Do Democrats Understand What's Happening to Them?
Warning lights are flashing. Is anybody paying attention?
“Republicans’ glee at the recent wave of leftist candidates winning Democratic primaries has been almost uncontained. GOP leaders spy a precious opportunity to tar their midterm opponents as an extremist threat.” — Today’s Politico Playbook
Galen Druke dives into the new Times/Sienna poll and provides this Reality Check: “In every Senate battleground this cycle except for Maine the majority of the electorate thinks the Democratic Party is too extreme. In none of the battlegrounds does a majority think the Republican Party is too extreme.”
This is one of the reasons that Republicans — with the very notable exception of North Carolina — have a clear home-field advantage in battleground states and an increasingly strong chance to keep control of the Senate:
And yet… as Jeremiah Johnson notes, “the media is obsessed with reporting how the future of the Democrats is a handful of DSA types who won primaries in D+60 districts.”
Commented the folks at RVAT: “Maybe, just maybe, elevating far-left socialist candidates who praise communist leaders, support Hamas, justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, believe that all deportations are wrong, say 9/11 was an “inevitable” consequence of U.S. foreign policy, and call for abolishing prisons and the police isn’t exactly helping the Democratic Party’s brand. Just a thought.”
What could go wrong?
Today’s newsletter includes two important articles about the existential challenge that Democrats now face:
In The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait writes: “There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists.”
And in the Wapo, Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett of the center-left Third Way calls on liberals and centrists to fight back against the far-left’s hostile takeover of their party before it is too late. (See below for excerpts.)
Happy Thursday.
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These Are Not the Socialists You Think They Are
Jonathan Chait’s warning is bracing. “The costs of an alliance with the DSA are moral as well as political. The Democratic Party is waging an existential struggle to save democracy, the rule of law, and liberal norms. The DSA’s vanguard does not merely believe that its defense has faltered. It holds those values themselves in contempt as resistance-wine-mom frivolity.”
This is the crucial point that I’ve been trying (with only limited success) to make: (1) The DSA should not be confused with Nordic socialism. It is far far more radical. (2) A DSA hostile takeover of the Democratic Party would alienate voters in swing states, and (3) Lead to MAGA dominance for a decade.
Chait puts all of this into historic context and brings important receipts: The DSA as it now exists bears little resemblance to what its founders intended because it has been subjected to a hostile takeover itself — by self-described Marxist-Leninists who make no secret of their contempt for liberal democracy and its values.
It’s also worth noting that the DSA candidates “despise the Democratic Party.”
Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a “rapist” and wrote “Fuck Kamala Harris” on social media. She proceeded to be nominated for a House race in New York last week by Democratic voters who presumably do not all share those feelings.
Chevalier should not be confused with your usual Democratic “progressive.”
Chevalier, for instance, joined a post–October 7 celebratory rally and portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to Western “bullying.” She previously called for seizing land and the means of production and has repeatedly praised communism.
But, Chait points out, these positions “are not holdovers from the idealism of youth or a bygone ‘woke’ era.”
“They are a by-product of the DSA’s core ideology. The DSA has become a force in Democratic Party politics even as it has grown more hostile to the party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic.”
This is the result of “an influx of tens of thousands of young members. Some of the new recruits were Marxist-Leninist organizers who saw the DSA’s growing membership as fertile ground.”
Some founding members of the DSA have tried to sound the alarm about what was happening to “democratic socialism.”
In 2021, eight founding DSA members similarly warned that far-left factions were attempting to gain control of the group.
The communist influx threw open the question of whether the DSA would support authoritarian parties and states around the world. Communist organizers, as Harrington feared, began to reshape the DSA as an ally of any anti-Western force, even the most murderous and oppressive.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the DSA opposed the invasion but blamed it on “the expansion of NATO and the aggressive approach of Western nations,” and opposed any military aid to allow Ukraine to defend itself…
The DSA’s posture toward terrorism, which ranged from equivocation to outright support, drove away many of the organization’s remaining advocates of liberal democracy.
Two dozen prominent old-line members announced their resignation the next month, conceding that “today’s DSA has driven itself beyond redemption” and had become “entirely wanting in its dedication to the moral principles that are the foundation of democratic socialism.”
It seems important to note that the goal of the new DSA leadership is not the revitalization of the Democratic Party. To the contrary, writes Chait, its long-term goal “is to exploit the Democratic Party’s ballot access and reservoir of voters to build its following, and then, after it gains enough power, break off to form its own party, after which the husk of the old Democratic Party would wither and die. This gambit is called the ‘dirty break, a term coined by a 2017 article in the left-wing magazine Jacobin….”
