SHAPIRO: Revolutionary Democrats moving to take control of the party

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They did it. They finally did it. Those maniacs. They blew it up. 

As New Yorkers walk dazed through the streets of the world’s greatest city, seeking perhaps the half-buried Statue of Liberty lying beneath the silent sands of a deserted beach in the Forbidden Zone, one thing has become clear: The young revolutionaries of the Democratic Party are ready to take control of their party’s future. And there’s hardly anyone left to stop them. 

On June 24, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old Ugandan-born trust-fund baby — the scion of a Columbia University post-colonialism professor and an Oscar-nominated Hollywood director — won a stunning Democratic primary victory over disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani immediately declared that he would be running against “billionaires” to preserve “democracy.” In Socialist-speak, this means he will propose massive rent-freeze regulations, city-owned grocery stores and a bevvy of free goods that would make a child running for fifth-grade president blush. 

Meanwhile, Mamdani regularly hits the highlights of the so-called left-wing omnicause: He calls for the disestablishment of the State of Israel as a Jewish state, while vowing to arrest the prime minister; he’s sympathetic to a bevy of terrorists throughout the Middle East, so long as they oppose Israel; he vows to spend millions of dollars subsidizing the transgender hormonal and surgical mutilation of minors. He’s a walking meme, a Columbia University student, a decade too old for school … and now the frontrunner to become New York’s next mayor. 

It serves the Democratic Party right. For years, they’ve strung along the hopes and aspirations of the Bernie Sanders wing, and now they’re paying the price. After Sanders narrowly lost the 2016 Democratic nomination for president to Hillary Clinton and then was deprived of the 2020 Democratic nomination by Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and other more traditional Democrats, young Democrats have rallied to Sanders’ cause. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who campaigns with Sanders to “fight oligopoly,” is currently the Democratic frontrunner for the 2028 nomination, despite the machinations of more typical Democrats like California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. 

And those typical Democrats don’t know what to do. They’re stuck between praising the supposed ardour and sincerity of the Sanders socialists and condemning them for their radicalism. Do the former and they may continue to lose steam with normal Americans who aren’t eager to build Moscow on the Hudson. Do the latter, and they may lose the white, college-educated base they’ve cultivated.   

Do the latter. 

They’re stuck. And they deserve to be stuck. 

But that doesn’t mean they can’t win. 

And herein lies the problem for America. Americans should want two major parties that at least live within earshot of reality. That’s because, effectively, we’re a two-party system, which means that any major party nominee has at least a 40% chance of becoming president, no matter how insane. It’s why Republicans should have wanted Joe Biden to stop Bernie Sanders in 2020, even if it meant a higher likelihood of President Donald Trump being defeated, because a Sanders presidency would have been exponentially more dangerous than a Biden presidency. Republicans shouldn’t root for Democrats to fly off the cliffs of reality like Thelma and Louise because they might take America with them. 

Mamdani’s victory shows that Democrats seem to be careening toward those cliffs at full speed. We should all hope and pray that rational Americans reject the Sanders revolution and all its acolytes, before it’s too late.