Permanent Victory for the Democrats’ Left Flank Is Not Assured ⁠68%

By W. James Antle III⁠96%

8/5/2026, 9:03:00 PM

BS Summary: This article contains 16 faulty reasoning types, including Politically Right Leaning Bias, Negativity Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 72.5% saturation with 579 hits. Analysis detected 1,840 faulty-reasoning hits from 799 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 52.4% and a BS Rank of ⁠68% (10,040 of 30,584 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 67.20% of the article peer group.

Permanent Victory for the Democrats’ Left Flank Is Not Assured 
Left-wing candidates’ poor quality is being overshadowed by the GOP’s self-inflicted wounds. 
Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images 
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. 
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. 
The post Permanent Victory for the Democrats’ Left Flank Is Not Assured appeared first on The American Conservative . 
Article reasoning-pattern comparisonThis article: 2.9%W. James Antle III: 7.4%The American Conservative: 7.6%Confirmation Bias2.9%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.6%The American Conservative: 0.6%Anchoring Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 4.7%The American Conservative: 3.4%Availability Heuristic0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 1.9%The American Conservative: 1.2%Representativeness Heuristic0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 3.7%The American Conservative: 1.5%Hindsight Bias0.0%This article: 3.9%W. James Antle III: 1.9%The American Conservative: 3.0%Overconfidence Bias3.9%This article: 8.3%W. James Antle III: 7.4%The American Conservative: 7.4%Framing Effect8.3%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 1.7%The American Conservative: 0.4%Loss Aversion0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 1.0%The American Conservative: 0.7%Status Quo Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.0%The American Conservative: 0.2%Sunk Cost Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 1.3%The American Conservative: 1.7%Optimism Bias0.0%This article: 2.1%W. James Antle III: 4.6%The American Conservative: 2.6%Pessimism Bias2.1%This article: 25.9%W. James Antle III: 13.2%The American Conservative: 9.6%Negativity Bias25.9%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.7%The American Conservative: 1.0%Self-Serving Bias0.0%This article: 5.4%W. James Antle III: 2.1%The American Conservative: 2.1%Fundamental Attribution Error5.4%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.1%The American Conservative: 0.2%Actor-Observer Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 2.3%The American Conservative: 2.1%In-Group Bias0.0%This article: 18.1%W. James Antle III: 2.1%The American Conservative: 2.0%Out-Group Homogeneity Bias18.1%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 1.6%The American Conservative: 1.3%Halo Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.6%The American Conservative: 0.3%Horn Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.0%The American Conservative: 0.1%Dunning-Kruger Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 1.1%The American Conservative: 1.3%Recency Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.2%The American Conservative: 0.5%Primacy Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.0%The American Conservative: 0.1%Blind-Spot Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 2.5%The American Conservative: 2.5%Ad Hominem0.0%This article: 8.0%W. James Antle III: 3.3%The American Conservative: 1.8%Straw Man8.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.2%The American Conservative: 3.9%Appeal to Authority0.0%This article: 6.5%W. James Antle III: 8.2%The American Conservative: 3.0%False Dilemma6.5%This article: 6.6%W. James Antle III: 3.5%The American Conservative: 2.1%Slippery Slope6.6%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.4%The American Conservative: 0.2%Circular Reasoning0.0%This article: 24.2%W. James Antle III: 10.4%The American Conservative: 8.9%Hasty Generalization24.2%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.2%The American Conservative: 0.3%Red Herring0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.0%The American Conservative: 0.5%Bandwagon0.0%This article: 3.5%W. James Antle III: 4.9%The American Conservative: 5.1%Appeal to Emotion3.5%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 1.4%The American Conservative: 1.3%Begging the Question0.0%This article: 4.0%W. James Antle III: 5.4%The American Conservative: 4.2%Post Hoc (False Cause)4.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.5%The American Conservative: 0.3%Tu Quoque0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.5%The American Conservative: 0.8%Burden of Proof0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.1%The American Conservative: 0.2%Appeal to Nature0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.3%The American Conservative: 0.4%Composition/Division0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.4%The American Conservative: 1.8%Anecdotal0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.3%The American Conservative: 0.2%No True Scotsman0.0%This article: 1.6%W. James Antle III: 3.5%The American Conservative: 1.9%Ambiguity (Equivocation)1.6%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.0%The American Conservative: 0.0%Gambler’s Fallacy0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.0%The American Conservative: 0.1%Middle Ground0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.4%The American Conservative: 0.1%Personal Incredulity0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.3%The American Conservative: 0.2%Special Pleading0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.3%The American Conservative: 0.3%Genetic Fallacy0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 3.9%The American Conservative: 3.0%Unattributed Quote0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 1.9%The American Conservative: 1.8%Quote-first Misdirection0.0%This article: 72.5%W. James Antle III: 26.8%The American Conservative: 15.1%Biased Writer Voice72.5%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 3.7%The American Conservative: 2.7%Indoctrination0.0%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.0%The American Conservative: 0.9%Politically Left Leaning Bias0.0%This article: 36.8%W. James Antle III: 7.5%The American Conservative: 3.5%Politically Right Leaning Bias36.8%This article: 0.0%W. James Antle III: 0.0%The American Conservative: 0.4%Attempt to Sell a Product or S…0.0%

799 words analyzed.

Speakers

1speaker2.4%attributed speech780writer words
100%flagged-word coverage
19 attributed words100% of attributed speech78% writer coverage
0%50.0%100.0%Politically Right Leaning +64.7 ptsWriter: 35.3%The American Conservative: 100.0%100.0%Biased Writer Voice-74.2 ptsWriter: 74.2%The American Conservative: 0.0%0.0%

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…

Analysis

Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.