[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]

The nomination of the radical leftist Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City, arguably the capital of global capitalism, is a flashing beacon of the Democrats’ disorder since the election. Mamdani (pictured above) is a self-confessed socialist, and an objectively antisemitic hater of Israel, who wants to “globalize the intifada,” the word denoting Palestinian Arab terrorism and murder.

As such, of course he’s being showered with fan-boy attention from the corporate media, who are overworking the question-begging cliché “charismatic.” His nomination is a milestone in the left’s long hijacking of the Democrat Party, and if he wins, will likely put paid to the Dems’ experiment in letting the lunatics run the asylum.

Starting in the Sixties with the New Left, and facilitated by the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxist “Long March” through the educational, social, political, and culture institutions, the Democrat Party began steadily to move even farther to the left. That shift was aided by the earlier political encroachment of Progressivism by one of its most consequential theorists, Woodrow Wilson.

During the following decades, Democrat presidents from FDR to Barack Obama continued to transform the Constitutional order and its unalienable rights and divided and balanced powers, into the “living Constitution” in order to serve the burgeoning collectivist, technocratic, redistributionist, dirigiste welfare state, a vehicle for progressive economic “improvement” and “social justice.”

Their aim has been and remains the top-down, intrusive control of the states and citizens through unelected, unaccountable federal agencies––the recipe for tyranny that the Framers designed the Constitution to avoid. Their purpose was to protect our individual rights and freedoms, most importantly private property and the free-market economy that creates wealth and jobs more equitably and successfully than economies controlled by the Leviathan state and its minions.

Equally troubling has been the Republican lawmakers and administrations who to some degree adopt and champion some of progressive Democrats’ welfare state programs and other policies that have weakened our unalienable rights and individual freedoms. But despite these assaults, the Constitutional structure still gives us the means to change course, as we experienced last November.

With Donald Trump’s victory, in just six months we have seen the most aggressive efforts to date to restore Constitutional order, and restrain the federal behemoth’s ever-encroaching power. Trump’s roll-back of that power has riled up and enraged the Dems’ “woke” left wing. But these new “woke” Democrats have been more dangerous than old-school progressives, promoting and indulging new programs, lunatic ideas, and policies that go beyond economics to target social mores, and invent new “existential” crises that require even more government power and money.

Fortunately, under Trump, these “woke” shibboleths are being dismantled and defunded. Planned Parenthood and its abortion mills, marketed as “women’s health services,” are losing their federal sugar-daddy. So, too, are NPR and PBS––“attack machines for the Democrats,” as Mark Halperin put it. Both are egregious redundancies in the digital age, and now have to peddle their products to investors who are beholden to the bottom line and loyal customers rather than partisan politics.

Then there are the unscientific ideas like transgenderism, which claims that “gender” is fluid and limitless; and peddles heinous sex-change treatments that replace biological sex with whatever whims or wishes of troubled young people. Thanks to Trump, these preposterous ideas now can no longer subject minors to poisoning and mutilation. And real women athletes no longer have to compete against bigger, stronger “trans women,” or be subjected to the indignity of biological males invading their locker-rooms and showers.

Other expensive and intrusive bad ideas endorsed by the “woke” left––and based on dubious science and gross violations of common sense––include “clean energy” mandates and subsidies pushing windmills and solar panels, intermittent energy sources that still require fossil fuels to generate energy when there’s no wind or sun, or recharging stations for EVs are unavailable. Additionally, fossil fuels are needed to create the heavy machinery indispensable for excavating the minerals, ores, and other resources required to build windmills and solar panels.

Here too Trump has taken action, removing the fed’s “green” funds and mandates that have been compensating for the failures of this “green” energy and EVs. And his administration is revving up domestic extraction of oil, and building the infrastructure for delivering and exporting it. Meanwhile, communist powers like Russia and China pay only lip-service to these feckless assaults on the energy source that created the West and its dominating power. China keeps building multitudes of dirty coal-fired plants, even as they produce the lion’s share of solar panels for warmist Westerners who are damaging their nations’ economies and security with feckless “net-zero” carbon policies. To paraphrase Cicero, there’s nothing so absurd that a university-trained “wokist” won’t try.

Finally, we shouldn’t pass over the doctrines and praxis, as the left likes to say, of identity politics. This un-Marxist addition to the left’s breviary is a political construct created by the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society programs that followed. A major goal pushed by lobbyists, race-mongers, and activists of ethnic and other special-interest factions, was to secure for their clients as much government funds and special treatment as they could.

The foundational criterion for determining what group should take priority was its history of oppression based on racial exclusion and other prejudice. This focus led to set asides for “protected classes”––eventually defined by race, ethnicity, sex, age, disability, and sexual preferences ––when awarding government contracts and jobs, and admission and hiring in colleges and universities.

This regime, given the anodyne moniker “affirmative action,” from the start was blatantly contrary to the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution, and substantially weakened the critical principle of merit uncompromised by anything irrelevant to the job or position being applied for. In his first term Trump created the conditions to end race-based discrimination by appointing three Constitutionalist Supreme Court Justices, who in 2023 finally put an end to these discriminatory protocols.

Yet the assault on merit continued under the “woke” guise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies that achieved the same end of mandating that certain “protected classes” must take precedence over “straight white males.” In his second term, President Trump is dismantling DEI programs, demonstrating once again that the “woke” left’s illiberal un-Constitutional ideologies and policies can be defeated.

These are just a few examples of the “woke” left’s dangerous policies that have made economic leftists, as destructive as they have been for over a century under progressive Democrat control, even more dangerous, spreading their malign, unscientific, tyrannical influence into every dimension of our nation, and magnifying the intrusive powers of the federal government and its agencies. President Trump now is reining that in.

Right now, the Dems are in disarray, the more centrist Donks trying to marginalize the “woke” left buffoons like AOC and Mamdani, and elderly fellow-travelers like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who would like to return to the Obama-Biden failed policies such as opening the nation’s borders, hamstringing police, attacking and interfering with ICE agents enforcing immigration laws, and restoring the toxic economic policies of taxing, printing, borrowing, and redistributing the nation’s funds. These positions are so glaringly contrary to the will of the electorate as demonstrated last November, that it’s tempting to underestimate the power of venal, uninformed voters, and unforeseen black swan events.

The job of restoring the integrity of the Constitution and of our rights and freedoms, then, is not done. We must keep fighting to finish the job. But we can do it only as long as Republican Constitutionalists stay in power and protect the people from the “woke” left’s tyranny.