HIJACKED: The Socialist Movement Inside the Democratic Party Is No Longer Hiding What It Wants

There was a time when calling an American political candidate a “socialist” was treated as an accusation. Today, some candidates wear the label proudly. More importantly, the organization helping elect them has stopped speaking in vague slogans and begun telling Americans, in remarkably plain language, exactly what it wants to do to the country. Americans should read that language very carefully.

The Democratic Socialists of America is not technically the Democratic Party, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that distinction. DSA describes itself as a political and activist organization rather than simply another wing of the Democratic National Committee, even though the lines are blurring more and more as days go by. Its candidates routinely compete in Democratic primaries, its allies increasingly occupy Democratic ballot lines, and socialist politicians have become increasingly influential within progressive Democratic politics. That raises an uncomfortable question for traditional Democrats: at what point does a faction working through your party cease being merely an ideological constituency and begin transforming what the party itself represents?

That is why the word “hijacked” is more than a provocative headline. The argument is not that every registered Democrat has suddenly become a communist, nor that every Democratic officeholder supports the DSA agenda - many do. The danger is that an organized ideological movement can exercise influence far beyond its numerical size by winning primaries, capturing activist organizations, dominating political conversation among younger voters, and gradually making positions once considered politically radioactive seem ordinary.

The most disturbing part is that none of this requires a conspiracy theory. DSA has published its objectives itself.

Its 2026 national program, “Workers Deserve More”, goes far beyond familiar Democratic arguments over tax rates, healthcare subsidies, or environmental regulations. DSA says capitalism ultimately must be replaced and describes the construction of a fundamentally different society. Its program calls for a new Constitution and what it explicitly describes as a “democratic socialist republic.”

Those words deserve considerably more attention than they have received.

This is not Bill Clinton debating marginal tax rates. It is not Barack Obama defending the Affordable Care Act. It is not even Bernie Sanders arguing that America should adopt a more generous European-style welfare state. This is an organized political movement openly contemplating replacement of significant portions of the constitutional and economic order under which Americans currently live and have fought and died to protect.

Consider the United States Senate. DSA’s program calls for abolishing it. Not reforming the filibuster. Not changing Senate rules. Not adding states to alter its partisan balance. Abolishing the institution itself. The organization also supports replacing America’s two-party electoral system with proportional representation and dramatically restructuring the federal government.

The presidency and Supreme Court would not escape this transformation. DSA’s program proposes replacing the existing presidency and Supreme Court with executive and judicial institutions selected by and subordinate to Congress. It also supports abolishing the Electoral College. These are not cosmetic reforms. They concern the architecture of the American constitutional system: separation of powers, bicameralism, judicial independence and the presidency itself.

For nearly 250 years, Americans have argued about how much authority presidents should possess, whether senators properly represent their states, and how judges should interpret the Constitution. The socialist answer increasingly being offered is not merely to prevail within those institutions. It is to replace or fundamentally reconstruct the institutions.

Then there is policing. DSA’s national program advocates demilitarizing police, weakening police unions, and redirecting police funding as steps toward what it describes as fully abolishing the police and prison system. Americans should understand exactly how radical that proposition is. This is not a debate about requiring body cameras, improving police training, prosecuting misconduct, or reforming sentencing. Those are legitimate policy debates. Abolishing the police and prison system is something altogether different.

Americans living in communities plagued by violent crime might reasonably ask what happens when someone kicks down their door at two o’clock in the morning. Social workers perform important work. Mental-health professionals perform important work. Community organizations perform important work. None of them eliminates society’s need for people empowered to arrest violent criminals and protect innocent citizens.

Immigration provides another example. DSA’s program calls for abolishing ICE, ending immigration detention and deportations, providing legal status regardless of immigration status, eliminating visa caps and quotas, and extending voting rights to permanent residents. Whatever one’s position on immigration reform, those proposals represent an extraordinary departure from the immigration system Americans have known.

Economically, the transformation would be equally profound. DSA advocates public ownership of major corporations and essential industries, universal rent control, publicly provided housing, expansive public retirement benefits, free higher education, cancellation of student debt and a 32-hour workweek without reductions in wages or benefits. Its broader vision imagines essential goods and services increasingly removed from traditional private, for-profit markets.

Call it democratic socialism. Call it economic democracy. Give it whatever twenty-first-century branding makes it sound most appealing. Americans should still examine what the policies actually mean: vastly greater collective control over economic activity and vastly diminished reliance upon private ownership and markets.

