The Democratic Party is moving left. Its most dynamic leaders over the past few years have been Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani. Its most passionate activists are the young progressives who gave us the campus encampments after October 7. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say the Biden administration was a dozen aging moderates trying to manage a staff of 4,000 young progressives. These days, Democratic-primary voters are flocking to support whoever seems most furious. So Democratic mainstays such as the three-term Colorado Senator Michael Bennet are losing their campaigns, and members of the Democratic Socialists of America are triumphing.
As my colleague Jonathan Chait detailed in an essay earlier last week, this DSA isn’t just liberalism in a hurry. It’s not just a bunch of Michael Harrington types who want America to look more like Denmark. The hardcore left has taken over the organization. Apparently, almost half of the members of the DSA’s leadership body identify as Communists. The party is in alliance with the most brutal left-wing authoritarians from around the world, including in Cuba and Venezuela. Its New York chapter’s response to the October 7 mass murder and mass rape of Israeli civilians was to blame Israel for provoking the attacks.
All of this has centrist Democrats feeling a tad nervous. Some of their concerns are political. Working-class voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania may not go for the faculty-lounge notions swirling around the keffiyeh-sphere: open borders, defund the police, defund the Pentagon, punish Israel, oppose support for Ukraine, tear down prisons. One successful DSA candidate, Darializa Avila Chevalier, refused to answer when asked repeatedly whether murderers should serve prison time, a question most voters would not find hard to answer.
[Arash Azizi: Two futures for the American left]
But other mainstream Democratic concerns seem to be moral. Something in the liberal heart recoils in the face of righteous ruthlessness. Everyone remembers the careers that were destroyed and the voices that were silenced by hardcore progressives in the peak woke era. When the left is opposing Donald Trump, viciously vehement rhetoric it uses can be thrilling. But there is also something terrifying about the fact that these voters also use this rhetoric against anybody even slightly to their right.
Napoleon was onto something: In politics as in warfare, the moral advantage is to the material as three is to one. Right now, all of the passion is on the left. Progressives are showing once again that so long as your followers are fervently committed, it doesn’t take many people to commandeer a movement. So far, no mainstream Democratic politician has seemed willing to stir up the hornet’s nest by taking on the progressive brigades. The sauvignon-blanc liberals in the affluent coastal suburbs hardly seem capable of pushing back effectively. The Democratic establishment risks responding to incipient left-wing authoritarianism exactly the way the Republican establishment responded to incipient right-wing authoritarianism around 2015—by going into denial until it is too late.
To encourage my Democratic friends, I would remind them of this fact: The Democratic Party became great not while pushing against the right. It became great while pushing against the left. Democrats can argue against Republicans in their sleep. They have a comfortable set of moves they can go to: trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the rich.
But mainstream Democrats have to think hard when arguing against the left. They have to toughen up. They have to clearly define what they believe and what they do not believe. They have to rally grassroots supporters willing to fight alongside them. They have to come up with some new agenda to compete with the get-everything-for-free agenda that the left is now offering.
This kind of struggle has happened before—and it was the making of the modern Democratic Party. In the late 1940s, World War II had just ended, and the Soviets were in the process of brutally subjugating Eastern Europe, thus moving from an uneasy U.S. ally to an aggressive U.S. foe. People were becoming aware of the tens of millions of victims who had been murdered by communist regimes over the previous decades. Soviet socialism in Russia was looking more and more like National Socialism in Germany.
Mainstream Democratic politicians such as Harry Truman and New Deal historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. began to adjust their thinking. The left wing of the party, led by Henry Wallace, did not. Some on the left still had sympathies with the Marxist revolution. Wallace simply didn’t see the Soviet Union as an important threat. He declared that he was no more anti-Russian than he was anti-British, as if there were no substantive difference between the two governments.
The progressive left and the Democratic mainstream both understood that they were in a struggle for control of the party, and they both mobilized for that struggle. The progressives led by Wallace set up an organization called the Progressive Citizens of America to pull the party their way. The mainstream Democrats such as Eleanor Roosevelt countered by setting up Americans for Democratic Action, which explicitly banned Communists from joining, in order to block the leftward advance.
