Little Shop of Horrors

How Political Parties Feed the Movement They Can No Longer Control

There is a wonderful moment in the  1987 film “Little Shop of Horrors,” a film about a curiously odd, interesting plant that our hero, Seymour, names after his lost love, Audrey. The “wonderful moment” comes when the audience understands something before the characters do.

The plant is no longer an interesting curiosity.

It is hungry.

Audrey II first appears as a small plant. Strange, entertaining, even useful. Feed it a little and it performs. Feed it again and it grows. And grows. And grows.

Eventually the question is no longer whether Seymour can control Audrey II. The question is whether the plant has begun controlling Seymour.

In this episode of Fair Game, Dr. Gary Kellner suggests American political parties have a similar problem.

A growing problem…perhaps one morphing into a horror they cannot control.

An Insurgent Movement Arrives at the Edge of One of the Major Parties.

The establishment regards it as eccentric, provincial, too ideological or simply unelectable.

Party elders assume that they can borrow its energy, accommodate some of its voters, perhaps steal a few of its ideas and keep it safely under establishment control.

Sometimes they can.

Sometimes the insurgents eat the establishment.

Which brings us to the Democratic Socialists of America.

The temptation is to treat the DSA as either much more important than it is or much less important than it may become.

The first mistake produces hysteria. America is not on the verge of becoming a socialist republic. Congress is not preparing to nationalize General Motors. Capitalism is not about to disappear from the United States.

The second mistake may be more consequential. Because political movements do not have to capture the presidency to change a country. They merely have to change a party.

-American history is full of movements that did exactly that.

The Election Nobody Remembers

Start in 1912.

It was one of the strangest presidential elections in American history. Republican President William Howard Taft was running for reelection. Former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, furious with Taft and increasingly convinced that the Republican establishment had become the captive of entrenched interests, bolted the party and ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party.

Woodrow Wilson, a political neophyte with less than two years in elected office, carried the win for the undivided Democratic banner.

And then there was Eugene Victor Debs.

Debs was a former railroad worker, labor organizer, union leader and Socialist candidate for president. He had already run several times. In 1912, something extraordinary happened. Nearly 900,000 Americans voted for him — roughly 6 percent of the popular vote. Six percent does not sound terribly threatening. Debs did not win a state. He received no electoral votes. He was never going to become president.

Yet the Socialist movement beneath his candidacy was considerably more important than his electoral total suggested. Socialists were organizing workers, publishing newspapers, electing local officials, winning municipal power around the country and, most importantly, articulating ideas that would help shape American politics for almost a century.

Milwaukee became the most famous example.

In 1910, Emil Seidel was elected mayor, becoming the first Socialist mayor of a major American city. Victor Berger became the first Socialist elected to Congress. Later, Daniel Hoan would serve as Milwaukee’s Socialist mayor from 1916 until 1940.

These were not revolutionaries storming the Winter Palace.

They became famous for something considerably less romantic. Sewers. Roads. Public health. Parks. Clean government.

Milwaukee’s version of socialism became known, somewhat mockingly, as “sewer socialism.”

That is historically important.

Ideological movements become dangerous to established political organizations not necessarily when their most radical ideas become popular, but when they demonstrate that they can fill potholes and fix the sidewalks.

Once voters begin separating a political label from whatever frightening abstraction they once attached to it, the political equation changes.

That may be happening again.

The Democratic Socialists of America announced this summer that its membership had reached approximately 120,000, which the organization says makes it larger in dues-paying membership than the Socialist Party reached at its 1912 peak.

One should be careful with the comparison.

The America of 1912 contained roughly 95 million people. The America of 2026 contains more than 350 million people. The Socialist Party of Debs therefore represented a much larger fraction of the population.

That is beside the point.

The lesson of 1912 is not that Debs nearly became president. He didn’t.

The lesson is that ideas can lose elections and still win arguments. And political establishments are notoriously bad at understanding that distinction.

Franklin Roosevelt Learns to Listen

By the 1930s, the American republic was on the brink.

The Great Depression destroyed banks, businesses, farms and lives. One of every four workers was out of work. Men who had believed themselves solidly middle class stood in breadlines. Farmers watched banks seize land their families had worked for generations. Industrial workers discovered that an economic system capable of producing unimaginable abundance could not provide them work.

That was combustible material.

To Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s left stood an extraordinary collection of populists, socialists, labor organizers, pension crusaders and political entrepreneurs.

