Democrats Keep Treating the Far Left Like a Sidekick. Eventually, the Sidekick Takes the Wheel.
For years, establishment Democrats have played a dangerous little game with the activist left.
They want the energy. They want the organizers. They want the endorsements, the turnout, the social-media machine and the ideological enthusiasm. They want all of that right up until somebody asks whether the people supplying it are actually influencing the direction of the party.
Then suddenly everybody gets coy.
What radical left?
Apparently we’re supposed to believe the Democratic Socialists of America and the broader socialist activist movement are just colorful supporting characters in Democratic politics—useful enough to court, powerful enough to accommodate, but somehow never powerful enough to take seriously.
Sure.
Keep smiling and pretending the DSA is your cute little political sidekick.
Because political movements don’t spend years building organizations, recruiting candidates, winning local offices, challenging incumbents and moving policy debates just so they can remain somebody else’s enthusiastic volunteer corps forever.
Eventually they want the keys.
You Don’t Get to Borrow a Movement Without Empowering It
This is the part Democratic leadership seems determined not to understand—or perhaps hopes voters won’t notice.
Political power is transactional.
When elected officials repeatedly accommodate an ideological faction because they need its voters, activists or institutional support, they aren’t merely “building a coalition.” They’re changing the balance of power inside that coalition.
Every concession establishes another expectation.
Every ideological litmus test that becomes normalized moves the baseline.
Every incumbent who decides it’s easier to bend than fight teaches activists an extremely important lesson:
Pressure works.
And once a political faction learns that lesson, why on earth would it stop applying pressure?
That’s why I’m going to laugh my ass off if some of the Democrats who spent years trying to keep their left flank happy suddenly discover that keeping the peace was never the final objective.
Power was.
The people you’ve been bending the knee to can primary you.
And if they believe you’re standing between them and the policies they actually want, eventually some of them will.
A Primary Challenge Isn’t Betrayal. It’s the Logical Next Step.
This is where the whole arrangement gets funny.
Establishment Democrats often behave as though progressive activists are supposed to understand the deal: push us left, make noise, organize, vote for us—and then know when to sit down.
But why would they?
If you genuinely believe the Democratic establishment is too moderate, too corporate, too compromised or too timid, replacing establishment Democrats isn’t treachery.
It’s the mission.
AOC’s victory over Joe Crowley in 2018 should have ended any confusion about this. Crowley wasn’t some Republican infiltrator. He was a powerful Democratic incumbent and chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.
He still lost his primary.
That wasn’t an accident in the system.
That was the system.
And the lesson for ideological activists was obvious: you don’t have to spend eternity begging established politicians to move your direction.
Sometimes you replace them.
So when Democrats accommodate increasingly aggressive factions on their left and assume those factions will remain permanently grateful junior partners, I have one question:
Why?
What exactly makes you think they’re finished?
The Democratic Coalition Has Contradictions Nobody Wants to Talk About
There’s another problem Democrats keep papering over: the constituencies being assembled under the Democratic umbrella do not automatically share the same values.
That matters.
A coalition can contain socialists, progressives, establishment liberals, religious conservatives, secular activists, Muslim voters, Jewish voters, LGBT activists, feminists, union households, affluent suburban professionals and a dozen other groups.
Fine. American political parties have always been coalitions.
But calling something a coalition doesn’t magically erase ideological conflict inside it.
And some of those conflicts are real.
They involve Israel.
Religious law and secular government.
Women’s rights.
LGBT rights.
Free speech.
Capitalism.
Policing.
Immigration.
Foreign policy.
The role of religion in public life.
Those disagreements cannot be permanently solved by repeating “diversity” loudly enough.
At some point politicians have to decide what principles are actually nonnegotiable.
And Yes, We Need to Talk About Political Islam Without Playing Stupid Games
Here’s where everybody immediately starts screaming past one another.
Criticism of Islamism or political Islam is not the same thing as hostility toward Muslims.
