Six steps to socialism:

Party transformations follow a predictable six-stage evolution — recoil, squint, rationalize, submit, amplify, and purge. Each stage has language you can hear long before you see it in the votes. Republicans just finished the full cycle. Democrats might be starting it.

Watch how the language shifts, stage by stage, for signs of whether recent socialist wins are an anomaly, or the start of something bigger and broader.

• Stage 1: Recoil. Denounce, by name. Lindsey Graham called Trump a “kook” who was unfit for office. Ted Cruz called him a “pathological liar.” That was 2016. Both later defended him against the exact words they coined.
• Stage 2: Squint. Support without looking. “I haven’t seen the tweet” became the go-to response of House and Senate Republicans in Trump’s first term when they were asked about the latest storm. Some did the binary dodge: “The other side is worse.”
• Stage 3: Rationalize. This is the “yes, but” stage: “I don’t love the style, but the judges … the tax cuts … the border … He’s a fighter.” This is where accommodation becomes the norm, and the need to win trumps style or tactics.
• Stage 4: Submit. Dissent becomes career-ending. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said on the floor that Trump “bears responsibility” for Jan. 6. Two weeks later, McCarthy flew to Mar-a-Lago to make peace. In less than three years, he’d been ousted as speaker. Silence becomes life-and-death survival.
• Stage 5: Amplify. Fully adopt the vocabulary, the style, the maximal claims. Try to out-Trump Trump. After privately calling Trump “America’s Hitler” in 2016, JD Vance is now vice president. And routinely seeks to show his Trumpiness. That’s almost every Republican now.
• Stage 6: Purge. Actively work to oust anyone who disagrees. You either fully accept and amplify, or get exiled. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) — gone. This year alone, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) was beaten in a Trump-backed primary, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) chose retirement over humiliation, and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) drew a primary challenger (and lost to him) after voting with Trump 99% of the time.

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The counterpoint: Socialism is widely seen by most elected Democrats as political poison. So this moment could prove fleeting. Four reasons for this:

1. Socialism has no enforcer yet. Trump ended careers personally. An idea can’t, unless someone becomes the idea. Mamdani endorsing, campaigning and toppling incumbents is what an enforcer looks like in beta. But it’s hard to see Bernie Sanders or AOC taking this national.
2. The far left has no Fox News synchronizing base and elites. In fact, it’s safe to assume The New York Times, The Atlantic and MS NOW will resist socialism, at least initially. But watch for the formation of a media ecosystem to counter them. Politics is downstream from information flow and currents.
3. Transmission is slower. Democratic voters, broadly speaking, are institutionalists. Republican voters wanted demolition. Submission to an insurgency may have a lower ceiling on the left.
4. Socialists need to clear general-election hurdles, as Trump did. If socialist nominees cost Democrats swing seats in November, expect the Iraq-style reversal and recoil to come roaring back.

Interesting… But as near as I could determine these stages are anything but “predictable”. My research suggests this is the first time such a classification has been proposed. Political “science” (for some definitions of science) does study these sorts of things but this analysis and classification system is new. Via Grok:

Political science does study related phenomena—party realignment, factional capture, elite defection and conformity under primary incentives, populist takeovers, and the dynamics of movement entry into parties—but these are typically analyzed through historical comparison, voting data, network analysis, or game-theoretic incentives rather than a fixed six-stage sequence.

I would love to know the future of socialism in this country. But this analysis methodology has not been proven to be a good predictor.