Huey Long proposed his “Share Our Wealth” program. Francis Townsend created a national movement demanding generous pension for the elderly. Labor militants demanded organizing rights. Socialists argued that capitalism itself had failed. Communists gained influence in certain unions and intellectual circles.

And lest you think that the ferment was all on the left, tens of thousands of veterans from World War I marched on Washington to demand payment of bonuses they were owed but Congress refused to pay.

Franklin Roosevelt did something political leaders often resist doing.

He listened.

He did not become Huey Long. He did not become Eugene Debs. He did not abolish capitalism.

He changed capitalism to save it.

Social Security arrived in 1935. The Wagner Act strengthened organized labor. Bank reform followed. Public works programs employed millions. Financial markets were regulated. The federal government assumed responsibilities that would have been almost unimaginable a generation earlier.

That is how established parties sometimes survive insurgencies.  They distinguish between the anger and the ideology. The anger may be justified even when the proposed cure is not.

That distinction matters enormously today.

A voter who says, “I cannot afford an apartment,” is not asking Karl Marx for help. A twenty-seven-year-old who cannot imagine buying a home may not have developed an opinion about collective ownership of the means of production. A family paying enormous health insurance premiums is not demanding the abolition of private enterprise.

They may simply be telling their political leaders that something in their lives does not work.

Roosevelt’s genius was understanding that if democratic capitalism could not answer those complaints, something considerably more radical eventually would.

This is where contemporary Democrats should pay attention. Not necessarily to every paragraph in a DSA platform.

To the people reading it.

The New Plant in the Window

The Democratic Socialists of America are quite explicit about what they are.

Their constitution rejects an economic order organized around private profit and describes a long-term vision involving greater popular control over resources and production, economic planning and substantially different distributions of wealth and prosperity

That is not merely Franklin Roosevelt with better health insurance.

DSA’s 2026 program moves across an enormous ideological landscape: housing, healthcare, labor, immigration, policing, climate, public ownership, taxation, foreign policy and a considerably larger role for collective economic decision-making.

Some proposals would be recognizable extensions of policies already debated inside the Democratic Party. Others are politically improbable, hopelessly utopian or wildly unrelaistic. Still others deserve extremely serious debate about cost, economic consequences, governmental authority and whether the cure might become worse than the disease.

But focusing exclusively on the platform misses the political innovation. DSA does not need to persuade 340 million Americans to call themselves socialists.

It needs to win Democratic primaries. That is a much smaller battlefield. And the organization understands it.

Its current endorsement rules are revealing. Candidates seeking national DSA endorsement are expected not merely to vote progressively, but to identify publicly as socialists, support the organization’s program, participate in the organization’s political life and view themselves, in DSA’s formulation, as socialist organizers first and legislators second.

That is not a book club. It is an attempt to build a disciplined political movement.

And then came Zohran Mamdani.

New York Changes the Conversation

When Zohran Mamdani entered the 2025 New York City mayoral contest, he initially looked like precisely the kind of candidate American political establishments have been trained to dismiss.

Young. Uber progressive. Explicitly socialist.

Running against Andrew Cuomo, a former governor with enormous name recognition, institutional connections and access to money.

Mamdani won the Democratic nomination. Then he won the mayoralty.

The significance was larger than City Hall.

New York’s DSA chapter says more than 100,000 volunteers participated in the campaign and that the broader effort knocked on millions of doors. The organization now describes Mamdani’s victory as the most important American socialist electoral success in a century. That description is partisan, but the scale of the organizational achievement is difficult to dismiss.

More important was Mamdani’s message. He talked relentlessly about affordability. Housing. Transportation. Groceries.

The cost of living.

There is an old political rule hidden there. Ideology works best when voters experience it as a solution to something they complained about before the politician arrived. People generally do not wake up demanding “democratic socialism.” They wake up demanding an apartment they can afford.

The politician provides the vocabulary afterward.

That is how political labels change meaning. It is also why establishment mockery can become counterproductive. The more loudly political opponents insisted that Mamdani was a frightening socialist, the more opportunities he had to answer:

What frightens you more — the word socialist, or your rent?

That is an extraordinarily effective political trap. Because the voter is not required to endorse the entire ideology.

The voter only has to be dissatisfied with the present.

The Goldwater Lesson

Republicans should understand this better than almost anyone.

In 1964, the Republican establishment had its own Audrey II.

His name was Barry Goldwater.