The foreign-policy program is similarly radical. DSA advocates dramatically reducing American military power, closing overseas military bases, eliminating various sanctions and embargoes, and ending American support for Israel. Whatever criticisms can legitimately be made of particular wars or Pentagon spending—and there are many—the cumulative effect of such policies would represent an enormous retreat from the international security system the United States constructed after World War II.

And then there is Hasan Piker.

Piker is not an elected official, and he should never be falsely described as one. He is something potentially more influential among younger Americans: one of the country’s most prominent socialist political streamers, commanding an enormous online audience and increasingly interacting with elected officials and candidates. That makes his political rhetoric relevant, particularly when politicians decide that appearing alongside him is advantageous.

Piker’s most infamous statement came in 2019, when, during a discussion of American foreign policy, he said that “America deserved 9/11.” He subsequently explained that he was criticizing American foreign-policy decisions rather than celebrating the murder of innocent civilians. Context does not erase the extraordinary nature of the words themselves.

Nearly 3,000 people were murdered on September 11, 2001. Firefighters ran upstairs while everyone else was running down. Police officers entered buildings they would never leave. Office workers, airline passengers, military personnel, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters were killed because terrorists deliberately targeted the United States.

For millions of Americans, there is no foreign-policy argument that makes the phrase “America deserved 9/11” acceptable.

This is where Democratic candidates who associate themselves politically with Piker deserve scrutiny. It would be fair to claim that every politician who appears with him therefore personally hates America; if they support him, they support his statements. You can read another person’s heart, and guilt by association can fall into political analysis. Americans are entirely justified in asking politicians who knowingly campaign with, seek support from, or politically embrace someone who has made such statements to explain where they draw their own line. If “America deserved 9/11” does not make someone politically untouchable, what would?

Abdul El-Sayed provides a particularly important example. El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic nomination for the United States Senate in August 2026 and has advocated Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, increased taxation of billionaires, Supreme Court reform, and eliminating the Senate filibuster. He has also campaigned alongside Piker. El-Sayed makes a credible case for claiming that he personally admires the Chinese Communist Party by standing with Piker. Those distinctions matter. But his willingness to campaign alongside Piker illustrates how personalities and ideas once considered far outside conventional Democratic politics are increasingly being normalized within portions of the party.

Piker’s commentary about Communist China deserves scrutiny for the same reason. After visiting China, he publicly emphasized the country’s enormous economic development and prosperity while arguing that Americans are conditioned to view China too negatively. Most provocatively, Piker has described Mao Zedong as “one of the great leaders of this world.”

Americans should understand exactly who Mao was before treating such praise as another piece of internet edginess.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward contributed to one of the worst famines in recorded history, killing tens of millions according to widely cited scholarly estimates. The Cultural Revolution produced political persecution, ideological fanaticism, humiliation, imprisonment, violence, and social destruction on a colossal scale. Whatever economic and geopolitical accomplishments modern China can legitimately claim, romanticizing Mao requires looking past an enormous mountain of human suffering.

There is also a striking contradiction in the modern socialist influencer phenomenon. Piker has become extraordinarily successful and wealthy through the American marketplace. His audience, subscriptions, media business, and personal brand exist because an open society permits individuals to build enormous enterprises around their personalities and political opinions. There is nothing inherently wrong with Piker becoming rich. In fact, his ability to do so is part of what makes America remarkable.

But that success creates an obvious irony when wealthy socialist personalities condemn the capitalist system that enabled their wealth while championing political systems built around dramatically greater collective economic control.

Piker’s wealth does not automatically invalidate his arguments. A rich socialist can sincerely believe workers deserve more money just as a wealthy capitalist can sincerely support higher taxes. The substantive question is what happens when the ideology moves from Twitch streams into government policy.

History provides reasons for caution. Communist revolutions repeatedly promised equality, liberation, and economic justice. The Soviet Union promised power to workers. Mao promised revolutionary liberation in China. Cuba promised equality. Venezuela’s socialist revolution promised justice for ordinary people. The histories and systems of these countries differ enormously and should not lazily be treated as identical. But a recurring lesson remains: concentrating political and economic power in government does not guarantee equality. It can instead concentrate extraordinary power in the people controlling the government.

That lesson is particularly important because Americans frequently encounter quotations supposedly predicting that communism would someday conquer America from within. One popular version is attributed to Vladimir Lenin and another to Nikita Khrushchev, usually claiming America would be destroyed without a shot being fired. Those exact quotations have serious attribution problems and should not be presented as verified historical statements.

The authentic historical warning is more interesting anyway.

Khrushchev famously told Western diplomats in 1956, “We will bury you.” He was expressing the Soviet conviction that communism would ultimately outlast capitalism. He later explained that he was speaking about historical and economic competition rather than literally digging America’s grave. That distinction matters, but so does the underlying worldview: Soviet leaders genuinely believed history was moving toward communism and that capitalist societies would eventually be superseded.

