At a victory celebration for Democratic Socialists in New York this week, the chant wasn't aimed at billionaires or corporate titans. It was directed at House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “You’re next!” they roared, warning that the New York Democrat could be the next establishment figure to lose his seat to a left-wing insurgent.
The scene was a stark illustration of a pattern as old as revolution itself: leaders who stoke populist fury eventually find themselves in the mob’s crosshairs. For years, Jeffries and other top Democrats have fanned the flames of rage, hoping to ride the wave to power. Jeffries called for supporters to “fight in the streets,” denounced the Supreme Court as “illegitimate,” and posted an image of himself wielding a baseball bat. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer shouted threats at conservative justices outside the Supreme Court—rhetoric a disturbed man later cited in an attempt to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison celebrated Antifa as a force to “strike fear in the heart” of Trump supporters. Rep. Ro Khanna, whose wife’s inheritance is reportedly worth half a billion dollars, pushed a billionaire’s tax widely seen as unconstitutional. The pattern is consistent: affluent progressives using working-class anger as a weapon against their opponents, never imagining the weapon would turn on them.
By the time they realized their armchair-revolutionary rhetoric wouldn’t hold the mob, it was too late. Jeffries and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed candidates like Rep. Dan Goldman, a trust-fund heir who owns three homes and pledged to use his inheritance to fund his reelection. Goldman lost by more than 30 points on Tuesday. As political commentator Van Jones noted, the Democratic establishment is “collapsing” under the weight of its own contradictions.
The dynamic echoes the French Revolution, as I wrote in my book Rage and the Republic. Both the American and French Revolutions were rooted in Enlightenment ideals, but France’s descended into the Terror. Affluent figures—aristocrats, journalists, lawyers—led the Jacobins, using working-class radicals as muscle. Once the aristocrats and clergy were gone, the radicals turned on the Jacobins. “Moderates” were guillotined, and eventually the mob came for Robespierre himself. French writer Jacques Mallet du Pan observed, “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”
Today, even liberal media figures like Ezra Klein and academics like Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky—who has called for trashing the Constitution—have become targets. Law students staged protests in Chemerinsky’s home. Rep. Rashida Tlaib denounced lengthy sentences for nine Antifa members convicted of attempting to murder a police officer. Meanwhile, newly elected socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier bragged about wiping her hands on the American flag, and her allies pledged to dismantle institutions like the Supreme Court.
In Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is surging after campaigning with Hasan Piker, a virulent anti-Semite who promises “the American empire is going to inevitably fall.” The mob’s appetite is insatiable. As protesters celebrate the assassination of Charlie Kirk and display guillotines at demonstrations, the Democratic establishment that fed this rage now finds itself the main course.
There is little joy in watching this unfold. The party has addicted the country to rage, and now the addiction is consuming its dealers. The question is whether the mob will stop at Jeffries—or if, like Saturn, it will devour every last one of its children.
