Meet the New Democratic Left

Britain Has Already Seen This Movie

It was nail-biter election on Tuesday, but the results ultimately came as a loud warning for the Democratic Party and for the country’s liberals.

Several establishment centrists held on to their seat, but many anti-establishment candidates succeeded, although by narrower margins than expected, as in the case of Abdul el-Sayed in Michigan. That is an alarming sign for the Democrats’ chances in November.

This isn’t the first time a mainstream center-left party has faced an insurgency from its left flank. Britain offers a cautionary example.

The Democratic Party is now divided between two clearly delineated camps: an insurgent left making gains and an establishment center scrambling to catch up. Centrists now face the challenge of weeding out the ideological radicalism of the insurgents and responding to the legitimate complaints that have prompted one-third of Democrats to self-identify as democratic socialists, aligning with the radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose ideas do not enjoy widespread support. More about the eye-popping DSA platform in a moment.

Election results suggest that the insurgency is made up primarily of young, educated White voters, along with Arab and Muslim Americans, while the center comprises establishment Democrats, backed by older White, Black and Jewish voters.

DSA, the epicenter of the rebellion, has been allowed to compete in Democratic primaries despite not being a Democratic organization. Like the GOP before it, the party risks being reshaped by a highly motivated activist minority aiming to take the party and the country in a very different direction. The DSA is so far from the Democratic Party that its leaders urged voters not to support Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Why are the leftist insurgents now gaining ground?

The statistician Nate Silver describes DSA members as “highly educated, downwardly mobile” young Americans. The analysis jibes with Jay Caspian King’s description of what he calls “Subaru Socialists”:

“…college-educated millennials in their thirties and early forties who earn a somewhat steady income but not what they expected. These voters arrived at their politics via the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, and the continual escalation of housing prices in urban areas—all of which heightened the contrast between what they were promised when they took on student debt and their current circumstances.”

Then there are the “Great Disappointed”

“Like the Subaru Socialists, these twenty-two-to-thirty-year-olds aren’t exactly happy with the return on their educational investment. But their political views have seemingly coalesced less around the economy than around the war in Gaza, which serves as a character test for any politician who asks for their vote.”

With the American Dream seemingly out of reach, many have joined a radical organization that combines popular progressive ideas such as Medicare for all and free college, supported by traditional non-DSA progressives who sharply reject the new far left, with radical proposals.

The DSA platform envisions a socialist utopia that includes “the end of capitalism,” exhorting followers to imagine that:

“You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.”

To achieve this socialist nirvana, they propose not only heavy taxation of the wealthy, but also having the state take over all the largest corporations. They want to radically change the U.S. system of government, abolishing the Senate, the Supreme Court and even the presidency, and replacing them with an executive and judiciary subordinate to the Congress.

They advocate allowing all U.S. residents to vote. That includes non-citizens. They want to grant amnesty to all immigrants, including not only the undocumented but also immigrants who have committed serious crimes, and they would end “all visa caps and quotas,” meaning anyone could enter the United States.

They also want to shut down the Pentagon, end the Department of Defense and close all U.S. bases overseas. One can only imagine the glee all this would bring to Moscow and Beijing.

Then there’s what for some reason is one of DSA’s most passionate ideas – the one foreign policy issue that fires up their members -- ending all military and economic backing for Israel, and recognizing the so-called “right of return” for Palestinians, an idea that would turn Israel into an Arab country with a Jewish minority.

On Israel they are not only deeply committed, but apparently also stunningly misinformed. In a recent interview, Mirah Wood, an official from DSA’s International Committee, presumably one of their foreign policy experts, described a group that is ruthlessly violent and oppressive of Palestinians this way:

“Hamas fighters, when they are not fighting against Israeli tanks, they are handing out flowers to children. Their fight comes from deep love and tenderness.”

Warm feeling for a terrorist group are hardly the exception, and are clearly not disqualifying. On Oct. 8, 2023, with the bodies still being collected in Israel after Hamas massacred 1200 people and took hundreds hostage, the DSA’s Darializa Avila Chevalier participated in a pro-Palestinian rally. Chevalier went on to win the Democratic primary for Congress.

The DSA’s worldview and agenda have been tested in another democracy not very long ago, with disastrous results.

It’s no coincidence that Jeremy Corbyn, the disgraced former leader of the British Labor Party, sits on DSA’s advisory council.

Corbyn was Britain’s most unpopular opposition leader since 1945, and his party paid the price. Labor suffered “A Defeat of Epic Proportions,” in the 2019 British elections, making room for a landslide victory for the flamboyant Conservative Boris Johnson. It was the worst showing for Labor since 1935.

Under Corbyn’s leadership, with his viscerally anti-Israel positions, the party was accused of antisemitism. The U.K.’s independent Equality and Human Rights Commission investigated and agreed. Corbyn’s reaction to the EHRC report led Labor to suspend him.

For the party as a whole, elevating the far left Corbyn, with his out-of-the-mainstream ideas, was calamitous. Democrats in the U.S. risk a similar fate. After Tuesday’s primaries, Election guru Charlie Cook declared that “Democratic chances of recapturing a Senate majority have effectively evaporated.”

Rising economic inequality and rampant corruption are real and important issues. The Democratic Party is the one best positioned to tackle them, but not if the far left takes the rudder. With Republicans now controlled by its far-right flank, the prospects of Democrats falling into the hands of another out-of-the-mainstream faction would leave most Americans politically homeless and centrist Democrats, along with independents, dismayed at the alternatives.