Now We'll See Whether the Democratic Establishment Truly Cares About Democracy (Part 2 of 2)
For those of us who follow US politics reasonably closely, the 2026 primary season has been quite a ride. And we are back at it today, with several more states holding primaries. One of the safest predictions I can make is that lazy pundits and journalists will once again describe conservative Democrats as "moderates," even though there is not even a passing attempt to analyze -- or even to identify -- an affirmative vision of their policy views on economics, foreign affairs, climate, and other issues, much less to show how those views are somehow in the middle of a range of identifiable competing alternatives.
Even so, the coverage from both pundits and "straight news" sources will again lean into the same old caricature: wild-eyed lefties versus worried moderates. How can I be so sure about that? Because that is what has been happening for years, and the political conversation in this country is nothing if not tediously predictable.
Last week, in Part 1 of this column, I focused in large part on the fight for the Democratic US Senate nomination in Michigan, a contest that became particularly ugly as the national Democratic Party's establishment and key funding sources moved aggressively behind the non-progressive candidate, Haley Stevens. I noted that during the campaign, Stevens had debased herself in a way that was worse than I could have ever imagined from a non-Republican.
Her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, criticized her for the $30 million that she received from one of the most unpopular organizations in US politics today -- a group that is so unpopular, in fact, that it hides its funding of favored right-leaning candidates behind shell groups. That group is unpopular because it is devoted to supporting candidates who will not challenge US support for the Netanyahu government, a government that clear majorities of Americans in general and Democrats in particular do not support.
To be clear, any group is free to take that unpopular position, but any other candidate or group should be free to criticize it and those who support it. Instead, Stevens dove into the cesspool with this: "Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans." Such a grotesque smear should have been disqualifying, but the power players in the Democratic Party stuck with her. She did end up losing a close race, but she should have been a pariah.
The question that I raised in the title of this two-part column is whether the losing side of that intramural battle is now going to say, "Well, we lost another one, but we're still Democrats who care about the future of American democracy, so let's all join hands and get El-Sayed and the others into office." To her credit, Stevens quickly said the right things, but I stand by my statement last week that there are some bells that cannot be un-rung in a general election. Claiming that a Muslim man whose parents immigrated from Egypt wants to blame all of his problems on Jewish Americans easily falls into that category.
But no matter what one thinks about Stevens's actions before and after the election, she was merely the favored candidate of a party leadership that is anything but reliable when it comes to "backing blue, no matter who." The same people who are freaking out about El-Sayed were so incensed about now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani winning their party's nomination in New York City last year that they shamelessly backed an independent campaign by disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who then lost badly to Mamdani. Notably, the same group of old men who tried to block El-Sayed in Michigan stood behind an accused sexual assailant in New York.
Who are they? Chuck Schumer, Jim Clybourn, Hakeem Jeffries, and others. In other words, the same people who claimed in 2020 that the only way for Democrats to win was to nominate Joe Biden and who then did nothing while he and his Attorney General slow-walked the pursuit of justice. And when people suggested that maybe Biden should have cleared the way for a generational shift in 2024 -- even though that process could have produced a younger version of the defensive-crouch Democrats that Schumer et al. love so much -- everyone was told to shut up and fall in line.
I have recently begun to insist on using the word "establishment" rather than the empty labels "moderate" or "centrist," because both of the latter terms make it sound as if the party's leaders are in some ideal "safe middle ground" of American politics. But other than opposing much of the progressive agenda, it is often difficult to figure out what those people want to accomplish. As I will explore below, theirs is almost entirely a reactive, negative approach to politics. Indeed, there is a strong argument that many of those people are part of the Democratic Party not because they have a positive vision of what their party could achieve. Instead, they want to make sure that the two-party system in the US never has a party that is dominated by progressives. That is, their strategy could have been: "Let's put all of our efforts into supporting Republicans and defeating Democrats every time." Instead, they have opted for this: "Even when Democrats win, they should be the kinds of Democrats who will never rock the boat."
That is a rather aggressive conclusion on my part. Where does it come from? For one thing, the establishment's response to El-Sayed's win has been quite a show. The headline writers for The New York Times announced: "Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left." Was the word "war" an exaggeration by the journalist who wrote the piece? Not at all. It was a direct quote: "'We are preparing for the next war that is coming,' said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism." (I wonder if that $15 million could be better spent on defeating Republicans. But I digress.)
So about Third Way. ... I will spare readers a rerun of the history of that group, because I ran through it in a Dorf on Law column on March 31 of this year. They have been around for decades fighting tooth and nail against every genuinely liberal policy that comes along. Indeed, they spend most of their time and money attacking not just "democratic socialism" but what used to be plain-vanilla Democratic policy views. They are anti-labor, anti-environmental, soft on civil rights (especially LGBTQ++), pro-economic orthodoxy, and on and on. They are the Democrats' in-house anti-Democrats.