The crucial clash happened in Minnesota. The mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, was a rising star in the Democratic Party. In June 1946, he was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s state convention (the DFL is Minnesota’s version of the Democratic Party). A few months earlier, the left had staged a coup and had come to dominate the delegations at that convention. When Humphrey arrived to speak, the delegates erupted in jeers, calling him a “fascist” and a “warmonger.” A sergeant at arms shouted at him, “Sit down, you son of a bitch, or I’ll knock you down.” Humphrey never got a chance to deliver his speech.
But he did launch a campaign to take back control of the Minnesota party. What followed was a vicious struggle over control of the party offices and for the hearts and minds of center-left Americans, a story recounted by James Traub in his biography True Believer. “The police state is the police state” regardless whether it is left or right, Humphrey declared. Too many Americans, he continued, are “not clear in their own mind that the Communist state is of the menacing proportions of the fascist state.”
At one party meeting after another, Humphrey and others—including Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, Don Fraser, and Orville Freeman—maneuvered to regain control over the party’s power centers. “The Communists fought back hard,” Humphrey would remember years later. “But if they stayed up until midnight, we stayed up until 3 a.m. If they issued five press releases, we put out 10. It was tough, and sometimes the fight got dirty. But we were just as tough as the Commies were—and sometimes just as mean.”
Humphrey and his allies won their fight for control of the DFL, and Wallace’s career cratered when he ran for president in 1948 and received a pathetic 2.4 percent of the vote. It turns out that a lot of the ideas that thrilled the left-wing cadres did not have purchase with the wider electorate. Meanwhile, Truman was reelected in a shocking comeback.
This confrontation was transformative for a generation of Democratic politicians, not only in Minnesota but nationally. It taught them how to organize, how to push back against a foe that did not believe in democratic niceties. It made them tougher. It taught them that there can be a chasm between what the pseudo-intellectuals believe and what working-class voters believe, and that the latter actually like the American way of life and possess some conservative cultural instincts that actually make sense.
[Russell Berman and Elaine Godfrey: Something is happening in the Democratic base]
If you read the first chapter in John F. Kennedy’s 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, you will see that he lauds two virtues above all: courage and the ability to compromise. That sort of tough-minded pragmatism became the favored profile for a lot of Democratic pols.
The struggle reshaped liberal thinking in comprehensive ways. The early Cold War liberals had read their history books and seen how the French Revolution had begun with high progressive hopes but descended into a vicious bloodbath. They had seen how the Russian Revolution had begun with high progressive hopes but quickly produced a genocidal police state. They had seen firsthand the horrors of World War II and the death camps. They had seen the hopes for a peaceful postwar world dashed by Soviet aggression.
This infused Democrats with a powerful moral realism. They developed a healthy appreciation for human sinfulness, including the sin in their own hearts. They became suspicious of concentrated power, of fanaticism, of radical efforts to burn everything down. The classic statement of this mentality was Arthur Schlesinger’s 1949 book, The Vital Center. He argued that the degeneration of the Soviet Union had taught Americans a useful lesson:
It broke the bubble of the false optimism of the nineteenth century. Official liberalism had long been almost inextricably identified with a picture of man as perfectible, as endowed with sufficient wisdom and selflessness to endure power and to use it infallibly for the general good. The Soviet experience, on top of the rise of fascism, reminded my generation rather forcibly that man was, indeed, imperfect, and that the corruptions of power could unleash great evil in the world.
Schlesinger wasn’t the only one who learned this lesson. Most of the leading liberal intellectuals of the day—Lionel Trilling, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, the columnist James Wechsler, and above all Reinhold Niebuhr—did too.
On April 25, 2007, I was interviewing then-Senator Barack Obama by phone, acutely aware that the interview wasn’t going well. In a desperate attempt to liven things up, I asked him out of the blue, “Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?”
Obama’s tone changed from weariness to excitement. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.”
“What do you take away from him?”
“I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naive idealism to bitter realism.”
In that moment, a thousand dissertations were born. Obama perfectly captured the moral realism that was so prevalent among Cold War liberals. He was demonstrating that this mentality was alive and well at the top of the Democratic Party decades later. Obama would use his Nobel lecture to deliver a beautiful encapsulation of this point of view. Joe Biden, who was formed by the Cold War, has his own version of this perspective.
