A Truce Is Still Possible
Factionalists contemplating "war" need to get a grip.
The conservative movement infiltrated the Republican Party, then took it over completely, to establish a beachhead from which to attack (and ideally dismantle) liberal government in the United States.
But for most of its existence the constituent elements of that movement didn’t agree with one another about what made liberal government so intolerable, and, thus, where to focus their energies.
The money behind the movement was largely obsessed with money. Wealthy reactionaries both believed in and financed the production of an ideology that abhorred government regulation and redistribution of income. They hated the income tax and the New Deal. All that money rightfully belonged to them, and they should be able to do what they want with it.
But the popular fixations were traditionalist, xenophobic, and bigoted. America should be a Christian nation, and really a white Christian nation.
These elements fused. But to gain power nationally, their motive commitments had to be euphemized. The New Deal was popular nationally. Civil inequality (eventually) was not. So they campaigned for “small government,” and “liberty”—often the liberty to discriminate—rather than wholesale rejection of the welfare state and civil rights.
The plan basically worked! Except that by the time conservatives became a dominant faction within the GOP, they were overrepresented by the money people—the faction with the least organic public support. Indeed, the conservative movement’s money agenda inhibited its growth, insofar as many Americans with traditionalist or nativist beliefs were reluctant to join a movement committed to running Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and food stamps dry.
Donald Trump brought the movement to full fruition with con-artistry. He emphasized and appealed to the movement’s identitarian commitments, while adopting a populist pose. Republicans still funnel money up to the money people, and they still gut welfare programs. But they found an optimal political balance by switching out euphemisms in favor of outright lies.
The progressive movement is younger, and modeled openly on the conservative movement.
Its goals are obverse: pluralist, rather than nativist; distributionist rather than regressive; secular rather than denominational.
But its approach is familiar: create a fusion of activists with different priorities along with a baseline view that the American government should be radically changed; back candidates committed to that vision, with the goal of claiming control of the Democratic Party entirely.
It is unclear to me whether that objective is attainable. For a long time I would have bet not. We used to refer to the three-legged stool of old-school Republicanism, because it had three constituent elements (traditionalism, national security, big business) but also because this seemed like a stable arrangement. The agenda was uncomplicated, and it had a lot of popular support.
The progressive firmament couldn’t be described in the same terms, at least in its early waves, because stools don’t come with dozens of legs, and the constituencies were often at odds over their priorities: environmentalism or labor revival? Racial equality, or gender equality, or sexual equality, or religious equality? Health care or climate change or immigration reform or… you get the idea. You could ask “why not everything in one fell swoop?” but some of these objectives come into conflict, and in any case there aren’t too many doctrinaire progressives in the electorate who support the whole suite of ideas.
As a left-populist reaction to the second Trump term, though, the picture looks different. Whatever commitments they carry around in their hearts, the new wave of the progressive insurgency has boiled its appeal down to a more manageable range of promises: fight oligarchy, Medicare for All, no aid to Israel. Most of the baggage from the last decade is gone.
“No serious person that I know who is running for office, believes in quote unquote defunding the police [or] doing away with prisons,” Bernie Sanders told the liberal podcast host Jon Favreau, “Open borders? No. Most of us believe in comprehensive immigration reform, not opening up all the borders.”
And, when progressives recruit charismatic candidates and rally around them, those candidates can reliably count on garnering between (say) 35 and 50 percent of the vote in competitive primaries. Not always enough to defeat establishment candidates head-to-head, but usually enough to beat a divided field. Not enough to win general elections everywhere Democrats are competitive, but enough to win in blue territory; possibly purple, too, as Republicans and Trump circle the drain together.
Can this movement displace the Democratic establishment just as the conservative movement displaced the old Republican guard? Maybe. If in victory progressives govern well, they can make converts. If they make converts, they might become viable in larger swaths of the country. But they are also, to some extent, free-riding on widespread discontent with the establishment. Democratic voters did not lurch to the left all of a sudden; but they are furious at their party for adopting an approach to politics that lost two of three elections to Donald Trump. That outrage will likely subside if a charismatic but mainstream Democrat coasts to power in 2028 and manages not to repeat the mistakes of the Trump-Biden era leadership. The new energy on the left would dissipate, and the movement would recede somewhat.
It is also possible that calamity could strike. Abdul el-Sayed, the progressive Senate nominee in Michigan, has both upside and downside potential, but the party quickly united behind him. If everyone else on the Democratic ticket wins in November, but he loses, Democratic voters will be snakebit. Good luck convincing them to take a flyer on another left-wing candidate in swing territory for the foreseeable future.