Muslims are people—millions of individuals with different beliefs, politics, cultures and levels of religious observance.
Islamism is a political ideology concerning the relationship between Islam and government.
Those are not interchangeable concepts, and pretending they are makes serious discussion almost impossible.
My concern is not that Muslim Americans participate in American politics. Of course they should. They have precisely the same political rights as everybody else.
My concern is what happens when politicians become so terrified of appearing intolerant that they lose the ability to distinguish religious freedom from religious political ideology—or legitimate criticism of a political movement from prejudice against an entire population.
A liberal democracy has to be capable of doing both things simultaneously:
Protect Muslims from discrimination and scrutinize Islamist political ideology.
Protect Christians from discrimination and scrutinize Christian nationalism.
Protect Jews from discrimination and debate Israeli government policy.
Those principles aren’t contradictory.
They’re what intellectual consistency looks like.
Nobody gets an ideological exemption because politicians are frightened of the vocabulary.
You Cannot Defend Liberalism by Refusing to Defend Liberal Values
This is the contradiction I find most remarkable.
People who describe themselves as defenders of liberal democracy sometimes become incredibly reluctant to defend the actual philosophical foundations of liberal democracy when doing so creates friction inside their coalition.
Individual liberty matters.
Freedom of conscience matters.
Religious pluralism matters.
Equal treatment under the law matters.
Women’s equality matters.
The rights of gay and lesbian Americans matter.
Freedom of speech matters.
Separation between religious authority and state power matters.
Those principles should apply whether the threat comes wrapped in a Bible, a Quran, a hammer and sickle, a corporate logo or a fucking rainbow flag.
That’s the point of principles.
You don’t only have them when they’re politically convenient.
The Socialist Question Isn’t Going Away Either
The same evasiveness surrounds socialism.
Democratic leaders frequently want to insist that America’s Democratic Party is not socialist while simultaneously treating openly socialist politicians and organizations as perfectly ordinary coalition partners.
Again, pick a lane.
There is nothing inherently illegitimate about Americans advocating socialism. They have every right to organize, run candidates, argue their case and try to win elections.
But everyone else has the same right to look at their agenda and say:
No.
And Democratic voters have every right to know how much influence those organizations exercise over candidates asking for their votes.
The answer cannot perpetually be, “They’re simultaneously influential enough that we have to listen to them and irrelevant enough that you’re ridiculous for worrying about them.”
That trick has an expiration date.
Coalitions Change the People Who Build Them
This is what establishment politicians consistently underestimate.
They think they are absorbing movements.
Sometimes the movements are absorbing them.
A party shifts gradually enough that the people inside it barely notice. Yesterday’s fringe position becomes today’s activist demand, tomorrow’s primary question and eventually something elected officials are terrified to oppose.
Then everybody looks around ten years later wondering how the center of gravity moved.
It moved because people pushed it.
That’s how politics works.
And it works in both directions.
Republicans should understand this too. No political party gets immunity from its own coalition. If you repeatedly empower a faction because it’s useful against your opponents, you had better be prepared for that faction to eventually make demands of you.
There are no permanently obedient political movements.
Eventually Somebody Comes to Collect
So Schumer, AOC, Jayapal, Booker and every other Democrat trying to manage this increasingly complicated coalition can keep telling themselves they’re in control.
Maybe some of them are.
For now.
But I wouldn’t confuse temporary cooperation with permanent loyalty.
I wouldn’t assume activists who believe the Democratic establishment is obstructing fundamental political change will remain satisfied electing the same establishment forever.
And I definitely wouldn’t build a political strategy around the assumption that movements interested in acquiring power will politely stop acquiring it when doing so becomes inconvenient for me.
You invited these factions into the house because you believed you could manage them.
You needed their votes.
You needed their energy.
You needed their organizing infrastructure.
You needed them more than you wanted to admit.
Now don’t act shocked when some of them decide they don’t want to be the sidekick anymore.
They want the deed.
And when the primary notices start arriving?
I’ll bring the popcorn. 🍿
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