A paroxysm of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching was set off yesterday, as another Democratic Socialist candidate beat a long-standing Democratic incumbent in a Colorado primary. This likely means there will be at least three new members of the House of Representatives who call themselves Democratic Socialists, which is causing certain political commentators to absolutely freak out.

The phenomenon is not (as some had hoped) confined to just New York City. Or even "big coastal cities," since New York and Seattle now both have Democratic Socialist mayors (and Washington D.C. will elect another in November). Democratic Socialists are now winning elsewhere, showing the movement is a lot more popular than its detractors would prefer.

There are other candidates who aren't members of the Democratic Socialists of America or don't formally identify themselves as Democratic Socialists who still support most of the Democratic Socialist agenda, but overall their influence is pretty small (even with the recent primary wins). If the Democrats have an extraordinarily good midterm election then there might be a handful of Democratic Socialists in the House and one or two in the Senate. That's hardly "taking over the Democratic Party," which is what some are now issuing dark warnings about.

The Washington Post ran not just one but two opinion pieces today full of such dark warnings and plenty of pearl-clutching. One was written by the president and executive vice president of "Third Way," which is an organization dedicated to a "centrist" (read: "corporatist") ideology. Here's how they started their article out:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) first ran for president as a self-described "democratic socialist" a decade ago. Since then, the Democratic Party has hoped the movement would simply fade away. It didn't. The Democratic Socialists of America now claims more than 100,000 members. Its candidates have won major local elections, and, after last week's bloodbath in New York City and Tuesday's win in Colorado, have defeated mainstream Democrats in important congressional primaries.

Despite having little success outside leftist strongholds, the DSA aims to become a dominant force in national politics. But the DSA's radicalism makes it not a faction to be appeased; it is a movement to be opposed.

Comparisons are also being drawn to the Tea Party movement and the MAGA movement which followed in the Republican Party. The Tea Party was never very effective at getting much of anything done, but it was superbly effective at throwing monkey wrenches into the system so all the other Republicans couldn't get anything done either. MAGA isn't really a political movement so much as a personality cult, and (so far) there is no emerging Democratic Socialist personality who is threatening to take over the Democratic Party the way Donald Trump hijacked the GOP. If Bernie Sanders were two or three decades younger, he might qualify, but he's never going to run for president again.

There are actually a number of things going on simultaneously, so it's tough to point to any one of them as the sole cause of all this movement within the Democratic Party. One is a generational shift of power that has been slowly happening for years now. The sitting House member in Colorado who was defeated in last night's primary is 68 years old, and was a "15-term incumbent." Diana DeGette was beaten by Melat Kiros, who is only 29 years old -- meaning she was already in office before he was even born. This generational dynamic has been playing out in many races, as longtime incumbents are being defeated by much younger challengers. And as a general rule of thumb (for Democrats), the younger you are the more progressive you tend to be.

There is another aspect to at least some of these races worth mentioning. Right now, the American public is going through a sea-change of opinion about our support for the state of Israel. In a very short period of time, support for Israel has plummeted pretty much across the board. This has happened so quickly that neither major American political party has caught up with it yet. The official party line from both Democrats and Republicans is to wholeheartedly support Israel, no matter what it does. This stance is getting more and more unpopular with base voters in both parties, however, and it is becoming a bigger factor in Democratic politics. Democratic Socialists and other progressive Democrats are far more willing to question the unequivocal support of Benjamin Netanyahu, which has played a part in many of these upset victories.

But it's not just foreign policy, it's also the anger from voters that the Democratic Party doesn't seem to stand for much of anything in the way of an agenda that would radically change the prospects of average working Americans in dramatic and noticeable ways. Oh sure, Democrats know that "affordability" is the main thing to run their campaigns on this cycle, but what are they really offering to fix any of the longstanding problems of inequality? Democratic Socialists and other progressives are not shy about proposing very ambitious solutions. Which is why they have generated so much excitement among the electorate.

This is the real thing some people are freaking out about. Plutocrats are just fine with the way things currently are, so they desperately want to fight the progressive agenda and prevent any of it from happening. They think (from Donald Trump on down) if they just scream all the old political scaremongering terms enough ("Socialist! Communist! Marxist!") then voters will recoil in horror. But these terms just aren't as powerful as they used to be. The term "socialism" isn't as scary to younger voters as it was to previous generations. And "socialism" doesn't equate to totalitarian communism, no matter how hard its opponents try to link the two. Dark warnings of Cuba or Venezuela or the Soviet Union don't resonate the way they used to, because people like Bernie Sanders calmly point out how Scandinavian countries (where Social Democrats tend to rule) are actually really nice countries to live in and regularly score the highest in world surveys of how happy the populace is.

These scare tactics will be deployed in the upcoming midterm elections. The freakout of the Republicans and the plutocrats will be deployed in full force. They'll tell the voters that Democratic Socialists want to take everyone's property away and abolish the police and all sorts of other scary scenarios. This will be countered by progressive candidates insisting that life for average Americans can be improved, by taxing gigantic corporations and ultrawealthy people a bit more, and using the money to pay for programs that actually help people out -- like providing affordable (or free) healthcare, or elder care, or college, or any number of other good ideas.

Donald Trump actually ran (when he first entered politics) as a populist. He promised he would fix the economy for the little guy. He would make prices come down and boost wages and everyone would be happier. To say that he hasn't done any of this in his second term is a vast understatement, and it is the main reason why the voters could produce a rather large blue wave this November.

Voters are looking for Democratic candidates who will fight back, period. They are increasingly seeing incumbent Democrats who have been around for years (or decades) as insufficiently angry at what Trump and his MAGA party are doing to this country.

The real question -- if Democrats do sweep back into power in Congress -- is what this is going to mean going forward. There may well develop a similar dynamic to the Tea Party, where a solid bloc of Democratic Socialists and other progressives band together and withhold their votes until their agenda items are adequately addressed. There won't be anywhere near enough of them to "take over" the Democratic Party (no matter how much the pundits are freaking out about such an outcome), but they will flex their muscles and have an influence on what a Democratic Congress stands for. Their most-extreme agenda items will probably never actually pass, but they may score impressive victories nonetheless. And that's really nothing to freak out about at all.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant