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To most Americans, the big problem with the Democratic Party is that it has moved too far left in recent years. If you’re among those who believe that, brace yourself.
The worst is yet to come.
A serious push is underway to move the party even further away from the political center, embrace economic plans close to pure socialism and launch radical woke culture battles.
It sounds like a bad joke, but it’s really happening. And it’s a movement that goes beyond the socialist fever dreams of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Although some of the push is a reaction to Donald Trump’s election in November and his embrace of America First policies, the fury reflects more than just Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Consider the lead sentence in a recent fundraising email.
“Democratic voters want a more progressive party,” began a pitch from a far-left group called Justice Democrats.
To my surprise, a legitimate national poll supports the claim, and others hint at the same trend.
Survey USA, in a poll taken earlier this month, found that 50% of Dems said they want the party to “become more progressive,” 24% said it should “stay the same” and just 18% said “become more moderate.”
Lowest approval rating
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the findings, but can only wonder how much further left Dems can go before they fall off the face of the Earth.
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and their angry fellow travelers apparently aim to find out.
Their big, boisterous rallies are all about tearing down what Sanders calls “ubercapitalism,” but history and current events show that socialism always adds to human misery.
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Perhaps the left’s new power couple should go on a fact-finding trip to Cuba and Venezuela to see for themselves.
Or they could ask the 12 million illegal immigrants Joe Biden let in why they risked life and limb to get here if America is such a terrible, rotten place to live and work.
One thing the radicals can’t deny is that the Dem party that voters soundly rejected last November has its lowest national approval rating ever at under 30%.
Most of that dismal view is because it’s widely seen as too far left already.
The reasons are obvious: The party is largely anti-police and pro-criminal, it’s riddled with antisemitism and some congressional members are foolishly fixated on defending gang members who came to America as part of the illegal migration wave.
In addition, party leaders never met a tax hike they didn’t embrace and made Elon Musk Public Enemy No. 1 for daring to try to cut fraud and waste from the bloated, debt-riddled federal budget.
Dems, elite universities and a web of NGOs fattened on taxpayer money are reacting as if the world would end if even a penny were cut.
These and similar positions put the party well outside the American mainstream, so what would it mean to be even more progressive?
And where are the voters who are willing to support such madness? They’re certainly not among those common sense Americans fleeing high-tax, crime-infested blue states.
The answers about finding new voters are vague by necessity. As the Justice Democrats insist in their email pitch, “Too many Democratic leaders keep chasing the center, running Republican-lite campaigns that don’t reflect the values of the people who put them in office.”
Younger, more radical
So moderation is the enemy and no self-respecting Dem should be caught anywhere near the center of the political spectrum? Got it.
Except Biden and Kamala Harris had the most far-left administration in the modern era, and the results were disastrous for the nation — and the party.
Yet the desire to drink more of the same Kool-Aid is especially prevalent among young Dems.
The Harvard Youth Poll released last week shows that of the 18- to 29-year-olds who voted for Harris last November, only 23% approve of what congressional Dems are doing.
This, too, is divorced from reality. Dems in Congress have opposed virtually everything Trump has proposed, including his Cabinet nominees.
Most wouldn’t even stand when Trump, speaking to a joint session of Congress, saluted families who lost loved ones to migrant murderers. Nor were they moved by a 13-year-old boy with cancer the president honored.
The only time Dems have compromised this year was when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine other Dems voted to keep the government open instead of killing a GOP spending bill that would have shut down the government.
Schumer was right when he said Dems would be blamed for the shutdown, but the left is so eager for a fight that it wanted him to burn it all down.
For his trouble, Schumer has been targeted by his party, with calls for AOC to challenge him in a primary.
That wouldn’t be until 2028, but the idea of using primary battles to remake the party younger and more radical is now out in the open.
A prime antagonist is David Hogg, the 25-year-old anti-gun activist who was recently named a vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee.
The move aimed to show young voters the party was open to their generation and ideas, but it immediately backfired in spectacular fashion.
Hogg said he would start a multimillion-dollar fund to challenge “asleep-at-the-wheel” incumbents in primaries.
Jeopardizing victory
His pledge rattled the old guard, which aims to expand its members, not trade trusted old ones for radical new ones.
“No DNC officer should ever attempt to influence the outcome of a primary election, whether on behalf of an incumbent or a challenger,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a call with reporters. “Voters should decide who our primary nominees are, not DNC leadership.”
Although Trump and congressional Republicans are the targets, the Dems determination to marginalize themselves isn’t necessarily good for the country as a whole.
The two-party system works best when the competition is over voters who are slightly to the right or left of center. The need to attract these swing voters has a moderating influence on the government as a whole.
Presidents temper their agenda so that voting for it doesn’t cost their members their seats, especially in the House, where control has been shifting in recent years.
Trump lost the House two years after the GOP swept the 2016 election, and Biden lost it in the 2022 midterms.
From that point on, most of their domestic agendas were dead.
The pattern shows that voters punish presidents and parties that are seen as straying too far from the middle.
The oddity now is that Trump’s poll numbers are slipping and with the GOP holding the narrowest possible House majority, control could easily shift next year.
All of which makes the Dems’ behavior so bizarre. Most are willing to jeopardize their chances of victory in favor of moving further to the left.
Good luck with that.
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