Guess who’s not coming to dinner? It’s a new take on an old comedy-drama currently playing out in Wisconsin. The Democratic gubernatorial frontrunner state, Rep. Francesca Hong, made national headlines when CNN, having unearthed her peak-woke social media posts, asked her whether she still wanted to cancel Thanksgiving.
Hong then spent a lot of words not exactly saying no, notwithstanding a few good lines about being a chef who had previously prepared the meal and knew how to bring people to the table.
Presumably, mom and apple pie cannot be far behind on her list of things that must be canceled in our brave new woke world. Hong is part of a new wave of socialist candidates taking the Democratic Party by storm, but this time in a relative battleground state rather than some deep-blue urban congressional district. She has tried to pivot away from defunding the police, for example, but hasn’t been quite able to stick the landing. (Imagine there’s no prisons. It’s easy if you try.)
Hong has managed to bring together those debating heritage America versus the proposition nation, however. It’s the country that celebrates Thanksgiving that she really wants to cancel. She seemingly isn’t particularly fond of either the blood and soil involved or the founding propositions.
Like the Tea Party more than a decade ago, these characters will blow some winnable elections and also win some thanks to a wave benefiting the political party they now inhabit. While President Donald Trump rightly excoriates these Groucho Marxists, his choice to prioritize war with Iran over whipping inflation now is the primary reason they have any proximity to political power whatsoever.
Trump’s job approval rating dipping below 40 percent, especially on the economy, creates openings for Democrats of all stripes. But most importantly, he has allowed the populist left to steal the America First mantle, with candidates promising to spend taxpayer dollars on needs at home rather than on weapons and wars abroad.
But the socialists seem hell-bent on blowing their political opportunity as well. Even if their economic message is flawed, to put it mildly, an economically motivated left can compete better than a culturally motivated one.
Bernie Sanders may have allowed progressives to bully him on immigration, but his heart was never really in it or any of the associated culture-war stuff. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani shares Barack Obama’s understanding that not every voter shares his most left-wing sensibilities, and he knows when to shut up.
The younger, more racially diverse socialists may be able to put together more of a Rainbow Coalition than Sanders ever did representing Vermont or in his two Democratic presidential campaigns, but they are peak woke personified—and sometimes worse than that. And they aren’t going to shut up about it, even if it means they have to tell Kaitlan Collins they would like to cancel Christmas.
A major dividing line between the left and right is emerging over whether the American project was almost entirely discredited by racism or whether there is much in our political inheritance worth conserving despite the country’s original sin. These contests of ideology and identity will play out in a culture and climate of racial politics far more complicated than in the 1960s.
It will be difficult for a left-wing political movement to sustain an America First posture without much positivity toward America, at least as it existed before five seconds ago. Negativity toward Israel, or even foreign wars that might not be in the national interest, will ultimately not suffice.
But it might be good enough to win the midterm elections this year, setting the stage for a showdown with the Democratic Socialists of America in 2028. We’ll see. It is easy to misread the mandates in such moments.
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Some of these radicals will genuinely moderate with time and experience, while others will pretend to do so. Others will be made more pernicious once they taste real power beyond the faculty lounge or community center. Even with continuous mass immigration and left-wing domination of academia, much of their political program will remain implausible and undesirable to most Americans.
MAGA, or its descendants, will likely get another chance to compete with the Democratic Party’s growing left-most flanks. If it squanders this one, however, it is not clear how many more opportunities there will be.
The great Thanksgiving debate of 2026 ought to be a warning sign, if not a wake-up call.
