What will the Democratic Party’s 2028 platform look like? The way things are going, no one should be surprised if it looks like a manifesto written by a couple of bitter, revolutionary 19th century Germans.

Marxism is no longer on the Democratic Party fringe. It is taking it over.

We see this in the unpleasantness of Zohran Mamdani, the recent winner of the New York City mayoral primary.

The callow Mamdani describes himself as a “Democratic Socialist.” Fact-checkers, who seem to never fact check the incessant claims by the media and Democratic politicians and operatives that President Donald Trump and other Republicans are fascists, say he’s no communist.

While he might not be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, several of his known positions are inarguably in line with Marxism.

Like Karl Marx, the privileged Mamdani, who calls himself a “BMW Bolshevik,” sees the world through the lens of class struggle. The platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which he is a member, “fights” for “the abolition of capitalism” as well as the “social ownership of all major industry and infrastructure,” two Marxist principles that Mamdani supports.

Mamdani is also promising “free stuff” for New Yorkers, from bus trips to child care; proposes to freeze rents (to stick it to those greedy capitalist landlords, no doubt); wishes to “shift the tax burden … to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods“; and says there should be no billionaires, though he hasn’t said what he’d do with the 123 who live New York City.

There has been some light pushback from within the party. A few Jewish Democrats in Congress have been “raising concerns about” him, says The Hill. But many in the party are aligning themselves with Mamdani, even Bill Clinton, whose “third way” policies melded ideas from both the left and right, and by today’s standards was an ultra-conservative Democrat.

With a couple of notable exceptions – the New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards – the media have largely leapt upon the Mamdani express. The hard-left British Guardian seems happy to report that “many Democrats from across the ideological spectrum believe” Mamdani “might offer a roadmap for winning back the voters they have lost touch with.” Salon says Mamdani is “good for the world.” The New Yorker tries to make “The Case for Zohranomics.” The Wall Street Journal insists Mamdani is “a charming and exuberant young man who raps about his beloved Indian grandmother” and “displays an Obama-like magnetism that attracts young people” and “some old ones, too.”

Regrettably, Mamdani is not the sole Marxist Democrat who has traction.

The party’s last presidential nominee, and possible California gubernatorial candidate, Kamala Harris, has deep Marxist roots. To begin with, she’s the daughter of “a renowned Marxist economist from Jamaica who taught at Stanford University for decades.”

Harris’ mother, her “biggest influence,” also had revolutionary connections. She has been referred to as a friend “who helped formulate the ideas” for Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition,” says Harpers Bazaar. Her ideas don’t stray far, if at all, from the Marxist creed “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

The sainted Barack Obama had a mentor by the name of Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member who brainwashed a teenage Obama “into hating America while romanticizing Soviet Russia.” As president, Obama’s Marxism was subtle. But he made a Kinsley gaffe when he promised, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” as the 2008 election neared.

The young Obama was also guided by Barack Hussein Obama Sr., an African communist and anti-colonialist who hated the West and wrote favorably of Soviet-style communism and industrial nationalization.

Obama had a number of other radical father figures and counselors, all “heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon, a Marxist revolutionary,” our colleague Paul Sperry wrote in Investor’s Business Daily in 2012.

Another Democrat with a firm familial Marxist connection is former South Bend mayor and failed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who somehow is the leading Democratic candidate for 2028, says one poll. His father, Joseph Buttigieg, according to the Washington Examiner, “was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin.”

Buttigieg the younger is clearly a “Chip Off the Ol’ Eastern Bloc,” a “bad apple [that] didn’t fall far from the tree.” He has a perverted sense of freedom; is an advocate of “democratic capitalism,” which unlike true capitalism requires coercion; did enough as transportation secretary to demonstrate he’s a socialist; and has long admired Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Even more common than economic Marxists are the social Marxists on the left who are using identity politics, revised history, corrupted education, and advocacy media to further the revolution. The Democratic Party is fully invested in each of these.

In 2022, then-Senator Marco Rubio noted that a “bunch of Marxist misfits” were among those “who sadly today control the agenda of the modern Democratic Party.” Today, there are few real centrists left in the Democratic Party, as Mamdani shows. If we write a similar editorial a year from now, it’s a foregone conclusion that our list would extend well beyond those mentioned above.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board