The defeat of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Francesca Hong in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary arrives as good news for the vast majority of Americans who are not among the DSA’s 120,000 members.
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It was, however, a very close race. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who was endorsed by Gov. Tony Evers (a fellow Democrat), received 39.8 percent of the vote, to Hong’s 39.3 percent.
Hong was a weak candidate and a poor standard-bearer for the DSA agenda, possessing none of the charisma and political talent of DSA superstar New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Hong’s charisma shortage limited her appeal to voters and led to the refusal of prominent DSA favorites Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to endorse her. The missing endorsements were probably dispositive in such a close race.
I think Hong’s failure to get past the post in the Democrat primary illustrates a greater problem for the collectivist “democratic socialist” movement.
The democratic socialist approach relies on one central idea: tearing down all the nation’s existing institutions and replacing them with a system that eliminates inequality by redistributing wealth and status to those who have allegedly been unfairly denied these things.
The movement necessarily relies on coercion, which it justifies through the fomenting of grievances against anyone who can be characterized as having done well for themselves under what the democratic socialists characterize as a fundamentally corrupt society built on racism, sexism, classism, imperialism, and other cruel isms that toxically masculine Euro-trash imposed on stolen land originally occupied by noble, ecologically conscious people of peace and universal benevolence who were cruelly eliminated by massacres, deliberately infected smallpox blankets, and truly awful real estate swindles.
High crime rates, mass homelessness, unaffordable housing, single-parent households, education decline, increasing economic inequality, and the like have all been caused by government policies ostensibly intended to help the needy. The proponents of these disastrous measures then use the increasingly dire resulting conditions to call for more power for themselves to solve the problems they created.
To deflect attention from their own culpability for these evils, the politicians and the media place the blame on people not on their team, such as “the wealthy.” They isolate and demonize these alleged enemies of all that is good and right, to delegitimize their unpleasant, embarrassing questions about causes and effects.
That is how leftist politicians thrive even though their proposed solutions make things much worse. The greater the decline in economic and social conditions, the more blame and hatred they can heap on the out groups.
There is, however, an obvious problem with this type of scapegoating. If the out groups you are demonizing are too big, you won’t be able to gain a political majority, even with the help of a lot of cheating.
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Clearly, that is the real reason the DSA bigwigs refused to support Hong’s candidacy. In addition to calling for eliminating all police and prisons and claiming that “Police exist to uphold white supremacy,” Hong has a long history of Twitter/X statements targeting white people and “whiteness,” especially “old white dudes.”
Most notoriously, Hong wrote in 2019 of leaving a beloved Wisconsin fast-food restaurant because she was “on the verge of a [sic] anxiety attack” due to the presence of “to [sic] many old white people who didn’t think we spoke English.”
Four out of five people living in Wisconsin are white. The median age in the state is 40, above the national average, and 18.5 percent of Wisconsinites are 65 or older. Sixty-one percent self-identify as Christians. Donald Trump won the state’s presidential race with 49.6 percent of the vote in 2024. Just under half of Wisconsin’s population is male, of course.
That is a lot of people to eliminate from your potential election coalition.
Hong’s defeat thus indicates a fundamental weakness of the DSA’s strategy and of collectivism in general. The necessary demonization of opponents eliminates ever-greater numbers of potential supporters. The party’s tent shrinks steadily as the list of scapegoated out-groups lengthens.
This can work in places such as New York City and Chicago, at least for a while, as there are enough self-described victims (many of them very wealthy) to create majorities. In less-cosmopolitan locales like Wisconsin, aspiring autocrats must be much more careful about which voting groups they are willing to put publicly on the chopping block.
If DSA-affiliated candidates in those places speak too openly about their obsessions, their excessive zeal and candor could reduce the movement’s appeal significantly below its outlier status.
It seems undeniable that the DSA and its political sympathizers agree with Hong on the issues. Where they evidently differ deeply is on the political viability of their agenda when its innate hostility to the great majority of Americans is honestly presented.
Clearly, leaders on the left believe concealment of the movement’s real foundations and extensive hatreds is far more important than the very small policy distance between Hong and Crowley.
Similarly, suppression of the truth about democratic socialism is the obvious reason behind Ocasio-Cortez’s recent attempt to pretend she now believes “Woke One was crazy.”
It’s all part of a strategy of hiding the full extent of the democratic socialists’ enemies list, not any change of policy, ideology, or the targets of their ire.
S. T. Karnick is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and author of the Life, Liberty, Property weekly e-newsletter.
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Image: David Shankbone