For decades, the Republican Party was dominated by a powerful, moderate Eastern establishment. Dwight Eisenhower had not dismantled the New Deal. He accepted much of the postwar welfare state while governing as a fiscally cautious Republican.

Goldwater conservatives hated that accommodation. They wanted, as the phrase went, “a choice, not an echo.” The establishment regarded them as ideological purists who might destroy the party.

They nominated Goldwater.

Lyndon Johnson obliterated him. Johnson won more than 60 percent of the popular vote and carried 44 states. Goldwater won six.

If politics ended on Election Day, that would have been the end of the story. It wasn’t. Because Goldwater lost the country while winning the Republican Party.

The Miller Center describes his 1964 campaign as a transformation of the GOP from its older Eastern establishment toward an increasingly conservative party. And speaking for Goldwater during that campaign was a former actor and former Democrat named Ronald Reagan. On October 27, 1964, Reagan delivered a televised address called A Time for Choosing.

Goldwater lost eight days later. Reagan became governor of California two years later. Sixteen years after the Goldwater debacle, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States.

The ideas that looked electorally suicidal in 1964 had become the governing philosophy of the Republican Party by 1980.

This does not mean the DSA is destined to repeat the Goldwater-to-Reagan trajectory. History is not a train schedule. It means something more modest and more useful: Do not measure an insurgency only by whether its first national candidates can win a general election.

Ask whether it is changing the people who can win a primary. Ask whether it is changing the language candidates use. Ask whether politicians who do not belong to the movement nevertheless begin borrowing its issues. Ask whether yesterday’s radical proposal becomes today’s negotiating position.

And above all, ask whether the establishment still possesses the authority to say no.

The Party That Changed Its Rules

Democrats have their own cautionary tale.

In 1968 the party nearly came apart. Vietnam had divided Democrats.

Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential contest. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Hubert Humphrey became the nominee despite not competing in the primaries in the way modern voters would recognize.

Outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police and protesters battled in scenes televised across the country. Inside, party professionals still exercised enormous influence over how nominees were chosen.

After the disaster, Democrats rewrote the system.

The McGovern-Fraser Commission radically expanded the power of primaries, caucuses, rank-and-file voters, women, minorities and younger activists in choosing delegates.

Then, in 1972, George McGovern — the very man whose name was attached to those reforms — captured the nomination. He represented a Democratic coalition that was younger, more antiwar and more culturally liberal than the party establishment.

Richard Nixon destroyed him.

McGovern carried Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Again, however, the landslide obscured a deeper transformation. The old boss system never came back. The rules remained changed. The Democratic Party that emerged from the 1970s was not the Democratic Party that entered the decade.

Political movements can lose the election and still inherit the institution.

That is the historical warning buried beneath the current socialist surge.

Then Came the Tea Party

Fast-forward to 2009.

Barack Obama had been elected president. Republicans were demoralized. Democrats controlled Washington.

Then an unruly conservative movement appeared carrying colonial costumes, handmade signs and a name borrowed from Boston Harbor.

The Tea Party.

Republican leadership initially had an uneasy, ambiguous relationship with it. The movement supplied energy. It supplied voters. It supplied money and television attention.

It also supplied candidates who occasionally terrified Republican professionals. Tea Party activists did not merely oppose Democrats. They challenged Republicans in Republican primaries.

That changed everything.

In Delaware, conservative activist Christine O’Donnell defeated establishment Republican Mike Castle in the 2010 Senate primary. Castle was a former governor and nine-term congressman.

O’Donnell became a national sensation. She then lost the general election.

Republican professionals could point to Delaware and say: See? This is what happens when ideological activists choose nominees.

They were not entirely wrong. They were missing the larger story. Tea Party candidates and supporters helped propel Republicans into control of the House in 2010. The Pew Research Center found Tea Party supporters extraordinarily energized; 86 percent voted for Republican House candidates that year.

More importantly, Republican incumbents learned to fear being “primaried.”

That verb tells the story.

The threat was not always that a Tea Party challenger would win a November election. The threat was that a Republican officeholder would never reach November. That pressure pulled the party rightward. Politicians changed votes, rhetoric and priorities because the activists most likely to appear in low-turnout primaries demanded it.

The Tea Party faded. Its voters did not.

Research years later found that some of Donald Trump’s strongest Republican support had deep roots in the Tea Party constituency.

The movement disappeared into the organism.

Seymour thought the plant was gone.

Instead, it had simply become the shop.

