The New Red Scare Is Here—and It’s Dumber Than Ever

These Beltway pundits desperately want us to believe that there’s an equivalent of Trumpism on the left.

For more than a decade, the biggest story in America has been Donald Trump, and for good reason. A real estate conman and reality TV star somehow, despite being a racist, sexist, narcissistic, juvenile, and just plain stupid man, became president of the United States. And then he did it again—after a failed coup, no less. In the process, he fitfully but ruthlessly took over one of the country’s two major parties and remade it in his own authoritarian image. Then he set about doing the same to the country as a whole. The Republican Party is now a cult of personality, and America is a plutocratic paradise governed by the president’s whims.

That is still very much the biggest story in the country. The president is waging two destructive wars—a literal one in the Middle East, and an economic one pretty much everywhere else—while jailing political opponents, detaining and deporting hundreds of thousands of people, attempting to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections, and musing—maybe joking, maybe not—about running for an unconstitutional third term.

But for Axios founders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, that’s old news—a status quo that no longer raises alarm among the Beltway punditry. There’s a new political threat brewing in America, and it’s just as frightening as Trump: There are reds under Democratic beds. The democratic socialists have arrived, and they’re the left’s equivalent of MAGA. And the Democratic establishment may well succumb to these unhinged insurgents, just like the Republicans before them.

In the newest iteration of their “Behind the Curtain” column, which is ostensibly devoted to big trends in politics and economics, Allen and VandeHei........

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