The United States spent nearly half a century proving them wrong.

Americans crossed oceans to defeat fascism and later stood against Soviet totalitarianism throughout the Cold War. American soldiers froze in Korea, fought in Vietnam, guarded the Fulda Gap, patrolled nuclear submarines, and manned missile silos because generations understood that the conflict between liberal democracy and communist authoritarianism was not merely an academic disagreement about economics. It concerned the fundamental relationship between the individual and the state.

America ultimately won that Cold War without Soviet tanks ever rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue.

That history should make Americans particularly skeptical when socialist politics is marketed as merely compassionate liberalism with better healthcare.

Democratic socialism is not automatically Stalinism. Supporting Medicare for All does not make someone Mao. Advocating higher taxes does not make someone a communist. These distinctions are essential because exaggerating the argument makes it easier for opponents to dismiss legitimate concerns as McCarthyism.

The troubling evidence is what DSA itself proposes.

When an organization openly advocates abolishing the Senate, replacing major constitutional institutions, moving toward abolition of police and prisons, abolishing ICE, establishing public ownership over major industries, dramatically reducing American military power, writing a new Constitution, and ultimately constructing a democratic socialist republic, Americans do not need Republican commentators to tell them that the movement is radical.

They merely need to read the platform.

This is why moderate and traditional Democrats should be every bit as concerned as Republicans.

The Democratic Party has historically contained enormous ideological diversity. Franklin Roosevelt was not John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was not Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was not Bill Clinton. Clinton was not Barack Obama. Obama was not Bernie Sanders. Millions of Democrats believe deeply in capitalism, constitutional government, law enforcement, American military strength, and the basic institutions of the republic.

Those Democrats now face a choice about the ideological boundaries of their own party.

A political party does not transform overnight. It transforms one primary, one candidate, one activist organization, one university generation and one normalized idea at a time. Yesterday’s radical proposition becomes today’s controversial proposal, tomorrow’s mainstream position, and eventually something politicians are afraid to oppose.

That is how political change works.

And that is why Americans should stop laughing when socialist organizations tell them what they intend to accomplish.

For almost 250 years, Americans have inherited an extraordinary political experiment. It has been imperfect from the beginning. Slavery contradicted its founding ideals. Segregation disgraced them. Women were denied political equality. Workers were exploited. Governments abused their authority. America has committed grave foreign-policy mistakes. Every generation has inherited problems from the generation before it.

Yet America’s greatest achievement has been its ability to correct enormous injustices without abandoning the constitutional experiment itself.

The answer to America’s failures was not less America. It was forcing America to live more faithfully by its own principles.

That distinction matters today.

The central question confronting Americans is not whether healthcare should be cheaper, billionaires should pay more taxes, police departments need reform, or corporations possess too much political power. Americans can argue vigorously about every one of those questions.

The deeper question is whether solving those problems requires improving the American system or replacing it.

When political organizations begin talking openly about a new Constitution, a socialist republic, abolition of the Senate, abolition of police and prisons, and public ownership of major industries, that question has already moved beyond ordinary partisan politics.

Americans should listen carefully when revolutionaries tell them what they want.

They should listen when influential commentators praise Mao. They should remember when someone says America “deserved 9/11.” They should scrutinize politicians who willingly associate themselves with those voices. And above all, they should read the actual platforms instead of allowing reassuring labels to substitute for uncomfortable facts.

America’s institutions were not handed down by accident. They survived wars, depressions, assassinations, riots, terrorism, political scandals, and foreign adversaries because generations of Americans believed the constitutional republic was worth preserving even when they bitterly disagreed about how it should be governed.

The danger facing the country is not that Americans will wake up tomorrow morning under communism.

Political transformations rarely happen that dramatically.

The danger is that Americans gradually become convinced that everything inherited from previous generations is obsolete: capitalism is exploitation, policing is oppression, borders are immoral, constitutional restraints are antiquated, the Senate is illegitimate, America’s military power is inherently sinister, and the Constitution itself needs replacement.

Destroy enough confidence in the foundations and eventually replacing the house stops sounding radical.

That is the political battle now taking shape inside the Democratic Party. It is ultimately a battle over something much larger than Democrats versus Republicans.

It is a battle over whether America’s next 250 years will be spent repairing and strengthening the extraordinary constitutional inheritance of its first 250—or dismantling it in pursuit of something entirely different.

Americans should know exactly which choice they are being asked to make.

And they should make it with their eyes wide open.