This Is the Democratic Question

The Democratic Party now confronts a similar structural problem from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum

Its socialist insurgents are not yet a national majority.

Political primaries are strange environments. Participation is lower than in presidential general elections. Voters are more ideological. Activists matter disproportionately. Volunteers matter. Small donors matter. Organizational discipline matters.

An energized minority can therefore exert influence far beyond its percentage of the national population.

That is particularly true in overwhelmingly Democratic districts where the Democratic primary is effectively the election. Win a primary in parts of New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles or other heavily Democratic cities and the general election can become almost ceremonial.

That creates a laboratory.

Movement candidates can win office. If they govern successfully, the laboratory becomes an advertisement. If they fail spectacularly, it becomes a warning.

That is why Mamdani matters far beyond New York.

His real historical test is not whether Republicans hate him. They do. It is not whether conservatives can find quotations from socialists that terrify suburban voters. They can.  

The test is whether New Yorkers can conclude that their lives have improved.

If housing becomes easier to afford, public services function, streets feel safe, businesses remain viable and ordinary people believe local government works better, then the word socialist becomes less politically radioactive.

If taxes climb, services deteriorate, business leaves and promises prove mathematically impossible, the opposite happens.

Mamdani winning New York is not merely about New York.

It is an ideological field test.

The Achilles’ Heel

There are already signs that the socialist movement faces limits.

One of the largest is the Democratic electorate itself.

Recent primary results show DSA-aligned candidates making gains, but reporting this week points to a difficult question for the movement: whether its appeal can expand substantially among Black Democratic voters, particularly older Black voters who have historically been among the party’s most pragmatic constituencies.

That is not a small problem.

African American voters have repeatedly served as a moderating force in Democratic presidential primaries. They helped rescue Joe Biden’s candidacy in South Carolina in 2020 when much of the political world thought he was finished.

The current socialist coalition tends to be younger, more urban, more ideological. More comfortable with sweeping systemic language.

Winning Brooklyn is not the same as winning Georgia. And winning a Democratic primary is not the same as winning Pennsylvania in November. Those distinctions are precisely why predictions of an imminent socialist takeover are overheated. But Democrats who take comfort from those obstacles may be making the opposite mistake.

A movement does not need to win everywhere to move everybody.

Barry Goldwater never won the presidency.

His Republican Party did.

Kamala Harris and the Problem of Recognition

There is another lesson in the Democratic defeat of 2024.

Kamala Harris was not an unknown quantity. She had been vice president of the United States. She had served in the Senate. Before that she had been attorney general of California.

Voters made a judgment.

Party professionals can debate whether that judgment was fair. They can blame timing, Joe Biden’s late withdrawal, inflation, Donald Trump, the media, misinformation, Gaza, turnout, race, gender or campaign strategy. Some of those explanations may be correct. But politics eventually becomes brutally simple.

The voter gets to vote. And the voter’s reasons do not require the approval of the people who lost.

This is where establishments often get themselves into trouble.

They explain the electorate instead of hearing it. Republicans did it before Trump. Democrats are doing it now.

The voter who says the system is not working may be wrong about why. The solution offered to that voter may be foolish. But when a political establishment refuses to hear a grievance, it creates a market for somebody who will.

That somebody may be Bernie Sanders. It may be Zohran Mamdani. It may be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Or it may emerge from someone we have not yet heard of.

Ronald Reagan was not the Republican nominee when Barry Goldwater began his revolution.

Feed Me

That brings us back to Audrey II.

The Democratic Socialists do not have to persuade the United States to abolish capitalism. They have to persuade enough Democratic voters that the Democratic establishment has failed them.

Then they need candidates. Then organizers. Then primary victories. Then local governments. Then congressional seats. Then legitimacy.

Then time.

The most striking thing about the DSA’s present strategy is how clearly it understands this progression. Its own 2026 organizing material emphasizes governing, electoral organization, labor power and building a durable movement rather than merely staging ideological demonstrations.

This is politics the old-fashioned way.

Organize. Recruit. Knock on doors. Win the primary. Take the seat.

Do it again.

The Democratic establishment should probably spend less time arguing about whether Americans “really” want socialism and more time asking why increasing numbers of younger Americans are willing to listen to socialists in the first place.

Housing, Healthcare, College debt. Economic insecurity, and the astonishing accumulation of wealth at the top are concerns. A generation entering adulthood after the financial crisis of 2008, living through COVID, watching home prices escape them and discovering that the traditional markers of American middle-class life often arrive later — if they arrive at all.

