The Monster They Built is Eating Them Now!
US Democrats spent a decade pouring petrol (gasoline in the US) on every institution, every norm, and every standard of public decency, and now they are shocked that the fire has a mind of its own. Victor Davis Hanson's recent analysis lays out a timeline that anyone with a functioning memory should recognize: the Democratic establishment did not get ambushed by socialists. They bred them, fed them, normalised their tactics, adopted their language, and then acted surprised when the creature sat up on the table and demanded the keys to the lab. The Frankenstein metaphor is almost too generous. Frankenstein at least had the decency to be horrified by what he had created. The Schumers and Pelosis of the world are still trying to negotiate with the thing.
Hanson opens with the affordability crisis and is right to reject the socialist framing. The panic over prices that is supposedly driving the Leftward lurch was manufactured by the very people now exploiting it. Biden's term saw inflation average near five percent and peak above nine, with many staples rising around thirty percent. Trump's first term averaged under two percent; even amid later pressures, including conflict with Iran, rates in 2025 ran lower before rising again. The numbers tell a story the media rarely emphasizes: those now screaming about unaffordability helped create the conditions that made everything more expensive. The relative silence during the worst of the Biden-era inflation was not an oversight. Inflation creates desperation, and desperate people are receptive to radical politics. The problem was not fixed so much as weaponised.
The deeper pathology is a two-decade grievance factory. Mainstream Democrats amplified a string of high-profile claims that later collapsed or were heavily qualified: the lab-leak theory for COVID dismissed in favour of more exotic origins, the Duke lacrosse case, the Covington Catholic students smear, Jussie Smollett's fabricated attack, the "hands up, don't shoot" narrative, the near-deification of George Floyd, Elizabeth Warren's ancestry claims, and the coordinated effort to brand the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation, a judgment later shown to be false. Institutional choices compounded the damage. Record illegal border crossings were treated more as a demographic opportunity than a crisis. The Steele dossier, opposition research, was laundered through intelligence channels and used to colour an election. Lawfare escalated with special-counsel actions, high-profile raids, attempts to remove candidates from ballots, and enormous financial penalties. Molly Ball's Time essay openly described a coordinated effort to change electoral rules and practices to ensure a preferred outcome. Rhetoric from senior Democrats crossed into open encouragement of confrontation: Chuck Schumer outside the Supreme Court warning justices they had "released the whirlwind" and would "pay the price"; Maxine Waters urging crowds to confront cabinet members in restaurants and stores; Nancy Pelosi wondering aloud why there were not more uprisings; Kamala Harris offering encouragement while cities burned, with significant deaths, injuries to officers, and billions in damage. An Obama-era appointee floated the idea of military intervention against a newly elected president. Assassination attempts on Trump were met in some quarters with applause or regret that they failed. Figures such as Luigi Mangione were elevated in Leftist circles, and political violence was increasingly treated as understandable rather than disqualifying. Any one of these episodes might once have ended a career. Taken together they describe a party that normalised the abandonment of democratic norms until violence became, for some, an expected feature of politics rather than a boundary.
The socialist capture of the Democratic Party was not a coup. It was an inheritance. The old guard spent years radicalising the base because it worked as electoral strategy. Hatred of Trump supplied cheap fuel. A detailed policy agenda was secondary to the claim that the other side was an existential threat. Every broken norm and every stretched claim were justified by the stakes. Radicalisation, however, does not stop where its sponsors prefer. The young activists trained to see enemies everywhere eventually turned the same lens on their elders. Geriatric leaders who had grown wealthy while in office, collected corporate speaking fees while denouncing corporate power, and lived in comfort while preaching equality looked, to the monster, like another set of parasites. The only difference was that the new radicals no longer felt obliged to pretend otherwise.
Hanson identifies the demographic core of the new cadre with precision: upper-middle-class, degreed but otherwise poorly educated white urbanites, furious that their credentials, student debt, inflated self-regard, and low-paying prestige jobs had not delivered the lifestyles of lawyers, doctors, or brokers. This is not proletarian rage. It is credentialed resentment. People who followed the prescribed path discovered that moral posturing does not command market value, so they demand a system that rewards something other than competence. Immigrants from countries that actually experienced socialism sometimes join the ranks as well, having learned that boutique radicalism and identity politics confer status in American cultural institutions even as they seek to dismantle the host that received them. The pattern is psychologically perverse and politically consequential.
The 2024 election should have been clarifying. Kamala Harris, long regarded as one of the more Left-leaning figures in the Senate, spent the campaign trying to moderate her record and still lost decisively. A rational party might have concluded that America had rejected radicalism. The Democratic Socialists of America and their allies drew the opposite lesson: she had not been radical enough. This is the terminal stage of ideological capture. Defeat does not produce moderation; it produces demands for greater purity. The next candidate will be more extreme, and when that candidate loses the diagnosis will remain the same. The spiral has no natural bottom. The older agenda: open borders in practice, reduced policing, rapid energy transition, court packing, elimination of the filibuster, and racial scapegoating, had already become mainstream Democratic policy in all but explicit language. The newer socialists simply say the quiet parts at full volume.
The Democratic establishment believed it could control the forces it had unleashed. "By any means necessary" was treated as rhetoric. The mob was expected to remain permanently aimed at Republicans. That assumption has failed. The monster no longer needs its creators. It has its own leadership, its own grievances, and its own energy, and from its vantage the old guard looks increasingly like the enemy. Pelosi and Schumer can attempt appeasement; the Jacobins are interested in replacement. Hanson closes with the observation that America will soon see how this insanity works out. He is right. The remaining question is whether enough of the country is still paying attention, and whether the predictable Leftist disaster occurs.
https://amgreatness.com/2026/07/28/the-socialist-monster-awakes/
