How the 'long march' through the institutions led to socialist takeover of Dem Party: 'Need to wake up'
From Tip O'Neill to Obama to Mamdani: experts sound off on how we got here
By Andrew Mark Miller Fox News
Published July 15, 2026 10:41am EDT
The rise of socialist candidates across the United States has reignited a long-running debate over how far left the Democratic Party has shifted, with political veterans from both parties telling Fox News Digital the movement's success is the product of decades of ideological change that started with cultural institutions and that failing to confront it could have profound consequences for the country's future.
"Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector, warned of ‘great brainwashing’ schemes to undermine America and the West some 40 years ago," New York City Republican Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, who grew up in Soviet Ukraine, told Fox News Digital.
"What we’re seeing now is anything but ‘grassroots’; it’s the effect of decades-long campaigns to subvert American thought and way of life."
That campaign, some experts argue, is the underlying reason behind the rise of socialist candidates like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the candidates he backed for Congress last month, as well as Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and the various other candidates who embrace socialist ideology.
"Marxist schemes slowly mainstreamed once-fringe ideas like ‘America is systematically racist,’ or ‘all cops are bastards,’ and ‘capitalism is evil,’" Vernikov explained. "The biggest culprits are the education system, which is increasingly beholden to radicalized teachers’ unions, and moderate Democrat politicians who have refused to challenge – and in most cases embraced – their radical, anti-West peers. The next thing you know, we have a socialist mayor committed to the destruction of our value system and three of his cronies on their way to Congress."
Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who fled communist Cuba in the 1970s, told Fox News Digital the path to this point over the last several decades was blazed by the "long march through the institutions" where the "cultural left took over the K-12 school system, higher education, art houses, media, entertainment, and museums."
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/long-march-through-institutions-led-socialist-takeover-dem-party-need-wake
