When Democrats swept the midterms on Tuesday, not everyone on the left popped the champagne. The party has plenty to cheer about, at least on paper. A new majority is coming that could take several cycles to wipe out. Look closely at who actually won, though, and the celebration starts to look a lot less wholesome.
Consider Los Angeles, where Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman knocked off incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. We have no love for Bass, but man, talk about picking someone even worse. In Washington, D.C., voters handed power to Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George. Then there's Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Troy Jackson in Maine, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, and Adam Hamilton in Kansas, plus a whole bunch of socialists headed to the House of Representatives. And New York City has lived under Zohran Mamdani since January.
None of this happened by accident. Socialists spent years quietly taking over much of the Democrat Party through primaries and local races, pushing the party further and further to the left.
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That agenda is what has Bill Maher rattled. The liberal comedian and talk show host used Friday's "Overtime” segment of Real Time to sound off on his party’s lurch to the left, starting by giving the government its due.
"We already have a lot of socialism and a lot of it is appropriate," Maher said.
But Maher drew a hard line between programs like Social Security and Medicare and the sweeping government control the far left now wants. "Socialism is Medicare, Social Security, it's the Marine Corps, it's anything that government does and the private sector doesn't," he explained. "You just read what they say in their manifesto, they want the government to take over everything."
And then Maher said what almost nobody on the left dares to say out loud.
"These people want communism," he warned.
Bill Maher, a man who has spent decades mocking conservatives for a living, looked at the people his own party just put in charge and saw communists. He also put the blame squarely on the classroom.
"That is a prescription for failure, and, to me, this is an indictment of our educational system," Maher continued. “The reason why they don't know that socialism didn't work in the past, to this degree, or Communism, is because nobody taught them in school. And they think they just were delivered down here on earth, there was no past."
He's right. Generations of students have walked out of school well versed in the supposed sins of capitalism and almost entirely ignorant of the breadlines, gulags, and mass graves that followed every serious attempt to implement the system they now cheer. You can't fear what nobody ever taught you to recognize.
Maher closed with a plea to the moderates in his party. "Who has the guts to say this is the Democratic Party, you are doing a whole different thing?" he asked.
Maher is deluding himself if he thinks enough moderate Democrats are left in the party to do anything about it. Precious few have shown any willingness to say what he just said, and the ones who try will face a new socialist leadership with every incentive to censor or cancel them for it. The moderates didn't lose a debate. They lost the party, one election at a time, while assuring everyone the radicals were just a fringe.The Democrat Party is all in on socialism, if not outright communism. There’s no going back for them.