The crucial question of the moment is whether that moral realism—the moral realism of Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, and, yes, Barack Obama—is dead.
The union hall is no longer the beating heart of the Democratic Party; the faculty lounge is. And from faculty lounges today comes a gigantic rejection of the Humphrey-to-Obama synthesis. For example, in 2023, Samuel Moyn, who teaches at Yale and writes for progressive magazines such as Dissent, The Nation, and The New Republic, published a book called Liberalism Against Itself. Here’s the first sentence: “Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe—for liberalism.” Here’s the clearest statement of his argument that I could find in the book:
After impugning the Enlightenment, Cold War liberals went on to purge the perfectionism and progressivism of the liberal tradition. It was momentous that in the middle of the twentieth century, liberals abandoned any account of the highest life, not in an ancient rendition that emphasized set ends and permanent interests, but in a modern one that stressed creative agency to invent the new, with history as a forum of opportunity for doing so.
I take Moyn to be arguing that the Cold War liberals made liberalism too self-restrained, too chastened. They abandoned utopian fervor, the inspiring belief that men and societies can be rendered perfect. If we’re going to fight for social justice, he seems to be saying, we’re going to need revolutionary fervor, people who are not afraid to use power, people who believe they can make the world anew.
Sometimes all of politics seems like one long debate over the French Revolution. The Cold War liberals tended to believe that the American Revolution turned out better than the French Revolution because it was conducted with sober expectations and a reformist mentality. To this day, mainstream Democrats are attracted by pragmatic reforms such as the Affordable Care Act—which sought not to replace the entire American health-care system but to reform and widen access to it.
The progressive left, on the other hand, has always drawn on the French Revolution as a better model. The French revolutionaries tore down almost all of society’s old structures—including the calendar, the churches, and the school system. Today, the crucial word in the progressive lexicon is dismantle. Left-wing activists are often calling to defund this or defund that. Nationalize the corporation; eliminate private health insurance. Recently, I heard a DSA candidate saying that she supported dismantling TSA PreCheck. (Promising longer airport-security lines is an unusual campaign tactic.)
In 2010, a group of progressive writers got together to form a magazine. They called it Jacobin. The choice of name was an unapologetic, in-your-face act of trolling. The original Jacobins were the most radical faction of the French revolutionaries. They supervised the reign of terror and sent roughly 17,000 people to the guillotine (not to mention the tens of thousands more who died by other means).
[Jonathan Chait: There’s nothing Democratic about these socialists]
But at least the battle lines are clear. Every Democrat is going to have to ask themselves: Do I support the moral realism of the mainstream Democrats, with their pragmatic reformist temper, or do I support the progressives, with their utopian belief in human perfectibility and their willingness to concentrate power in order to take aggressive action on behalf of social justice?
I was the kind of kid who had a Hubert Humphrey poster on my bedroom wall (I know, I know), so I’m on team moral realism. I’m a big fan of the virtue of humility and get a little nervous when I run across people who think they are so smart that they can redesign society from the ground up.
When I am listening to the progressive wing, I’m always reminded of a sentence in Richard Weaver’s 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences: “The trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting.” Everything the progressives are proposing has been tried before again and again, with terrible results. Rent control? Tried. Nationalizing industry? Tried. Concentrating power in order to pursue one faction’s idea of justice? Tried.
I get that we’re living in an age of rising authoritarianism, but I was kind of hoping that the Democratic Party would resist the tendency.
The Cold War liberals had opponents on both sides—the McCarthyite right and the Communist left. Fighting a two-front war is bad for an army but good for a political movement. Instead of settling for Manichaean us-versus-them categories, movements beset on both sides need to clearly define their own worldview, their own values, their own set of plans. They have to combine a moderation of the mind with a forcefulness of the will. I figure the mainstream Democrats have until the 2028 primary season to stand up for themselves. If they don’t, America will have two opposing parties that were both hijacked by radical insurgencies. We’ll face an interesting choice between President Ocasio-Cortez and President Vance. For me, that would be a choice between a Democrat whom I find personally admirable but whose policy ideas are old-fashioned and ruinous, and a Republican who—oh, don’t get me started.
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