Jesus fucking Christ.
First Hakeem Jeffries is trending. Now Chuck the Fuck Schumer.
What a beautiful fucking Sunday.
I have wanted Chuck Schumer launched into political retirement for years, so watching Democrats increasingly decide that the smug fossil peering over his glasses at every available television camera might actually be part of their problem is objectively hilarious.
But there is something much bigger happening here than my personal enjoyment of Chuck getting politically dragged by his own side.
The Democratic Party is having a civil war.
And the old guard is starting to figure out that they may not be in charge of the firing squad.
Hakeem Jeffries Apparently Isn’t Left Enough
Think about how fucking insane that sentence would have sounded a few years ago.
Hakeem Jeffries is the House Democratic leader. He represents Brooklyn. Nobody is confusing this man with a Republican.
Yet Jeffries went on Meet the Press and actually drew a line between himself and the Democratic Socialists of America.
“I don’t support the DSA agenda as has been articulated by the DSA itself,” he said.
He specifically rejected defunding the police, open borders and abolishing the Senate. He also said he does not currently support Medicare for All, despite having co-sponsored Medicare for All legislation earlier in his congressional career. (Daily Wire)
And the response from parts of the progressive left?
Basically: Then get the fuck out of the way.
That should be setting off every alarm inside Democratic headquarters.
Because Jeffries isn’t some Joe Manchin-style centrist Democrat from West Virginia trying to survive in Trump country.
He’s Hakeem fucking Jeffries.
If he isn’t sufficiently progressive for the movement gaining ground inside his party, who exactly is?
This Isn’t Just Twitter Noise Anymore
That’s the part Democrats should probably stop pretending isn’t happening.
DSA-aligned and insurgent progressive candidates have been winning actual Democratic primaries.
Candidates associated with the first Trump-era Democratic resistance have already lost this cycle to challengers further to their left. Axios reported that former impeachment figures Alexander Vindman and Diana DeGette lost Democratic primaries to DSA-affiliated Angie Nixon and Melat Kiros. (Axios)
In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed defeated establishment-backed Haley Stevens in the Democratic Senate primary after Stevens benefited from enormous outside spending. The result was widely interpreted as another sign that the Democratic electorate is moving away from the party’s traditional establishment. (The Guardian)
And here’s where this gets particularly funny.
Some DSA-aligned Democrats expected to enter Congress won’t even promise to vote for Jeffries for Speaker.
That disagreement has become serious enough to create tension inside the Congressional Black Caucus over whether incoming members who refuse to support Jeffries should be welcomed into the caucus. (Axios)
Read that again.
The fucking House Democratic leader is potentially trying to become Speaker while members of his own party’s rising ideological faction won’t promise to vote for him.
That’s not a messaging problem.
That’s a power problem.
And Then There’s Chuck
Chuck Schumer has an even bigger target stapled to his forehead.
Schumer has been in Congress since fucking 1981.
He was elected to the Senate in 1998.
For decades, Democrats treated people like Schumer as permanent fixtures of Washington. Administrations changed. Congressional majorities changed. The country changed.
Chuck remained.
Always there.
Always finding a microphone.
Always lowering those fucking glasses down his nose like Moses was about to deliver another commandment from Brooklyn.
But Schumer’s political problem now isn’t simply that Republicans hate him.
A June Civiqs measurement had his national favorability at just 17%, with 68% unfavorable. Even among Democrats, only 36% viewed him favorably while 40% viewed him unfavorably. (Civiqs)
That’s fucking brutal.
And the pressure is coming from elected Democrats too.
Rep. Ro Khanna has publicly told Schumer to step aside as Democratic leader, arguing that he’s out of touch with both Democratic voters and members of his own caucus. (Common Dreams)
Now Schumer has an even stranger problem heading toward November.
The candidates who could potentially help Democrats regain the Senate are increasingly the exact candidates who don’t particularly want Chuck Schumer running it.
After El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Axios described Schumer’s predicament perfectly: his path back to a Democratic Senate majority increasingly runs through Democrats who are skeptical of him. (Axios)
That is fucking spectacular.
Imagine spending decades building the Democratic machine only to discover the people coming through the front door think you’re the machine they were elected to dismantle.
The Numbers Explain Why They’re Getting Bolder
This isn’t happening in a vacuum.
An Emerson College national poll released August 20 found 23% of likely voters identify as supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America. (Emerson Polling)
Twenty-three percent nationally.
Not 23% of Democrats.
Of likely voters.
Whatever Republicans think about democratic socialism — and whatever establishment Democrats desperately want to believe about it — that’s a constituency large enough to matter.
And within Democratic primaries, its influence can obviously be considerably larger.
That changes the calculation.
For years, establishment Democrats could treat their socialist flank like annoying relatives at Thanksgiving: let them yell for a while, give them a couple committee assignments and assume they’d eventually vote for whoever leadership told them to.
That arrangement works only as long as leadership controls the nominations.
Once insurgents start defeating establishment candidates in primaries, the relationship reverses.
Now leadership needs them.
This Is the Part Republicans Should Be Watching
Republicans would be idiots to look at this and see nothing except free entertainment.
Yes, watching Democrats eat each other is fucking hilarious.
I’m enjoying myself immensely.
But political movements become dangerous to their establishment precisely when everyone keeps dismissing them as fringe right up until they aren’t.
The Tea Party did it to Republicans.
MAGA did it on a much larger scale.
The Democratic socialist movement is attempting its own version from the left.
There are enormous ideological differences between those movements, obviously, but the insurgent strategy is recognizable: don’t ask party leadership for permission.
Primary them.
Replace them.
Take their voters.
Then take their institutions.
And eventually leadership wakes up and discovers that the party underneath them has changed.
Jeffries Is the Warning Shot
That’s why I keep coming back to Hakeem Jeffries.
Forget whether you like him.
Forget whether you hate him.
Just look at where he sits ideologically and institutionally.
If the Democratic House leader from fucking Brooklyn can publicly reject the DSA agenda and immediately find himself catching hell from the left because he isn’t progressive enough, the traditional Democratic establishment has a serious fucking problem.
And Chuck Schumer should probably clean those glasses and take a good long look at it.
Because this movement doesn’t appear particularly interested in waiting another twenty years for the old guard to retire.
They’re running against them.
They’re beating some of them.
They’re refusing to pledge loyalty to leadership.
And they’re discovering that the supposedly untouchable people at the top of the Democratic Party aren’t actually untouchable.
So yes.
Hakeem Jeffries trending.
Chuck Schumer getting dragged.
Democrats turning their guns inward.
What a beautiful fucking Sunday.
But underneath all the comedy is a legitimate political question Democrats are going to have to answer sooner rather than later:
If Hakeem Jeffries isn’t far enough left for the emerging socialist wing of the Democratic Party, who the fuck is safe?