Massive increase in support for socialism among Democrats

The next Democratic president will be much worse than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — much more socialist and much more intolerant of free speech. Because the Democrats who populate any future Democratic administration will be much more socialist and intolerant than the Democrats who populated past administrations.

In a recent poll, “74 percent of likely Democratic voters said democratic socialism comes closest to their viewpoint, while 16 percent said the same of capitalism,” reports Politico. “The survey of 1,257 likely voters nationwide, conducted from Aug. 22 to 24 using web panel respondents, had a 3-point margin of error.” “More than half of likely Democratic voters prefer socialist-aligned figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani to establishment politicians like Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi…Fifty-three percent of Democratic voters said they preferred politicians described as similar to Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani, while 33 percent favored those similar to Schumer, Jeffries and Pelosi.”

Democrats prefer self-described socialist Zohran Mamdani, who has called for pulling police out of high crime areas. Mamdani denounced the New York Police Department [NYPD], writing, “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety. What we need is to Defund The NYPD.” Mandani also said that “Queer liberation means defund the police.”

Zohran Mamdani has called for emptying jails, because “VioIence is an artificial construct.”

Mamdani has called for having the government run grocery stores, even though such stores lose money, cost taxpayers, and result in increased food waste and reduced choices of food. Mamdani also proposed arbitrary, extreme restrictions on rent that would leave landlords with too little money to maintain housing units, which could turn much of New York into a slum.

A Gallup poll found somewhat lower support for socialism, but still found that most Democrats have a favorable view of socialism, and that Democratic support for socialism has risen. Gallup notes “Democrats’ more positive views of it over time,” with Democratic support for socialism rising from 50% in 2010 “to roughly two-thirds” today.

After the 2016 and 2024 elections, progressives doubled down on wokeness and restrictions on free speech, seeking to curb the expression of viewpoints shared by most Americans, such as the belief that there are only two genders. In 2025, a progressive judge ruled that two fathers could be banned from school athletic events for expressing opposition to biological males in girls’ sports by wearing pink XX wristbands, even though 75% of Americans, and most centrists, agree with the fathers’ position. The judge ruled that officials had not just the right but the “duty” to ban the harmless pink wristbands. declaring that such speech is violence, and that the wristbands “can reasonably be understood as directly assaulting those who identify as transgender women.” (This judge was a one-time Democratic lawyer who was made a judge after his wife died in a space shuttle accident).

An earlier ruling by a progressive appeals court in New England upheld a ban on T-shirts that said “There Are Only Two Genders” and “There Are [Censored] Genders.” This effectively silenced the majority, since 66% of all Americans believe there are only two genders.

Progressive activists are so intolerant that they vilify both moderate Democrats who reluctantly voted for Kamala Harris, and moderate Republicans like me who routinely criticize Donald Trump. If these progressives completely take over society, they will impose far-reaching censorship. They will punish not just conservatives but also centrists who disagree with some of their woke stances — even centrists who reluctantly voted for the Democrats. For a long time, the most hated person on the Democratic-leaning web site Bluesky was Jesse Singal, a mild-mannered centrist Democrat who debunked inflated claims about the benefits of giving kids sex changes. Bluesky’s leftist users hate Singal even though Singal voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, and publicly said so at the time. Singal was the most blocked person on Bluesky.

When I criticize the Trump administration for showing antipathy to free speech, or doing economically harmful things, I sometimes get negative comments at this blog from readers who are avid Trump supporters. But — oddly — I also get hostile emails from progressives telling me that “The face-eating leopard is eating your face.” These people are intolerant cretins. They also tell me that people like me caused Trump to become president by criticizing campus censorship by progressives and fanning the flames of anti-wokeness, which supposedly drove people to vote for Trump. (In reality, it was Jeb Bush, not Donald Trump, who took aim at campus wokeness in the 2016 GOP presidential primary: Jeb Bush, not Trump, proposed getting rid of racial preferences and race-based scholarships in 2016, as I had advocated doing doing for decades, in court briefs and newspapers).  They also tell me that someday, I will pay for the harm I have caused. They are so intolerant that cannot even hide their hatred until they take over society.

By criticizing Trump, am I inadvertently helping bring these nasty people to power? People who share these intolerant views will likely populate the coercive organs of any future Democratic administration, whether it is the EEOC, the Office for Civil Rights, the FCC, and the NLRB.

Progressive activists are so intolerant they attack even people who are temporarily on their side! Intolerance is an ugly trait, and the intolerance of the Democratic intelligentsia cost their candidate votes in the 2024 election. Yet they cannot even hide their intolerance long enough to maximize their chances of winning the next election. (Their obsessive intolerance reminds me of the Soviet communist dictator Joseph Stalin, who was so intolerant of any potential difference in opinion that he had most of the members of his own communist party killed in the Great Purge, even though they were communists like him).

Progressive activists hate even centrists who voted for Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, such as Steven Pinker, if those centrists criticized campus speech restrictions favored by the Left. One of them absurdly claimed, “the Pinker, Dawkins, Haidt, etc. group is the reason the far right and Trump II gained so much political ground and legitimacy (via the ‘anti-wokeness’ narratives).” This was reposted by an especially obnoxious writer for Liberal Currents, who argues that the Democrats should respond to the 2024 election results by becoming more woke. It is simply false that anti-woke centrists paved the way for Trump’s rise — the candidate in 2016 who was most opposed to woke racial preferences was Jeb Bush, who promised to curb affirmative action, not Donald Trump, who didn’t. Bush’s campaign never took off, and Trump, not Bush, became the GOP nominee for president. The anti-woke centrists are almost invariably pro-free-trade (and friendly to legal immigration), while Trump is a protectionist who supports curbs on immigration. I was historically an opponent of high tariffs, describing the economic cost of tariffs in many newspapers like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But when I recently wrote about job losses from tariffs, a leftist told me that “the face-eating leopard is eating your face.”

Democrats want to ban hate speech, which they define to include views held by normal people who are centrists or conservatives. Most Democrats supported banning “hate speech,” while only 21% opposed such a ban, in a widely-cited You.Gov poll. Some progressives define even single-instances of “hate speech” as a civil-rights violation: New York City recently warned residents that it may fine them up to $250,000 if they use the term illegal alien in the workplace or rental housing, even if they do so only once. New York City views illegal alien as a pejorative term that constitutes illegal discriminatory harassment when it is uttered to offend or demean such immigrants — even though the term is found in federal laws.

To many progressive officials — such as those who run our college campuses — “hate speech” includes stating facts, if they produce attitudes detrimental toward “historically victimized groups”, even if the statement of fact is not motivated by hatred. ‘Hate speech” is “broadly ‘defined’ by leftists to include ‘offensive words, about or directed towards historically victimized groups.’” “The concept of hate speech has expanded to include commonplace views about racial or sexual subjects. That includes criticizing feminism, affirmative action, homosexuality, or gay marriage, or opinions about how to address sexual harassment or allegations of racism in the criminal justice system.”

Others define “hate speech expansively as ‘any form of expression regarded as offensive to racial, ethnic and religious groups and other discrete minorities, and to women,'” notes the Indiana Law Review. Defending free speech is itself offensive to some groups. A 2017 study by the Cato Institute found that a majority of African Americans (65%) believe that “supporting someone’s right to say racist things is as bad as holding racist views yourself.” The First Amendment is currently interpreted as protecting the right to say various racist things, as the Supreme Court made clear in its rulings in Matal v. Tam (2017), Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992), and Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement (1992).