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It's Monday, August 3rd, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler and this is the new season of the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Over the course of the last several weeks, there are so many big issues with worldview significance. But if we look at this week in American history and just say, what is the most crucial worldview issue that confronts us, I think it still is the Democratic Socialists of America. The future of the Democratic Party and what this means about this moment in the United States. Now, of course, the ramifications go far beyond the United States. But right now this is something unexpected. It's something unpredicted. If you were to have said to someone, even a major figure in the Democratic Party, say five years ago, the big issue in your party is going to be whether or not Democratic Socialists are going to basically take control. I think most Democrats would have said that is insane, it is impossible. But that's headline news right now. Just take, for example, the Wall Street Journal. Here's a front page headline. Band of Socialists Sows Panic in Democratic Party. The subhead wants a fringe wing. The movement is wielding surprising political power. Well, of course it is. It's astounding political power. And for one thing, just take how this issue has unfolded over the last several weeks. We don't have to talk about the last several decades, the last several years. We'll get to that right now. Just the last several, several weeks. The big story was, okay, okay, so in New York, it turns out that Democratic Socialist elected as a Democrat, Zoran Mandami. Mayor Mondame actually has so much political clout that he was able to basically supplant to defeat some incumbent Democrats with candidates of Democratic Socialist ideology that he preferred. And so the big story was Mayor Mamdani is not alone. This is a movement of sorts. But just about everybody was saying, yeah, but it's a movement in New York City that doesn't tell you much about national aspirations. There didn't appear to be much national possibility. But now possibilities become plausibility. And as a matter of fact, this week on Tuesday in Michigan, Democrats are going to basically decide whether they want the future of their party to be that of Democratic socialism or something else. Now, when it comes to the left wing Democratic candidate there for the senatorial nomination of the Democrats in Michigan, he is not officially a member of the dsa, the Democratic Socialists of America, but his positions are solidly associated with that movement and the people who are, so to speak, card carrying dsa, Democratic Socialists of America members are big time behind his campaign. And so even though he doesn't formally identify, you're talking about someone who is in every way politically, ideologically identified with that movement. So let's just take a minute here. We're talking about a direct worldview collision, the likes of which many people thought were simply put behind us in the 20th century. And by that I mean that we're talking about socialism versus the American order. The two are not the same. And as a matter of fact, I think it can well be argued that socialism is incompatible with the American order. And I think the people who are making that argument most loudly are the Democratic socialists of America themselves. They're coming right out and saying it, and we're going to talk about exactly what they're saying. Basically, therefore, the United States of America under a completely new constitutional system, one that is compatible and actually based in the ideological commitments of socialism. Now, there are so many things to look at here, but this direct collision has to do with the fact that socialism is not just a political idea. It's not just an economic theory. When you talk about socialism as an ism, you're talking about a pretty comprehensive worldview. And that became abundantly clear in the 20th century. And now when you're talking about socialism, there are different variants. There's democratic socialism. That's what the DSA claims to be. And they say that you're going to have a socialist revolution, a transformation of society, but it's not going to come by some kind of Bolshevik revolution, is going to come by the democratic process. And actually, one of the interesting twists and turns in that tale is the fact that the Democratic Party is really in danger being taken over by the Democratic socialists, who, by the way, understand that they can't win certainly many races if the only party label on the candidate is Democratic Socialists of America. So they are deciding to use the Democratic Party as their chosen vehicle, so. So that they actually run on the Democratic ticket. They win Democratic primaries, but openly they're discussing the fact that at some point the Democratic socialist agenda is going to have to replace the agenda and ideology of the historic Democratic Party, or they will simply gain enough political momentum that they can rid themselves, the Democrats, and move on. By the way, another very interesting footnote in all of this. If you were talking about the Democratic Party, say, I don't know, a year ago. We're not talking about ancient history, just say a year ago. And you're looking at the 2026 elections, the midterm elections. I think most of us would be saying, you know, when you look at the Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Democratic Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York. The first is the Democratic leader in the Senate. The second from the same place. We're talking about New York here. Hakeem Jeffries is the Democratic leader in the House and he wants to be the speaker of the House with a Democratic majority after the midterm elections. But the interesting thing is that so many people who are now running with all the energy for the Democratic nominations in so many different races, they're basically saying that they are not going to support Chuck Schumer as the Democratic Party leader in the Senate, they're not going to support Hakeem Jeffries as the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, and they wouldn't support him as Speaker. That's an astounding development because you're talking about two people who, who were just the most, I'd say, well identified Democrats in the United States, both of them from New York, and both of them, the DSA want to make endangered species. Okay, so let's go back at the most important worldview issues here. When you're talking about socialism, you're talking about an idea that really does begin with economics, but it can't end there. And that is because to have a socialist economy, you're going to have to have a socialist political, political order as well. And so the big issue historically in socialism is the fact that you have government ownership of the means of production, common ownership of the means of production. So in classic socialism, this means that the state basically owns the factories, the companies and all the rest. Now, to be fair, most DSA candidates don't want that. That absolutely. And so there are some who are openly calling for it. So you look at the DSA's own statements. There are some DSA members who openly want comprehensive government, state ownership of the means of production, of business, basically. So you just eliminate private enterprise. A lot of DSA members, following the tradition of democratic socialists in Europe, have come to understand that that's a recipe for absolute economic disaster. Now, I think any form of socialism is. But at least even some of the socialists understand that a pure socialism leads to absolute disaster for reasons that Christians are just. For that matter, economists should clearly understand. But what you had in the emergence of socialism in the 19th century into the 20th century was the fact that you had this idea that you should have the workers who are in control of the means of production. The state should own the means of production. There should be eventually the elimination of private property. And I think that's something a lot of college students very much involved in some of these DSA events. They don't have a clue that they're coming for their iPhone. But in other words, you would basically have the end of private property, the end of private enterprise. Now, I want to be fair. A lot of the DSA candidates don't want to go that far because they know that would be economic disaster. But what they want, just take Mayor Momdami as an example, what they want is selective government ownership of the means of production until they get where they want. And so Mondami is talking about housing as a major concern and wants rent control, government control of housing, and that means most importantly the rental market. And of course he wants very high taxation. He's talking about government owned grocery stores. And they announced that at least the first of them will be open within, within the year anyway. And by the way, it's going to come with a 30% discount on some staples. And that's going to sound very good, except for the fact that somebody has to pay for that because the margins in the grocery business are so narrow anyway, if you are offering a 30% cut in staples. So we're not just talking about a loss leader, a buy one, get one or something like that. We're talking about an actual pledge about how the economic model is going to work. Somebody's going to have to be paying for that 30% and that's going to be the taxpayers of New York City, or maybe he thinks the taxpayers of New York State, because when it comes, by the way, to the fiscal matters in New York City, the General assembly and the Governor have a lot of say, which means if they do this, they're doing it to themselves. But anyway, you're just looking at the fact that you have the end of private property, the end of private enterprise in pure socialism. So even if they don't go for pure socialism, and I want to say a lot of DSA members are open, that that's exactly what they want. Even those who don't want total socialization of the entire nationalization of the entire economy, they want it in selective areas, which by the way, is just that that's untenable, eventually won't work. It is interesting that Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who is of course the new Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, head of the Labour Party, which was openly socialist at one point. Now it doesn't have socialism in his platform, but he's got socialism in his passion. That's very clear. Talking also about nationalizing certain industries. We'll just go down the line. And by the way, housing there is a big concern as well. Okay, so how did we get here in the United States? Well, we got here because those who were trying to bring about in the first half of the 20th century, those who were kind of hardline