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Despite the threat — and what it might mean for 2026 and 2028 — too many moderate, liberal, and even progressive Democrats are reluctant to push back against any of this; and many on the left are content to reassure themselves that the crypto-Communists in their midst are merely “liberals in a hurry.”
But Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett are also firing off warning flares:
The organization’s ideas are electoral poison. Defund the Defense Department. Abolish “the carceral forces of the capitalist state.” Eliminate the presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court as they currently exist. Draft a new Constitution.
These are not caricatures invented by the MAGA right; these are the policies DSA leadership laid out in its new platform, according to City Journal. It will reportedly debut at the DSA’s “Socialists Summit” later this month.
Now is the time, they write, for Democrats to stand on principle and push back against the zealots on the far left. “Mainstream Democrats must emphasize that they are not a radical, socialist party and will not become one. And they must back that sentiment with money, organization and spine.”
Cowan and Bennett also cite an important historical precedent:
In 1947, liberal leaders including Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Reuther founded Americans for Democratic Action because they refused to let the communist-aligned left speak for American liberalism. They drew a bright line, condemned those who would not renounce the radical project and the next year helped Harry S. Truman crush Henry Wallace’s fellow-traveling third-party challenge. They understood that liberalism’s survival required a center willing to stand up to the left. That clarity led to the coalition that passed the Civil Rights Act, Medicaid and the rest of the Great Society.
Like Chait, they stress the existential stakes.
The DSA is disciplined and growing, but it can be beaten both in elections and in the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. Mainstream Democrats must rally to this cause. If they don’t, the consequences — for the party and the country — will be catastrophic.
Exit take: If only they had been warned. You have been warned.
Today’s Podcast
On today’s episode of “To the Contrary,” we welcome back Tara Palmeri, journalist and author of “The Red Letter,” We discuss Trump’s obsession with image leading up to the 4th of July holiday, immigration, the “Epstein class,” and Palmeri’s recent interview with a prolife congresswoman who experienced a near fatal pregnancy: “Congresswoman Kat Cammack Told Me This Story. Then She Asked Me Not to Publish It.”
Subscribers can listen to an ad-free version right here… or you can watch on YouTube / Listen (and subscribe) on Apple/ Spotify / iHeart / RSS Feed
Note: If you enjoy conversations like this one, or just want to hang around smart, sane people, please consider joining us.
Thursday dogs
Flashback. Moses was a gentle giant.
Here's the problem you have: you say "democrats" but what you mean is "voters."
Because this isn't the party bosses saying 'these are our candidates.' This is what the voters are choosing. Now, this means one of two things: either A, the voters want this, or B. the moderates you'd rather win are making terrible arguments that no one is buying.
It's probably a mix of both. But when you say 'Democrats are doing this' you mean 'Democratic primary voters are choosing this.'
And that means that, if you want to stop them, you have to run candidates that can sell their moderation. And I don't know if you've looked around, but the establishment has done a really terrible job at selling these things. It's done a horrible job of selling the brand you want them to buy, Charlie.
Part of the problem is that we've done moderation. We had four years of Joe Biden, and the result was more Trump. So the entire brand of the moderate is dead. When Biden left office, the Democratic brand was entirely discredited, because it failed to stop Trump.
So, if you and other moderates want moderates to win primaries, you need to convince voters that what you're selling is what they should support. And they have not managed to do that at all. Across the country, the moderates keep losing because they are failing to convince Democratic voters that they have the juice.
So if you're a moderate, you need to ask what you need to do in order to win. Because if your argument is just 'well, I'm more likely to win I think' they're not going to support you. That was the argument for Biden. Voters hated it.
Right now, there is deep dissatisfaction with party leaders among the voters; you either have to embrace that or face extinction. You can't pretend it doesn't exist. The job of someone trying to get elected is to persuade the voters to vote for them. Across the board, moderates are failing to do that. That's on them.
All of this reads as "am I out of touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong." Which is not a way to get elected, as many in the GOP found out. It's a nice bedtime story that evil shadowy figures in the DSA are taking over, but they can't take over if voters don't buy what they're selling.
You want moderates to win? Find a platform that voters will support. Otherwise, you're out of a job.
I really am so sick of people and polls saying that democrats are radical and have gone too far left, but they say nary a word about the repubs that have gone too far right. They seem to be okay with Tea Party and Maga constituents and their radical beliefs. It really is hypocrisy at its best.