LizaM

Mainstream Democrats who are not themselves comfortable seeing their party taken over by a communist-adjacent, Islamist-sympathetic fringe that harbors genuine disdain for the entire American project are in an increasingly difficult spot. That fringe is ascendant despite its electoral liabilities. Radical Senate candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, Peggy Flanagan, and Troy Jackson are on pace to substantially underperform the more mainstream Democrats running for governor in their respective states. Hell, Josh Shapiro looks poised to dominate his gubernatorial reelection contest in arguably the country’s single most consequential swing state, but barely figures in the conversation about the party’s future. There are two pathways before these mainstream Democrats. The Lis Smith wing, to its credit, sees the writing on the wall. They understand that even though moderates like Haley Stevens perform vastly better in general elections, that doesn’t much matter to the far-left activists and staffers who increasingly control Democratic politics. Their answer is to find politicians who can triangulate their way out of the problem. Chuck Schumer is too old, too associated with the old party, too tied to Israel. But leave it to us. We know how to talk to these people. We can control the beast. Today, the pound of flesh the activists demand is embracing anti-Israelism in its purest, most unadulterated form: issuing calls for the nation's destruction and excusing the barbaric violence of Islamist terrorists who seek to accomplish it. Before that, it was anti-white racism, the cult of transgenderism, and unworkable climate maximalism. The trendiness of any given ludicrous demand changes. We'll likely have a new one by the time 2028's presidential contest kicks into high gear. But the far left's expectation of submission does not waver. The Smith types think they can borrow from the DSA playbook and manage this. Remember the two goofball casting director types who recruited Mr. Nazi Tattoo Graham Platner, the rich prep school graduate packaged as an “oyster farmer,” because he looked the part? Mainstream Democratic consultants believe they have a good counter to this: find worldview-flexible empty vessels like Mallory McMorrow who can rhetorically triangulate their way into any position during an MS NOW hit and are capable of making a TikTok. Give the activists enough of what they want, reassure everyone else, and trust that the professionals can keep the whole thing under control. Good luck with that, I guess. The other pathway is the one Haley Stevens took: look the anti-American nihilism and blatant antisemitism of Third Worldists like Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker in the eye and eventually say, “Sorry, but enough is enough.” America did not deserve 9/11. An attack on a synagogue preschool in Michigan is not justified by a conflict on the other side of the globe. We should not replace the sensible center-left politics of the black church with the lunatic extremist politics of the campus encampment. But take that route, and they’ll do to you what they’re doing to Stevens: suggest you are mentally ill, an emotionally unstable woman being controlled by your Jewish handlers. That reaction tells you something about the limits of the Smith strategy. This is not a triangulation problem. It is an honesty problem. You cannot indefinitely finesse fundamental disagreements about whether America is a country worth preserving or a malevolent force whose enemies deserve our sympathy. And you cannot assume that yesterday’s party coalitions will survive those disagreements. Tucker Carlson endorsed Abdul El-Sayed. Haley Stevens endorsed Mike Rogers. We are in a period of rapid political realignment, and those crosscurrents tell us far more than another consultant’s plan to repackage the same radicalism with a more appealing messenger. The dividing line increasingly runs between deranged, conspiratorial, anti-American radicalism and competent, mainstream, patriotic normalcy. The fringes are looking to consume the center, and the old right-versus-left framework is increasingly inadequate to explain it. There is a fundamental difference between people who love this country, want to steadily improve it, and reasonably disagree about policy choices on how to do so, and people who hate what it stands for and regard it as a blight on the rest of the world. Mainstream Democrats need to be truthful about which of those forces is gaining ground in their party. Stevens’s response is more effective because it makes that distinction explicit—and demonstrates that there is a point beyond which party loyalty cannot reasonably be demanded. Plenty of Republicans reached that point during the Trump era. Woke 1 was about treating blackness as an unimpeachable good and whiteness as an inherent evil. Woke 2, which we are now in the midst of, is about treating Islamism as an unimpeachable good and America as an inherent evil. The idea that a clever enough consultant can tame this ought to strike more people as wildly implausible.