Marxists who wanted to bring about something like a Bolshevik revolution here, they ran into this problem in every Western democracy. And that is the fact that no Western democracy is going Bolshevik. It's just not going to happen. And by the way, by the time you get to the middle of the 20th century, the true horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet regime were increasingly apparent and impossible to deny. And so in the United States after World War II, I'm gonna argue that Marxism in the United States basically went in two directions. You had a hard, hard left and then you had a New Left. And the hard left was kind of old style Marxist. The New Left coming out of the kind of cultural Marxism that emerged in Germany. For instance, the Frankfurt School basically was calling for a form of democratic socialism. They wanted to use the democratic process in order to bring about a socialist revolution. And they also thought that society would have to be transformed before there could be a true economic revolution. And so that's why you had so many people on the radical left on the college campuses in the 1960s in particular, you had this New Left. And there were a lot of people in academia and in intellectual life during the 1960s and 70s who were big into this. And I met some of them when I spent a year at a state university. Just uncut cultural Marxism, socialism, critical theory, et cetera. Okay, it didn't appear to be going anywhere. In 1982, Michael Harrington, who was a man of the left and an open socialist, he came up with a new approach then. He hoped basically to take the saner, more responsible, and frankly, more politically able people from both wings of the socialist movement in the United States and bring them together into what became the dsa, the Democratic Socialists of America. And so here's what's really clear. They were open about their socialism. I mean, it's the second word in the three words. Democratic Socialists of America. It's not like they're trying to hide, but at the same time, they really didn't get anywhere. And even by the end of his life, Michael Harrington was pretty much aware of the fact that the DSA didn't appear to be the vehicle for the future, if only he could see 2026, because this is where things are changing fast. And I think one of the big stories here is the failure on the part of the Democratic Party to have a coherent ideology. And by the way, that's not an unusual situation for a party out of political power. When you have a party out of political power, you don't have someone. There is not just an obvious Democrat who can get up and define terms for the Democratic Party. Also, the Democratic Party has turned itself into the party of the college educated elite. And so they're the people who, by the way, talk socialism and actually walk capitalism. But nonetheless, you have the opening for the DSA to move in. Zoram Mamdani was not the first, but he was the most significant figure behind this and certainly getting the nation's attention, and he's going forward. The Democratic Socialists of America, as I said, came into being in 1982 too, and it really went almost nowhere. I mean, you're talking about membership in the hundreds until all of a sudden you have the coalescence right now of an awful lot of people with an awful lot of energy in the Democratic Party moving in this DSA direction. And so let me just mention two words to you to make very clear how ominous this is for the Democratic Party. Here are the two words. Michigan and Wisconsin, two states. Let me just state the obvious. Neither one of them is New York. There have been movements in this direction, particularly on the two coasts. We often talk on the briefing about the seas that make the worldview distinction. The city versus rural areas, the college campus as a place where you have a lot of blue, even sometimes in a sea of red. The coastlines, that's a sea that's really important and that's not new. You go all the way back to the ancient world, coastal cities, partly because of just the contact with other people around the world and the things that go on in some of these cities, they tend to be a good deal more socially liberal in contemporary terms on the coast. So you look at the east coast and the west coast, okay, California, Oregon, Washington, even within those states. By the way, the coast and the inland areas are sometimes just radically different. But let's look at the two coasts. You could say, well, okay, the dsa, it said its aims on basically taking over the Democratic Party by working on the east coast and on the West Coast. Except Michigan and Wisconsin aren't on either coast. And they're not the only two states of significance here. But we are talking about the fact that on Tuesday, voters in Michigan, Democratic voters are going to decide who will be their nominee for the United States Senate seat vacated by a retiring senator. And the big question is, are the Democrats going to go for a multiple term state legislator? That will be Haley State Stevens, who looks and sounds about as Michigan as you can get, or Dr. Abdul El said, and he is someone who was a Rhodes scholar, a very prominent physician and a health officer. And he is running and right now he's running away with it, just to be honest, at least in terms of the polls. And as I said, he's not officially a member of the dsa, but he solidly identifies with the ideological left and with the positions of the dsa. That's