I recently wrote that the wins by more progressive candidates in Democratic primary races that ousted candidates favored by the party establishment would show us whether the party would embrace this new energy and help these candidates win the general election races or whether the establishment would instead seek to hold on to its grip on party power even if it meant losing in the general election. And it appears that at least some are opting for the latter course.
Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the Democratic national committee, directed a pointed message at candidates running under the party’s banner while openly criticizing its direction.
“I say this with no ill will or animosity: if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” Harrison wrote on social media. “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Focus on building the party you actually support.”
It is curious how Harrison frames the progressives as ‘hating’ the Democratic Party purely because they want to take it in a different direction. He seems to think that the neoliberals who have dominated the leadership for so long are the rightful owners of the party and should not be challenged. He is not alone.
Over the last few days, prominent party figures have moved away from unifying under a “blue no matter who” banner to push for a more formal break with their left flank, and said the moment may have arrived for Democrats to confront their more socialist wing.
“I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the S-word: schism,” James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist and former Bill Clinton adviser, said on his podcast. He added that some DSA-aligned candidates “have no place in the Democratic party” and, of the broader coalition: “I’m not in that fucking political party.”
Norman Solomon has a very good analysis about the current state of the struggles within the Democratic Party and says that the party establishment is panicking and also reveals whom people like Harrison and Carville actually represent.
Between 2008 and 2016, when Harrison worked as a lobbyist for the powerhouse firm the Podesta Group, he represented scores of huge corporations. They included Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Boeing, BP, General Motors, Google, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Oracle, United Technologies, Walmart and Wells Fargo. He also lobbied for trade associations like the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity and the National Mining Association.
Harrison is an archetype of the political operatives telling democratic socialists to leave the Democratic party. If they followed such advice, the new mayors of New York and Seattle would no longer be Democrats. Nor would the next mayor of Washington DC, or the member of the Los Angeles city council now in a runoff for LA mayor.
Many prominent mainline Democrats are suddenly insisting that their party’s big tent should get smaller. One of them, James Carville, declared last week that the socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district, “is not a Democrat” and House Democrats “should not seat her in the caucus”.
…After gaining fame as the campaign manager for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory, Carville served as a consultant overseas for corporate and conservative candidates from Greece to Latin America. He and Harrison are just two of the eminent Democrats now publicly melting down about the left’s advances in this year’s primaries. The surge of voter support for strong progressives is a shock to seasoned lobbyists and political consultants for corporate America along with Democratic politicians who serve it.
A major factor is the drastic shift away from public support for Israel during the last two years, now showing up on ballots. Mainstream Democrats have been knocked out of their denial comfort zone. Even though it has lately become expedient to distance oneself from Aipac, the main pro-Israel lobby group, most Democrats in Congress (along with Republicans) remain closely aligned with Israel – despite the genocide in Gaza.
The Democratic leaders in Congress, Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer, have always been stalwart advocates for Israel. Each has received more than $1.7m in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups. Steadfast allegiance to Israel is one of the key reasons for their mutual antagonism with the left.
People like the odious Carville and Harrison represent neoliberal Democrats, not the party’s base.
The data, however, offers a more complicated picture of where the Democratic base actually stands. A Fox News poll in March showed that 49% of all registered voters, including 72% of Democrats and 60% of independents, described capitalism as working “not very” or “not at all” well.
CNN data analyst Harry Enten pointed to a poll from Marquette Law School that found the DSA now holds higher favorability than sitting congressional Democrats, from Democratic voters and leaners themselves.
In his segment, Enten summarized it by saying: “Simply put, they’re more popular than the Democrats currently in charge.”
…National polling also consistently shows that cost of living and affordability – which often comprise the center of democratic socialists’ platforms – remain the dominant concerns for US voters. And younger and more liberal Democrats are significantly more likely to express support for generational change within the party’s leadership.
It’s an opening that the DSA isn’t shying away from, with its sights set beyond the November midterms. DSA’s national co-chair, Megan Romer, told Politico last week that the group was dispatching surveys to all 250 of its chapters this summer, asking members to weigh in on who should carry the democratic socialist banner into 2028, with responses due back to national leadership by 15 September.
“What DSA represents is a real contrast to Democrats who have run the last couple of elections on fear,” Romer said. “You can’t run on that. You have to offer an alternative.
People like Carville want power so that they and their friends can benefit from it rather than use the power for the general good. He has exploited his talent for using colorful language in the service of power by portraying himself in such a way that the media call on him to give the ‘liberal’ point of view when he is actually serving right wing interests.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries vigorously opposed the progressives in the primaries but after the election, realizing that he needs them to win in order to gain a Democratic majority and the speakership, has at least on the surface, tried to reach out.
The fierce establishment reaction was a notably different posture from that adopted by House minority leader and New York Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, himself a figure the DSA has openly targeted.
When asked on CNBC about DSA supporters chanting “you’re next” at a screen showing his face, Jeffries pointed to Donald Trump. “Our focus is going to be on ending this national nightmare in this country,” he said.
