“You’re next!”
This chant, at the victory celebration of the Democratic Socialists this week, was a message not for the oligarchs or the billionaires, but for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and the Democratic establishment. They were threatening that Jeffries would be the next to lose his House seat to a socialist candidate.
It was a scene that has recurred throughout history, as establishment leaders are overtaken by the very mobs they sought to use for their own purposes.
For years, Jeffries has joined other Democrats in fueling the rage on the left in the hopes of becoming the next House Speaker. Whether calling for supporters to “fight in the streets,” denouncing the Supreme Court as “illegitimate” or posting an image of himself brandishing a baseball bat, Jeffries sought to portray himself as a class warrior worthy of the mob’s support.
Other Democratic leaders followed suit — especially Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. It was Schumer who yelled threats at conservative Supreme Court justices in front of the court. A deranged man triggered by such rhetoric in the media later attempted to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Schumer and others portrayed their opponents as Nazis who threaten the very existence of democracy, and they stoked class conflict to inspire resentment for the wealthy.
Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison — now Minnesota’s attorney general — celebrated that Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump and his supporters.
Figures like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) (who is reportedly worth half a billion dollars due to his wife’s inherited fortune) have attempted to ride the rage wave by advocating a billionaire’s tax that is presumptively unconstitutional.
By the time these establishment figures realized their armchair-revolutionary rhetoric would not convince the mob, it was too late.
Jeffries and figures like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had endorsed candidates such as Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), who perhaps more than anyone else personified the problem. He was the attack dog of the establishment, fueling rage and promising a spate of impeachments. But what the left saw was a trust-fund baby who had inherited a fortune, owns three houses, and has publicly pledged to use his inheritance to fund his reelection. He came across as the Democratic Richie Rich, and he lost on Tuesday by more than 30 points.
In my book Rage and the Republic, I discuss how these Democratic leaders are following the same self-destructive pattern of prior establishment figures in history who thought that they could use mobs against their opponents while hoping that they would be overlooked.
The American and French Revolutions were contemporary movements based on Enlightenment principles. But whereas our Revolution went on to become the world’s oldest and most stable republic, the French Revolution became the blood-soaked Terror. The French Revolution was not some spontaneous uprising of the proletariat or underclass. It was led by relatively affluent figures on the left, from aristocrats to journalists to lawyers. Maximilien Robespierre, who would later declare terror a virtue, was a lawyer who helped organize the revolutionary Jacobins.
These educated and affluent figures turned to working-class radicals as their muscle to terrorize their opponents. And not long after executing aristocrats and clergy, the radicals turned on the Jacobins themselves. “Moderates” were sent to the guillotine by Robespierre and his henchmen as they clung to power. But eventually, the mob came for them, too.
After the Terror, French writer Jacques Mallet du Pan wrote, “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”
After candidates endorsed by socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani easily swept aside the establishment candidates in Jeffries and Schumer’s backyard, politicians and pundits began to panic. They never imagined the mob would turn on them.
Even liberal media figures such as Ezra Klein and pandering academic figures have become targets of the left. Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who has called for the effective trashing of the U.S. Constitution, had law students staging protests in his own home.
Others have sought to stay at the front of the mob. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) denounced the lengthy sentences handed down to nine violent Antifa figures in Texas for their roles in the ambush and attempted murder of a police officer who had responded to the disturbance they were creating at an ICE facility. The officer, Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross, barely survived a bullet to the neck.
In the meantime, the mob is continuing its rush toward socialism and communism. One of those elected in New York, Democratic Socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, bragged about how she wiped her hands on the American flag as her fellow victors pledged to tear down core institutions, including the Supreme Court.
In Michigan, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is soaring in popularity after campaigning with virulent anti-Semite and extremist Hasan Piker. Piker was on hand to celebrate the recent victories as speeding along the socialist agenda to end capitalism and has promised the mob that “the American empire is going to inevitably fall.”
For some of us who predicted the rise of the American Jacobin movement, there is little joy in seeing Democratic establishment figures consumed by their own mob. They have been feeding a rage addiction in this country. Now they express surprise as protesters celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk and display guillotines at protests for those deemed enemies of the people.
After starting a brush fire, they have found themselves engulfed in the same flames with their targets. With Democratic voters now expressing support for socialism in record numbers and politicians pledging radical changes to our political system, they have proven again to be what Soviet communists called the “useful idiots” of the American left.
If history is any measure, we may soon find ourselves in the same position as Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, who was considered the Thomas Paine of the French Revolution. When asked what he had done during the Revolution, the old abbot pondered the question and answered: “I survived.”
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.“