The centrist meltdown continues.

Various voices hostile to the Left have been having a distinctly undignified freak-out in the wake of a series of Democratic primary wins by socialists, charging that it would lead to the thing they themselves had already done twice: empower Donald Trump. The latest offender is the Atlantic’s James Kirchick, who warns there is a dark conspiracy afoot within the Democratic Party — and an urgent need to stop it in its tracks.

Titled “The DSA is a Parasite,” Kirchick’s piece charges that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is “attempting a hostile takeover of the party” to steer it “toward identity politics, isolationism, and hostility to capitalism.” He expanded on this in an accompanying tweet, warning that DSA is using “using century-old Trotskyist tactics to infiltrate and subvert” the party.

“It’s time to throw them out,” he concludes.

How might they do this? Kirchick — known for pieces like his 2008 banger “The White House didn’t lie about Iraq” and, more recently, charging that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is “at the very least sympathetic” to the 9/11 hijackers — suggests the party establishment could copy what Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock did at the height of Thatcherism in the United Kingdom and simply expel its left-wing members. Democratic leaders need to take off the kid gloves they’ve supposedly been wearing up until now for fear of “appearing weak in the eyes of their base,” he writes, and take a page from the McCarthy era (yes, really) and “purge” their party of this “illiberal vanguard.”

Many have already ripped apart the shoddiness of both the analysis and history here. But the details or even feasibility of this plan are less important than what it says about the mindset of the kind of person who wakes up in a cold sweat at the thought of socialists holding public office.

What is the actual dastardly conspiracy that Kirchick and other socialism haters are accusing DSA of here? It’s that democratic socialists are engaging in the sinister, underhanded tactic of . . . running in and winning elections.

Yes, it’s true that as they win more power and popularity within the Democratic Party, socialists will have more influence to shape the party’s policy agenda and push it in a direction more in line with their vision. That’s kind of how politics works. It’s also how democracy works.

It’s not a good look to be railing against democracy, which is why Kirchick has to frame this banal process in dark, conspiratorial terms: “infiltrate”; “subvert”; “hostile takeover.” But as he himself is, ironically, forced to point out, voters, and Democratic voters in particular, are increasingly friendly to both socialism and the policy ideas advanced by socialists, not to mention that socialist figures like Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are by far the country’s most popular and positively viewed politicians.

In reality, it’s not the socialist movement that Kirchick and the rest are railing against; it’s the will of that pesky voting public.

Meanwhile, what is the anti-socialists’ plan to combat this? It’s not to win in the proverbial marketplace of ideas. It’s not to devise a new, more exciting policy vision that might win their side more popular support from voters. Nor is it to do the kind of mass, grassroots organizing that is at the heart of DSA’s political project and core to its election wins, one of the purest, most direct forms of democracy there is. It is, as Kirchick tells us, to reach back to one of the most shameful episodes of authoritarianism in US history, McCarthyism, and find some way to simply “throw them out” of the party.

Who’s the “illiberal vanguard” here, again?

This comes after a chorus of other high-profile, left-hating pundits called for something to be done to stop socialists’ scurrilous “factionalism” from destroying the party, which I argued at the time was a thinly veiled nod to former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s crackdown on the Labour Party’s left wing. That crackdown, incidentally, ended up destroying both Starmer and his party, if you want to know the most likely endgame of what Kirchick — a conservative, but one being asked to make this illiberal argument in a leading publication of high-brow liberalism — is proposing here.

It is, in other words, yet another example of the centrist establishment’s hostility to democracy within the Democratic Party.

In 2016, it was Sanders and the movement behind him that pushed for an end to the superdelegate system designed to let party elites outweigh the will of voters, while establishment centrists demanded it stay in place. The party actually argued in court that it had the right to tip the scales in favor of a particular candidate and even simply pick a nominee in a smoke-filled room if it wanted.

In 2020, the party coerced state parties not to delay voting during the early months of the pandemic in order to sew up the nomination for an ailing Joe Biden as quickly as possible, depressing turnout and even causing infections and deaths. Four years later, even centrist Democrats complained about the party’s antidemocratic maneuvering to forestall a primary challenge to then-President Biden, and they later unilaterally chose his replacement with no democratic process whatsoever. To this day, the Democratic powers that be continue to resist efforts by socialists and progressives to ban dark money from primaries.

You could go on. Takes like Kirchick’s calling on party bigwigs to simply overrule their voters and purge the party of its growing left are shameful, but in many ways, they do an important service. They make clear the intraparty “civil war,” as Andrew Cuomo once put it, going on right now isn’t just socialists versus the center. It’s democracy versus rule by an ironfisted elite.