By Saturday, Jeffries had publicly congratulated the nominees on social media. “From public servants to union organizers to community activists, the path is different but the work is the same,” he wrote. “We must decisively address the affordability crisis and crush far-right extremism.”
Coming up on August 4th is the Michigan primary for the US senate seat where a progressive Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed by Bernie Sanders and AOC, is running strongly against the establishment candidate representative Haley Stevens , after a third candidate who tried to straddle the two wings dropped out.
The Senate primary in Michigan has come under scrutiny nationwide by Democrats, who are vying internally to decide whether the party should hew to the more traditional approach backed by national figures like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer or embrace the leftist wing, helmed by figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. While Stevens has seen the support of establishment groups that argue their methods are best equipped to take on former Rep. Mike Rogers, the presumed Republican nominee, El-Sayed and his backers have made the case that the energy lies with their movement.
El-Sayed has adopted a more aggressive posture on the campaign trail, such as in his modification of former first lady Michelle Obama’s famous line: “When they go low, we don’t go high,” El-Sayed has said. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.”
Even right wing political operative Steve Bannon has noticed the surge is support for the democratic socialist position.
To Bannon, it’s proof of something he’s said for months: The U.S. is in a transformational political moment, and leadership in both parties is way behind.
“We are facing a new politics. We’re seeing the dying of the old politics before us,” Bannon said in a Tuesday interview. “You’re seeing it burn to the ground before you.”
Bannon argues that Mamdani and his allies have tapped into a base enthusiasm the Democratic establishment has been sleeping on.
…Here’s the thing I would tell people: We have a capitalist system with no capitalists. We have a very concentrated part of who controls capital in this country, and 80 percent of the people have no participation in, really, the capitalist system. You must be prepared to make radical changes to our system, and you must be prepared to stand in the breach, and to basically beat these people down, not just at the polls, but by government policy.
…We’re in a fourth turning. And Mamdani and his troops, his forces, they understand that they’re playing for keeps. They believe that they are on the rise, and they have within their grasp to take control of the most powerful nation in the history of the Earth in its 250th year.
In the next three to five years, they believe they will get ultimate power, and if you don’t stop it, they just might.
Of course, he also does the usual scaremongering about these people being ‘Marxist jihadists’, the way Trump is now trying to do. We should expect the Republicans to double down on that.
Let’s just hope there’s unity by November. I’d vote for a barely sentient flatworm at this point. We don’t need vote-splitting at this juncture.
And yet, when you ask one of these neolithic democrats (not to mention even the least fascist republicans), for examples of what was bad about socialism or Marxism they will talk about the how a small elite controls everything, about food and fuel shortages, how the state has dossiers on everyone, and how the state disappeared people.
To which most of us respond with, “The capitalists are already doing all that here, you goof! If you don’t want these things going on, try electing people who might try to stop it!”
Changing parties from within is the most likely path for change in the current US system, so of course people who disagree with the party are going to be running under its banner. Didn’t FDR change the path of the Democratic party? Didn’t Bill Clinton (in the other direction)? It is ridiculous to expect a party to keep the same positions as reality changes around it.
anat, you are so correct. The neoliberal Democrats need to remember an eternal truth: change or die. In fact, change is the only constant. Change to their party has descended, as is the law of the universe, so why not quit whining, or else just quietly lie down and rot.
After all, with progressives running, the democrats can actually *win elections*, isn’t that a *good* thing for the party? Find the silver lining, you snowflakes.
dennyk, I *think* that the vote may not be split in November, based on the rather long time that surveys have shown that progressive policies are much more popular with the democratic base than neoliberal policies. Well, I can hope.
Corporate money, money, money: if the neos are so fond of it, why not become Republicans? Same thing.
Umm, Hakeem Jeffries? Ending the national nightmare is only going to happen *if* progressives run. Just sayin’.
Glad Jerffries seems to have caught on to that at least a little. Perhaps he can persuade a few of the old toads to hold their noses and say nice things, no matter how insincere.
Steve Bannon is an idiot, but seems to have a firmer grasp of the situation than the democratic neoliberals, which tells you how far out of touch with reality the neos are.
Garnetstar @ 4
Absolutely.
When Gorbachev met the then leader of East Germany Erich Honecker and talked about glasnost and perestroika, he said ‘life punishes those who are too late” or words to that effect.
.
You Americans need to remind the Democratic politicians of that conversation. The leading Democrats are old enough to remember the tense months when it looked like Germany either would go the Chinese way (repression) or the Russian way (glasnost).
The Overton window has moved so far right that the Democrat party is full of Republicans and the Republican party is full of Nazis. The plan was that the true Left would never get a look in because of the two-party system. But now that plan is failing. The Republican party have spent so long claiming the Democrat party is full of Socialists, with the neoliberal Democrat incumbents sitting smugly knowing that they are the only alternative, that the successful DSA candidates are appearing right at home as the window shifts left again. Rightwing lobby groups that have sunk lots of money into “supporting” (buying) the neos are complaining that this isn’t what they paid for and are demanding action, but controlling the progressives is turning out to be hard with the current amount of public support for progressive policies.