In that March 31 column, I cited a piece in a liberal magazine titled "Centrists: Better Things Aren’t Possible: Third Way’s strategy session for Democratic moderates lacked any vision other than a hatred for progressives." The author of that piece, Henry Burke, e-attended a meeting of Third Way that was, to say the least, revealing. He wrote: "The event’s speakers celebrated their claim that a similar conference hosted by Third Way in the same location back in 2019 helped power Joe Biden—whom they touted as 'the most conservative Democrat in the 2020 field'—to the White House."
Note that they did not say that Biden was "the most centrist," "the most moderate on policy", or even "the most electable." Their bragging point is that, in a primary field that included "safe" non-progressives like Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Michael Bennet, Michael Bloomberg, and even Tulsi Gabbard (!), Biden was "the most conservative." They could have said "the least liberal," but they went another way. Word choices matter, and that choice fits with what we know about one of the most powerful groups backing the Democratic establishment.
To put it differently, even Third Way itself does not describe its own agenda as finding "moderates" but instead emphasizes finding the guy who is the most conservative. That, among many other reasons, is why it is important to stop falling for the moderate/centrist label.
In his column, Burke also wrote: "What is immediately apparent watching the event is a total lack of any positive vision. Rather than propose a worked-out centrist platform, or even suggest opposition to the Trump administration, the event largely defined itself in opposition to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party." That is, they have no affirmative view of what they want to accomplish. Even if one wanted to argue that they do not need a platform beyond "neither right nor left," it is difficult to see how they think they are going to motivate voters to go to the polls. "Vote for us. We're not for anything that might make some people uncomfortable."
As I noted in Part 1 of this column, a NYT op-ed last week by Thomas B. Edsall was quite interesting in providing legitimate statistical evidence about whether progressive candidates will doom Democrats' chances in November. His conclusion (quoting a political scientist from Stanford) was that it is a wash, with enthusiasm from young progressives providing roughly a one percent boost to Democrats while losing about one percent of swing voters.
To his great credit, Edsall ended the piece by focusing precisely on that enthusiasm gap, first by extending the quotation from that political scientist:
[T]he Democratic establishment is meeting its first organic energy in years with hostility rather than riding it. Pew has the Democratic Party at 59 percent unfavorable, statistically near identical to the G.O.P., and only 52 percent of Democratic-leaners (voters that identify as independent or with another party but lean Democratic) view the party favorably. Those leaners are generally not persuadable defectors. They need a reason to show up, and they skew younger.
In his own voice, Edsall ended the piece with this understated take-down: "While there are arguments of varying persuasiveness over whether [Democratic Socialists of America] candidates are endangering the Democratic Party’s already fragile brand, that does not address why the Democratic Party’s establishment candidates are so vulnerable to socialist challengers in the first place."
Which brings us back to Burke's piece describing Third Way's strategy session earlier this year. After summarizing the vague-at-best policy agenda that made its way into some speeches, Burke quoted a keynote speech by the group's president addressing (among others) the assembled corporate executives in the room. Burke described it as a
murky vision of a "government that works, not a government that grows" and that they "believe in abundance, results, and the urgency of now, not in bureaucracy, endless process, and red tape." Advocates of pointless bureaucracy, government that does not work, and the urgency of no results, consider yourself warned.
And it is these 1980's-era views, still enthusiastically embraced by the now-old "New Democrats." that must be rejected. The most powerful Democrat in the federal government, Chuck Schumer, simply cannot believe that voters today might not be enamored of Ronald Reagan's "government isn't the solution to the problem, government is the problem" nonsense. Establishment Democrats of Schumer's generation truly believe that "regular Americans" are Reaganites, which causes Schumer's wing of the party to continue to push an uninspiring approach to politics that says, at best: "Don't expect us to do anything when we have power. It's too risky."
I continue to believe that this will all become moot when Republicans negate the Democrats' midterm wins this Fall by whatever means necessary, which suggests that perhaps thinking about the Democrats' internal struggles is unimportant. But given that the Republicans might not be able to pull that off, it is essential that Democratic elites stop their insane push against the progressive wave.
In races where the progressive loses, people like Bernie Sanders will yet again step up and support the party's nominees. There is plenty of reason to worry, however, that the right wing of the party will not do the same. Perhaps they think that there will be a place for them in Republicans' post-constitutional order. There will be, but it is not a place that they should want to find themselves.
- Neil H. Buchanan