Bill Maher stood in front of his Los Angeles studio audience this week and delivered a line that would've gotten a Republican banned from social media three years ago: "The prevailing view of so much of the young left in America is that we're the worst country ever." The crowd didn't boo. They clapped.

Maher systematically dismantled the Democratic Socialists of America — an organization that announced 121,000 members on July 4th, has won 5 congressional primary races, and just seated 3 of 25 national board positions for its Marxist Unity Group. That's the faction whose website, dsausa.org, links to an outfit called Friends of Socialist China. Maher's response to all of it was a sentence that should be carved into the Democratic National Committee's front door: "I'm not a Republican. I'm just not stupid."

He's not the only one saying it. Senator John Fetterman — a Democrat who won Pennsylvania by running as a working-class populist — put the party's internal crisis in five words: "This isn't a big tent. It's anarchy." Fetterman followed that with a question nobody in leadership wants to answer: "Why can't Democrats call this out?"

Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar did call it out. "I read their platform and it's radical," Cuellar said — after surviving $20 million in primary challenges from the party's left wing. Arizona Senator Mark Kelly warned against "abolishing police, prisons, and borders, and defunding the Pentagon." South Carolina Senate candidate Annie Andrews. Rahm Emanuel. Even Chuck Schumer has quietly distanced himself from the DSA wing. The list of Democrats sounding the alarm isn't short. The list of Democrats doing anything about it is.

Watch Bill Maher's DSA rant here

The numbers tell the rest of the story. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 51% of Americans say the DSA has few or no good ideas. Another 47% said they were uncertain about Democratic Socialist policies — not opposed, just confused about what the party actually stands for anymore. Free market economics carries a plus-41 favorability rating. Communism sits at minus 73. The gap between where the DSA wants to take the party and where voters actually live is not a disagreement. It's a canyon.

Glenn Beck's transcript of the segment added context that Maher himself supplied: the last time a socialist movement hit this kind of membership and political influence in America was Eugene Debs and the Socialist Party in 1912. That comparison isn't flattering. Debs ran for president from a prison cell. The party collapsed within a decade.

The instinct from party loyalists is to dismiss Maher as a contrarian who enjoys provoking his own side. His ratings suggest otherwise. So does the applause in the room. When a comedian gets a standing ovation for stating facts that elected officials won't say on the record, the problem isn't the comedian.

Fetterman called it anarchy. Cuellar called it radical. Kelly called it a platform of abolition. Maher called it stupid.

The Democratic Party's official position on all four of those assessments remains: no comment.