why he's got their support as well. So the national media, by the way, are calling a progressive New York Times article Michigan Progressive and Senate Race Thrills and rattles Democrat. Okay. Yes. And in Wisconsin, we're also talking about the same kind of dynamic. We'll talk about it closer to the state's primary. But there is for the governor's race. And so in both cases you have DDSA identified or DSA, let's just say aligned candidates who are in Michigan really running way ahead in the race of the Democratic nomination for the US Senate seat and in Wisconsin way ahead for all kinds of bizarre reasons for the Democratic gubernatorial, the governorship nomination there as well. Okay. So this is going to be really interesting to watch. But you know, one of the things that you have on the part of major Democrats is the kind of statement that there's really nothing going on here and some of their, their friends in the media are doing the same thing. E.J. dionne Jr. Columnist, well known in, in in American Life. He's currently a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. He ran an article, the headline Socialism, Capitalism, who cares? Well, I, I think you and I care. I think a lot of Americans care. And by the way, I don't like the setup here, socialism or capitalism, because capitalism suggests that it's capitalism that antisocialists are contending for. Well, there's a free market element here that's most important. Capitalism is one shape and certainly if you want to say capitalism versus socialism, you can say that. But the big issue is that this is not on either side, something that's just an economic system. It comes laden with all kinds of ideological and political and social ramifications as well. I think most people on the conservative side who want to say free markets and the freedom of private property and respect for private property. But anyway, the point is that E.J. dion wants to say, you know, there's really nothing here going on. Socialism, capitalism, who cares? Well, I think. I think the Democratic Party is. At least many people in the Democratic Party are very aware of the fact that a lot of people are going to care. At least we can hope so. But the other thing that's going on here is the insinuation there's just not a lot of difference anyway. And that's why I want to come back to the fact that, yes, there's a lot of difference, but. And I don't have to just tell you what the Democratic Socialists of America believe, because they've told us in a document they posted on the Internet on their own website entitled Our Program. So, okay, they're the ones who said, this is what we believe. This is our program. It's about as radical as you could imagine. Not only is it socialism an economic form, but it is also, eliminate the executive branch, eliminate the president, eliminate the United States Senate, and of course, eliminate the electoral colleges. Go down the list. In other words, they don't want anything to get in the way of what they would see as a Congress. And by that they mean the House of Representatives. That will be taken over by a populist socialist movement. And so they're really calling for the end of the U.S. constitution. They're calling for a new constitutional order. They're not just calling for a little bit of this or a little bit of that. No, Mr. Dionne, it does make a big difference. They're calling for a new nation. They're calling for a brand new political order. They're calling for a transformation of the U.S. constitution. And by the way, a lot of that was well identified with both the Old Left and the New Left. Before the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, there just didn't seem to be any future for socialism in the United States. So most people ignored it. Ignoring it now would be very, very dangerous. They call for the socialization of just about all the economy. They call to eliminate the police. They want to empty the jails. And by the way, none of that's an exaggeration. That's just exactly what they're calling for. Get rid of the police, empty the jail, socialize medical care and housing. They want to push their revolution through the entirety of the society. And by the way, as I said, it's never just about economics. It's about a total ideological picture. And we as Christians understand that's just the way it works. Eventually, the ideas all begin to hang together. And so they're calling for queer liberation. They're calling for an end, to, quote, patriarchal restrictions on abortion, childbirth and child raising, gender expression, transition, marriage and divorce, end quote. So just notice now they're looking exactly as the Bolsheviks and the others who led communist revolutions in the 20th century. They're looking at the fact that if you're going to reform society, you're going to have to reform its most basic institutions, and that includes marriage and the family. And again, we're not just saying this. They said it right out loud in their document. I talked about how they intend to use an existing political party, and obviously that's the Democratic Party, to do this. In an article that they ran on their own site entitled Towards a Presidential Platform, the group states, we'll sweep to power using presidential politics to help trigger an avalanche of working class struggle and rip up the old rulebook, end quote. Just keep in mind the old rulebook rulebook is called the Constitution of the United States of America. I want to end by looking at an article that takes us to California and New York, but most importantly to California. The headline in the article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal is California's Case Against Second Chances. And in this case, we're talking about nothing less than a second chance for life when it comes to an unborn baby. It's in the Houses of Worship column of the Wall Street Journal, the last day of February, just last Friday, and it's written by Salvatore Corleone and Michael C. Barber. Now, the thing you need to know is that when you're talking about the first, he is the Catholic archbishop of San Francisco, and the second, he's the Catholic bishop of Oakland, California. So they're putting themselves on the line here. And I deeply appreciate that these two leaders, Catholic leaders there in the Bay Area, are calling out what's going on in California. Let me just tell you how they begin the article. Listen to this quote. Elizabeth Barrett, a young college dropout in Southern California, swallowed a pill the local abortion clinic had given her, then almost immediately after, changed her mind. An online search for advice on how to undo the chemical abortion led her to Heartbeat International, a Christian nonprofit that refers women to licensed doctors for treatment. It worked. Ms. Barrett is the mother of a healthy girl. Now, here's where the story turns really dark. Quote, the state of California wants to be sure that such things never happen again. In an extraordinary case now unfolding at trial in state court in Oakland, California's attorney general seeks an injunction and up to $20 million in fines against Heartbeat International and another small Pro Life Christian nonprofit, Real Options. Their offense is telling women who regret swallowing the abortion pill that there's a medical treatment that can sometimes save their babies. You have these very liberal state officers, and as I say, it's not just in California. It's also in New York State. They're calling it consumer fraud. But as these two leaders say, and they're Catholic leaders in the Bay Area, they say, quote, california versus Heartbeat International. And Real Options, that's the case they're hoping for, is a rare case that should bring together both sides of the abortion debate. In particular, it tests the souls of those who claim the platform of pro choice. What kind of people see a pregnant woman who wants to reverse the effects of an abortion pill and think, let's punish the nonprofits that informed her she has a choice. Are they really pro choice or do they just like killing? End quote? Okay, now I want to draw attention to this because this is a big issue, and it's not going to be limited eventually to California and New York State, to the attorneys general in those states. And it's not going to be left to just this one legal case. And we have to hope that it does progress and make the point very clearly. We have to hope that these good works are vindicated. But it does get down to the bottom line issue. And I appreciate these two Catholic bishops for saying, look, here's the deal. They say they're pro choice, but they want to eliminate a woman having a choice to reverse the abortion after the first pill. They want to eliminate that, basically calling it consumer fraud. And you can see exactly how the culture of death works and the insidious way the culture of death just digs in. And it's hard not to use a metaphor here, just digging in with its claws, just unwilling to let go. And I appreciate the way the two bishops ended the article because they really know what they're doing. And issuing a moral challenge when they say to those who call themselves pro choice are basically, you're really pro choice, or do you just like killing? They put it in the third person. But the point is very, very clear. And here's where we just need to understand what the stakes are as we come back, even to a new season of the briefing. We're talking about light and darkness. Now, we're not talking about this on every issue. We're not talking about every issue being as clear. But here you're talking about something that is life and death. It is blessing and curse set right before us. It is truth and a lie. And we just need to understand what is at stake. It's a good thing in this first episode of the Briefing for this new season that we are reminded that what is at stake in all of this is not just politics. It's not just a clash of worldviews. It's a clash of worldviews with either life or death eventually very much on the line. And just in terms of understanding the issue of abortion, this one piece in the Wall Street Journal by these two authors, and I'm very thankful they wrote the piece. And I say that as an evangelical Christian, I'm very thankful for the two Roman Catholics who wrote this piece having the courage to do so. But I want to say here's the thing. It sets to an absolute lie the position sometimes called pro choice. Here you have attorneys general in two states in the name of the law saying they don't want women to have the choice to save their baby or even to attempt to do so. That really tells us all we need to know. Thanks for listening to the Briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmuller.com youm can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.comalbertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological seminary, go to sbts.edu. for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing. Sam.