But either way—between radicalization and cohort replacement—the progressive faction has grown too big for the party to relegate to the fringes. It’s not the aughts, anymore, when the left served up Dennis Kucinich to win one percent of the vote in presidential primaries. Democratic leaders thus face a choice: They can tap out—cede control of the party, making an indirect bet that the left will discredit itself; they can try to find equilibrium with progressives on the basis of non-negotiable shared commitments (to democracy, civil equality, and the rule of law); or they can recommit to crushing the insurgency and re-marginalizing the left.
The second option—the big tent option—is the only palatable one at this point. Moderate and centrist and establishment Democrats seem to be in denial about it.
On Thursday, the centrist organization Third Way announced a $15 million plan to, as the New York Times put it, “discredit democratic socialism.”
“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, told the Times.
What this means is unclear, except that it would “include opposition research into D.S.A., polling, social media programs and educating Democratic activists and leaders. It would target both proud democratic socialists and those such as Dr. El-Sayed, whom [Cowan] derided as performing the ‘D.S.A. dodge’ — flirting with democratic socialists enough to get their organizing manpower and support while remaining distant enough to avoid the explicit label.”
In-party opposition research is standard fare in primaries. It would be extraordinary for a Democratic-aligned organization of any kind to gather opposition research on the party’s nominees. The political equivalent of murder-suicide.
The writer Jonathan Chait, who aligns with the moderate faction, similarly describes what’s needed as “two-front war”—one against Republicans, one against the left.
If establishment Democrats are bent on war—against future contenders, if not their own nominees—the battle plan is vague. What is to be discredited? The policy objectives of the progressive insurgents who’ve successfully infiltrated the party? The organizational branding of “the Democratic Socialists of America”? The illiberal faction within DSA that is hostile even to the kinds of mixed economies that foster the more equal societies of northern and western Europe?
Chait at some level seems to recognize that “war” is the wrong metaphor. The term appears in the headline of his piece, but not the text, which encourages fellow liberals not to leave the party, and instead, “find a way to engage in and win the substantive argument with the left.”
But he offers only two pieces of actionable advice: 1) Better organize the Democratic mainstream to avoid splitting the vote in primaries against a unified left. 2) Concede the issue of U.S. support for Israel to the left. “AIPAC has become a poisoned brand among Democratic voters,” he notes. “Fending off a leftist insurgency will be all but impossible unless Democrats reject AIPAC’s endorsements and stop supporting unconditional aid for an Israel that no longer works toward a two-state solution.”
He frames the latter suggestion as a matter of battle tactics. “Fending off a leftist insurgency…” But what if he and other moderates simply drew back for a moment and recognized what’s really happened here: Events and politics changed, and they now accept that the correct and winning position is to their left.
Sanders, coming from the other direction, similarly disavowed the most radical elements of DSA’s official platform. It is possible to describe these decisions in civil warfare terms—making strategic concessions in search of more advantageous fighting terrain. But to anyone without rigid factional commitments it looks more like everyone went looking for war but found common ground. As though, in the final analysis, total victory for all time doesn’t have to be either faction’s goal. Coalition partnership is possible.
My working model here is the unity task forces Sanders and Joe Biden established after the 2020 primary.
That effort didn’t achieve factional peace for all time, but it did achieve a truce that held for years. It would probably still be operative if Joe Biden had been 67 years old instead of 77 at the time. If he’d been able to defend the successes of his presidency, and win re-election. It fell apart after November 2024, when each faction sought to blame the other for losing to Trump.
In reality, neither faction makes a compelling case, because the party didn’t lose for being too moderate or too progressive. It’s not, as moderates claim, because Biden let too many Elizabeth Warren acolytes into the administration; and it’s not, as Sanders claimed, because the Biden-Harris administration abandoned working people.
The claim that swing voters rejected Bidenomics—defined by the ways Biden was friendlier to labor and more hostile to corporate America than his predecessors—is wildly reductive. It’s also at odds with just about everything moderates believed about politics prior to the early-middle part of this decade, when it was canon that jobs and growth were the key to incumbent electoral success.
Biden delivered both. The macro success of the Biden economy was quite remarkable, and the prosperity was widely shared. Portraying it as a substantive failure makes no sense on the merits; it makes tons of sense as a feint to avoid blame, or to jockey for staffing power in future administrations.
It’s much more parsimonious to argue that Democrats lost because Biden chose to run for re-election. I’d go further and argue that they lost because Biden ran for president in the first place, and the establishment backed him rather than some other candidate who could have credibly served two terms. They lost because, upon winning, they let Trump off the hook for the insurrection and allowed him to reassemble his movement. They lost, arguably, because of Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza—a decision many moderates now concede was a moral and political error.
The good news is that these grounds for defeat are not preclusive of another truce. And by truce I don’t just mean the establishment makes concessions to the left.
Liberals might agree to cut Israel loose, but leftists should be expected to cut loose fringe figures in their movement who can’t find, or intentionally blur, the line between Israel criticism and antisemitism.
Liberals might cede the moral argument about the importance of true universality in health care, and the political vulnerability of patchwork incrementalism, while progressives cede the Sanders Medicare for All plan as written. Abdul el-Sayed has already extended an olive branch: “I’ve been very clear that I want to get to Medicare for All, and I also believe that we’ve got to take a pathway there,” he told the health care writer Jonathan Cohn. “To me, as long as it reduces the power of the health care corporations, expands health care, and does so publicly, I’m for it, and would be glad to work with likeminded partners on that path. I think the mistake is sometimes to say, ‘Okay, we’ve made these changes and therefore we’re good to go. We’re not good to go until we have Medicare for All. But you know on the pathway—the steps along the way—I’ll be working hard with my colleagues to try to get those things done too.”
Democratic leaders could offer a standing spot in the leadership for a social-democratic factional leader, if that faction of entryists stipulates to basic distinctions between, e.g. “Nordic model,” social democracy and illiberal socialism, and agrees to change its literal branding. (This is, on one level, stupid. But it’s also important. “Socialism” is a freighted term in the United States. Demagoguery is frustrating. But we know from dealing with Republicans that it’s most effective when there’s a kernel of truth underneath. Democrats are not crazy to blanch at the idea that they need to attach their already tattered brand to a movement that has chosen a deliberately provocative name.)
Schumer could step down; Democrats could pledge neutrality in open primaries, or establish ground rules for scenarios in which intervention from the establishment is truly necessary.
The difficulty here is that the old truce came together when the party had an undisputed leader. Today it is leaderless. Who’d negotiate it? What does a truce even mean, when the party is running to be the opposition in Congress, rather than a governing party? Won’t it fall apart again when the Democratic presidential primary begins in earnest?
Perhaps; but between now and then, Democrats have to win the 2026 midterms. They can attempt to do so in atomized fashion, with the party’s brand in tatters. Or they can try to find unity ahead of the fall campaign, with a consensus left-moderate agenda for the coming Congress. Something like:
Affordability: Reverse Trump’s cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, and void his tariffs;
End the Iran war;
Zero out aid to Israel;
Fight Trump’s personal corruption;
AI safety;
Campaign-finance reform.
Trump has both a veto pen and the Supreme Court in his pocket. These items would thus mostly serve to embarrass him. But that makes room for creativity. So long as we’re stuck with endless dark money in politics, what about truth-in-advertising legislation that requires fly-by-night organizations to disclose their mission statements and affiliations, as well as their names. If “Think Big PAC” wants to pretend to be opposed to AI, to defeat AI-skeptical candidates, it should be required to disclose, “Think Big PAC, which opposes AI regulation, is responsible for the content of this ad.” If “United Democracy Project” wants to defeat Democratic candidates by attacking their voting records on domestic issues, its ads should come with a disclaimer: “UDP, a project of AIPAC, which promotes U.S. support for Israel, is responsible for the content of this ad.”
A truce like this wouldn’t end vigorous primaries. But it would drain them of their turf-war atmospherics that end in bitterness and make post-primary unity difficult to achieve.
And over time, instead of a uniformly left-wing party, we’ll have a hybrid one, standing as a durable bulwark against authoritarianism—a guardian of the higher values most factionalists already claim to share.
Lots in there, so I'll focus on a minor point.
What is "AI safety," and why leave it so vague? The opposition to AI data centers is overwhelming, and a natural fit for the Democratic party, no? It's anti-corporate and anti-tech bro, and forcing Republicans to defend new data centers would put them in a terrible bind, especially in red states.
So, why not "a moratorium on AI data centers and strong regulation to ensure AI does not destroy jobs or the planet?"
I think this is a good framework, one quibble.
"Liberals might agree to cut Israel loose, but leftists should be expected to cut loose fringe figures in their movement who can’t find, or intentionally blur, the line between Israel criticism and antisemitism."
I'd agree with this broadly, but who specifically are we talking about as fringe? I think the left has a point that a lot of the pearl-clutching of late blurs the same line either obtusely or deliberately to include as "fringe" basically any prominent Israel critic.