From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression from the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.

I'm Jerry Baker, editor at large of the journal. Thanks again for joining us.

Please, if you're not already subscribing, do make sure you subscribe to Free Expression,

Apple, podcast, Spotify, wherever you do, you're listening.

And please leave us a nice review. This week, we're going to take a look at the state of the Democratic Party.

There seems to be a fair amount of turmoil in the party right now. We've just seen the victory in the Democratic primary here in New York City of Zoran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist on a pretty radical platform,

I think it's fair to say. That seems to fit in with the kind of temper of the times in the

Democratic Party with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fellow New Yorker, of course, and Bernie Sanders,

perhaps being the most prominent and exciting the most energy and dynamism within the Democratic Party,

again, from a very, very radical position. Quite often what happens in politics is when you get

a radical change in the national temperament, in the national political orders we've had with

Donald Trump's election victory last year and with the first six months of Donald Trump's

administration. Quite often you get a kind of Newtonian equal and opposite reaction from the political

opposition, and the ones who argue for a more radical response, a similarly radical response,

are the ones who make not only a lot of noise, but get a lot of attention and actually make

some of the running. Of course, the problem with that is that aren't many democratic socialists in this country like Zoran Mamdani or

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. There aren't even many democratic socialists who vote in the Democratic

primary across the nation. There might be in New York City and Chicago and elsewhere, but there

aren't in the country as a whole. And some of the radical positions that the left is advocating seem to be way out of the mainstream and creating trouble for

the Democratic Party. So what does the party do? How does it develop a message that somehow

animates people and excites people in the way that some of these radical left-wing politicians

...