. “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 that takes over the law schools, then it gravitates to all faculties, and then it comes to the Ivy walls in the second decade of the 21st century with Obama. Obama creates the environment for it.”
Inna Vernikov stresses the same point: “Marxist schemes slowly mainstreamed once-fringe ideas like ‘America is systematically racist,’ or ‘all cops are bastards,’ and ‘capitalism is evil.’ 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 result is a socialist mayor committed to the destruction of our value system and three of his cronies on their way to Congress.”
This cultural conquest is no spontaneous movement. It is the fruit of a long-term strategy that has gradually transformed the institutions meant to transmit American culture and history into vectors of an ideology hostile to the country’s exceptionalism. By seizing control of schools, universities, museums, and the media, the radical left has succeeded in changing the way an entire generation views America itself.
The Role of Obama and the Disappearance of Moderates: The Decisive Shift
During Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats lost more than 1,000 elected offices nationwide, including 63 House seats, 12 Senate seats, 12 governorships, and roughly 940 state legislative seats—one of the party’s most severe down-ballot declines in modern history. While moderate Democrats were collapsing in red and purple districts, movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter rose to prominence. Widespread protests, and in some cities riots, followed high-profile police shootings, including the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown.
Gonzalez believes the last time the Democratic Party still had leaders capable of standing up to the socialist wing was before Bill Clinton. “I would say Tip O’Neill and Dick Gephardt. I strongly disagreed with them back then 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.”
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 of opening the door to the far left of the party with his rhetoric and big-government policies like Obamacare. It was under his presidency that the “decimation” of moderate Democrats accelerated, leaving the field wide open for radical ideas.
Veteran Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf goes further: his generation did a “crappy job” warning their children about 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.”
This combination—the disappearance of moderates capable of resistance, the rise of radical movements, and the absence of counter-discourse within the party—created the vacuum in which figures like Mamdani and DSA-backed candidates could thrive.
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The Rise of the DSA and the Electoral Shift
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is no longer a marginal movement. It is updating its platform with radical proposals: abolishing the U.S. Senate, replacing the president and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by Congress, amnesty for all immigrants, defunding the Department of War, an immediate end to all deportations, a 32-hour work week with no reduction in pay or benefits, Medicare for All, cancellation of all student loan debt, and universal rent control.
DSA-backed candidates such as Melat Kiros in Colorado and Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York defeated longtime Democratic incumbents. Kiros campaigned on Medicare for All, universal child care, abolishing ICE, and “ending the genocide in Gaza.” Avila Chevalier spoke of “international comrades.” These victories emboldened the DSA to proclaim that “only socialism can solve decades of capitalist mismanagement in the United States.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries did not endorse these candidates but congratulated them. Moderate Democrats such as Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) have expressed unease. Landsman believes some of their positions are “beyond the pale” and that party leaders are afraid of their own base.
The Experts’ Warnings and the Need to Wake Up
Hank Sheinkopf sums up the American divide in two camps: those who love the country and those who do not. “If you hate this country, it doesn’t matter whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. If someone hates the country, you have an obligation to do whatever you can to stop them.”
A Gallup poll released in late June 2026 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. Among Republicans the figure stands at 93%, compared to only 27% of Democrats.
A Fox News poll released in March 2026 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.
Mike Gonzalez is unequivocal: “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. 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.’ In other words, you’re going to need to be repressive. And that’s gulags. America needs to understand there is a specter haunting America, and it’s communism. They need to wake up to this.”
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From Tip O’Neill, who loved the flag and capitalism, to Zohran Mamdani, who speaks of collectivism and whose DSA allies want to abolish the Senate and the Electoral College, the journey has been long but coherent. It passes through the conquest of schools, universities, museums, media, and culture. It feeds on the disappearance of moderates and the inability of Democratic leaders to stand up to their radical wing.
Experts who fled communism say it plainly: what is happening is not a simple ideological debate. It is an offensive against the very foundations of American exceptionalism—natural rights, citizen sovereignty, and individual liberty. The question is no longer whether the Democratic Party has shifted. It has shifted. The only remaining question is whether America will finally wake up.
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