That’s the optimistic view. The bought ones have too much to lose to let this continue. In practice they will do everything they can to appease their masters and stop the leftward shift. I fear someone might even be paid to fall on their sword and deliberately create an internal corruption scandal in the Democrat party. Hope springs eternal, but I don’t have confidence that the progressive movement won’t be dammed somehow.
The old-school Democrats do have one valid point: money talks.
With the decline of network televisions, newspapers, etc, those who lead the opposition dialog through social media seem to think they can ride the same into power. I suspect when it really comes down to it, Zuckerberg, the Ellisons, Musk, et alia will yank the carpet from under them in ways Rosa Luxemburg’s ghost would find familiar -- with comparable results.
Can progressive out-organize the corporadoes? I have my doubts, but if they/we succeed in ’26, we’ll really have our work cut out for us in ’28.
Ah yes, those sage elders, the veteran Democratic strategists and advisers…. Just a thought, but perhaps you shouldn’t be taking political advice from the people who managed to lose to Donald fucking Trump of all people, and not just once but twice.
The Democratic Party establishment has been “Republican Lite” for decades. What platform are they offering besides “well, at least we’re not Republicans”? So they keep adopting more and more right-wing Republican policies, I suppose thinking that if the Republicans are winning with them, they must be the way to win.
My own district, NY-17, was long “represented” by Nita Lowey, who didn’t even bother to campaign (let alone meet with constituents) for at least a decade because she could rely on the Republicans to always nominate someone so bad even Republicans wouldn’t vote for them, and when an upstart, Mondaire Jones, ran against her in the primary, she simply “retired.” She reminded me of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan line “I always voted at my party’s call / and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.”
Then the powers that be redistricted Jones’s district away and we were going to be represented by Sean Maloney from NY-18, who instead of actually campaigning in his (new) district, spent his time campaigning for extreme right-wingers in Republican primaries. So we are now represented by a hard-line MAGA Republican, Mike Lawler.
Meanwhile, when “the squad” got elected, the Democratic Party bosses did their best to undercut them, the way they’ve been trying to undercut Mamdani and his friends. Their message has been “shut up and listen to your betters,” the way Dianne Feinstein reacted to people from the Sunrise Movement disagreeing with her stands on climate change.
Every now and then I get a mailing from the Democratic National Committee (and even one time from James Carville), but I won’t give them a dime. Even if they somehow win, it’ll be “the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Allison, you’re right about the neo Democrats trying to destroy the squad. And, that the squad is all women, and women of color, made them, in the eyes of the old toads, an even more unfit group to have any say in the party or to even listen to.
There actually is a Democratic Socialists of America organization, https://act.dsausa.org/donate/membership/, and, like you, not one penny of my donations are going to the democratic “party”, but to the Dem Socialists.
I had three thoughts about this.
1. I find it a bit insulting that they report the DSA is after Hakeem Jeffries like it’s just some anti-cult of personality. Nobody’s trying to get him out of leadership because they don’t like his voice or want a leader with more hair or something similarly absurd. It’s because of where him and the other establishment dems have lead us. If he really wanted to turn that around all he’d have to do is start acting like he represents someone other than rich assholes and the status quo that got us Trump again.
2. I’ve heard some talk about how it’s existential for these right wing dems to squash progressives. If they lose to the GOP, the people will get tired of GOP BS in a cycle or three and turn back to the dems, whoever they are. But if establishment dems lose to progressives and people start seeing a progressive agenda actually move forward that’s going to be the end of these Republican-lite posers. They’ll be sidelined faster than Donald J. Trump can grift and thank you for your attention to his wallet, and theyll never return except in places that legitimately have a large population of rich assholes to vote them in.
3. You can see what the establisment dems are going to do by watching Maine. They seem likely to push Platner out of the race soon. I’m not going to comment on him as a person because I don’t need to judge that: I don’t live in Maine and it’s up to the people that do to have an opinion on that. But his approach is solidly progressive. The opponent he stomped in the primary (former governor Mills) was a very establishment dem who will be 79 later this year. She withdrew but still came in 2nd. The third place candidate (Costello) sounds like he’s somewhere between the two. Watch to see if they succeed in pushing Platner out by the end of this week and if they do, whether they immediately push Mills to the front. I wouldn’t be shocked if we later found out that some democratic operative had been behind the timing of the accusations against Platner becoming public.
When the establishment wins it’s “Oops, I guess this is just what the people want, what can you do?” But when they lose all we hear about is the end is night, the sky is falling, and how everyone needs to circle the wagons and drive out the heathens that disagree with them. If these loudmouthed bozos get their wish and split the party the establishment will will go the way of the whigs within a decade.