You can tell those voters that democratic socialism is economically misguided. You may even be right. But if your counterargument is simply that the present system is wonderful, they may reasonably wonder whether you have ever met them.

Franklin Roosevelt understood that.

He did not save capitalism by insisting capitalism required no repair.

He saved it by repairing it.

The Cure Can Still Be Worse Than the Disease

None of this requires sentimentalizing the DSA.

At its most utopian, parts of the socialist program promise governmental solutions with little apparent concern for political limits, fiscal constraints or unintended consequences.

At its most troubling, the movement contains positions on policing, foreign affairs, private ownership and institutional power that many Americans would reject decisively if presented plainly.

Even the movement itself is already experiencing the oldest problem in ideological politics:

Factional warfare.

Recent reporting describes significant internal fighting within DSA over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, strategy and the possibility of the 2028 presidential race.

Success rarely cures ideological division. It often magnifies it.

There is another problem.

America remains a continental nation of radically different political cultures. New York City is not Tennessee. Massachusetts is not Texas.

A message capable of winning 70 percent in one congressional district may lose by 30 points two counties away. That geographical reality has repeatedly punished movements that confused intense local enthusiasm with national consensus.

George McGovern learned it. Barry Goldwater learned it.

And eventually every insurgency discovers that Twitter — or whatever has replaced Twitter this week — is not Ohio.

The Choice Facing Democrats

Democrats therefore face three possibilities.

They can surrender to the socialist left.

That would almost certainly alienate large sections of the electorate and place the party’s national coalition on the endangered species list.

They can declare war on it.

That might suppress particular candidates while simultaneously convincing dissatisfied younger voters that the Democratic establishment cares more about preserving itself than addressing their lives.

Or they can do something much harder.

Listen carefully.

Steal the good ideas. Reject the bad ones. Address the grievances that made the movement possible. And make democratic liberalism work sufficiently well that democratic socialism becomes less attractive.

Political establishments hate this solution because it requires admitting that insurgents noticed something first.

Franklin Roosevelt was not troubled by that. He borrowed ruthlessly.

There is no copyright on a useful idea.

What Happens Next

The great danger for Democrats is not that America wakes up tomorrow morning socialist. The danger is that Democratic leaders continue measuring the socialist movement by the wrong standard.

They ask: “Can these people win the presidency?” Wrong question.

Can they win enough Democratic primaries to change the Democratic Party? Much better question.

Can they frighten Democratic incumbents into adopting portions of their agenda? Better still.

Can they establish successful governing models in cities where Democrats dominate? Now we are getting somewhere.

And can they persuade a generation that socialism simply means government making rent, medicine, transportation and education affordable?

That may be the most important question of all.

Political language is never fixed.

“Conservative” meant something different before Goldwater. “Republican” meant something different before Reagan. It meant something different again after Trump. “Democrat” meant something different before Roosevelt, before Johnson, before McGovern, before Clinton and before Obama.

Parties survive. Their contents change.

Sometimes almost completely.

And Then There Is the Other Party

There is one final irony.

If Democrats respond badly to the socialist insurgency — either by moving much farther left than the electorate or by appearing contemptuous of the economic anxieties driving it — the greatest beneficiary may not be the Democratic Socialists.

It may be the Republicans.

American politics works like a pendulum, although not a particularly orderly one. One party overreaches. The other profits.

The Democrats nominate McGovern. Nixon wins 49 states. Republicans nominate Goldwater. Johnson wins 44. The country eventually tires of New Deal liberalism. Reagan arrives. The country tires of George W. Bush and the Iraq War. Barack Obama arrives. The political establishment recoils at Donald Trump. Donald Trump wins anyway.

Which is why today’s Democratic argument is ultimately bigger than Bernie Sanders.

If Democratic leaders fail to hear what the electorate is telling them, they may eventually discover that the punishment for failing to contain their left flank is not a socialist president.

It could be a conservative one.

Perhaps President J.D. Vance or President Marco Rubio. Perhaps somebody whose name we barely know today. That is the peculiar thing about political revolutions. The people who begin them are not always the people who inherit them.

Voters have a way of surprising us.

And yet, somewhere in the corner of the shop, the little plant everyone thought was amusing keeps getting bigger.

The intelligent question is not whether Audrey II is frightening.

It is much simpler.

Who keeps feeding it?