Are the Democrats going to save us this time?
And if not, what do we do?
Some people thought Donald Trump’s approval rating would have a floor around 40%. Well, it didn’t:
The nation’s disapprobation is richly deserved. I hardly need to go through the familiar litany of why Trump is bad — the failed war in Iran, the ridiculous tariffs, the destruction of America’s alliances and prestige, the attack on American science, the rampages of ICE, the unprecedented corruption, the authoritarianism, the election denial, the appeasement of Russia, etc. I guess I just did go through it, though. It feels a little cathartic to type it out once again.
If you think the GOP will return to being the party of Mitt Romney, John McCain, or Ronald Reagan after Trump is gone, think again. MAGA is already morphing from a personality cult into an ideology — a deeply xenophobic, economically retrograde ideology obsessed with expelling immigrants, and convinced that wealth has made the West immoral and weak. The party’s lower ranks are already filling up with unabashed fascists, Hitler apologists, and all sorts of scary people:
GOP veterans fret about the rising generation of young staffers in their party…Of specific concern are those labeled groypers — technically, followers of the self-described “White Identitarian” Gen Z streamer Nick Fuentes, though it’s also used as a catch-all term of abuse for young, anti-establishment right-wingers…
Prominent conservative commentators have alleged that groyperism is spreading among younger members of the GOP, including in government — a view seemingly backed by examples like the young Trump administration lawyer who admitted to a “Nazi streak” in text messages…The anxiety over groyperism in the GOP talent pool corresponds to a rise in antisemitism across the political spectrum, including among young conservatives…A Manhattan Institute poll found that a full 25 percent of Republicans under 50 self-identified as having antisemitic views, and 31 percent as holding racist ones…
[T]he troubling anecdotes are legion: gas chamber jokes and ethnic slurs bandied about on Young Republican group chats leaked to POLITICO last fall; a New York Magazine report from just last week linking a former New York Young Republican treasurer to a social media account denigrating Jews, Black people, Muslims and gay people; a House campaign adviser fired for mocking a rape victim on X; the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign staffer axed for retweeting a video featuring a Nazi image, only to join the office of Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and, eventually, the State Department, where he works today.
Meanwhile, at the top of the party, election denial has become a litmus test — a profession of faith for the bizarre Trump cult. The number of Republicans who will declare in public, in no uncertain terms, that the 2020 election was legitimate is now negligible. And being a vocal election denier is a fast track to prominence in the modern GOP — witness Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for the governorship of Wisconsin.
I see no reason to expect anything good from the modern GOP. When good ideas do make their way into Republican policy, it’s generally by heroic pragmatists quietly working within the system. But those small victories are becoming smaller and less frequent, as MAGA’s obsession with waging political warfare against its near-infinite roster of enemies muscles out any concern for the good of the nation as a whole. Americans are fed up with this, and they are very right to be fed up.
The Republicans have never been this bad before. But in the past, when they got bad, the solution was always pretty simple: Vote for the Democrats. Democracy isn’t perfect, but it does have a natural release valve; you can always just “throw the bums out.” And that’s exactly what we used to do. In 2006, 2008, 2018, and 2020, we grew disgusted with the GOP’s antics and elected Democrats to replace them.
I think if you look at those episodes, you can see a pattern of diminishing returns. Obama was a broadly successful president on domestic policy — he implemented broadly successful anti-recessionary macroeconomic policies, reformed health care and finance, and beefed up the welfare state. Biden gave us the return of industrial policy, but his fiscal profligacy — often squandered on things like student debt forgiveness and subsidies for already-overpriced service industries — contributed to inflation and did nothing to rein in the ballooning debt. On social issues, Obama was a moderate who tried and failed to curb his party’s drift to the left; Biden didn’t even try, running as a moderate but letting “woke” subordinates implement a lot of unpopular culture-war stuff.
Now it’s 2026, and the Republican regime in power is far worse than its predecessors in either the 2000s or the 2010s. Once again, we have the option of electing Democrats. And we should elect Democrats, this November. There is no ambiguity here; a Congress that challenges Trump’s lawlessness, investigates his unbridled corruption, and takes a more forceful stand in favor of Ukraine will be unambiguously better than the supine GOP Congress that can do nothing except worship at the man’s feet.
But at the same time, looking at the way the Democratic Party is headed, I think we should be asking how much better things will be under Democrats, including if they win the White House in 2028.
Let’s look at the type of candidates who are winning Democratic primaries. Francesca Hong, a DSA member who is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, tweeted in 2020 that we should “cancel Thanksgiving”. When asked in a recent interview if she had recanted that position, Hong refused, talking about how Thanksgiving was “incredibly painful” for many people:
As if that weren’t tone-deaf enough, she appeared to criticize herself for marrying a white man (saying “assimilation…took over”), and talked about having a half-white son as “proximity to whiteness”:
Hong backtracked a couple of days later, declaring that Thanksgiving is her “favorite holiday”, but the damage appears to have been done — Bernie Sanders said he didn’t think he would endorse her, and prediction markets immediately began to discount Hong’s chances of beating her Republican opponent in the fall:
Some had hoped that the Democrats’ socialist faction would be able to escape some of the baggage of “woke 1”, because of their focus on class politics, and because the Palestine issue might be able to muscle aside a whole bunch of unpopular 2010s-era culture-war stances. But Hong shows that this hope will be in vain; the DSA types are the wokest of the woke. A number of leftists, such as Bernie Sanders’ former campaign press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, doubled down on Hong’s anti-Thanksgiving stance:
Meanwhile, a number of progressive commentators, like Mehdi Hasan, castigated moderates for suggesting that Hong might not be worth voting for, pointing out that Hong’s opponent is an election denier:
This demonstrates exactly what I mean when I say that Democrats have spent their political capital moving to the left. Trump’s vast number of mistakes and outrages have alienated much of the country. Democrats could have used this alienation and outrage to become a long-term majority party, and relegate Republicans to the political wilderness — a just and fitting punishment for falling in line behind a man like Trump.
Instead, what they’re apparently choosing to do is to select candidates who are so far to the left that they end up frightening and/or offending many voters, and then basically daring people to keep voting for the Republicans. Sure, she wants to cancel Thanksgiving, but you wouldn’t vote for a fascist election denier, would you? And so on. The median voter is pulled back into a state of disgusted ambivalence between two extremes, and people like Mehdi Hasan get to take the Democrats in their preferred direction.
When DSA-type candidates were just winning in deep blue cities, it was possible to think that they would remain a small, limited faction within the party. But Francesca Hong is the Democratic nominee in a statewide race. So is Abdul El-Sayed, who, while not a member of the DSA, is closely aligned with them (especially on Israel, which he focuses on a lot). El-Sayed just won his primary for the Michigan Senate race, but a closer-than-expected election, with very little working-class support, shows how his selection represents an expenditure of Democrats’ political capital.
This, increasingly, is who the Democrats are now. It’s doubtful that a leftist candidate will win the presidential nomination in 2028, but — just as Biden made concessions to Bernie Sanders supporters on student debt relief and other issues — whoever does get the nod two years from now is likely to let the ascendant DSA faction set a lot of policy priorities.
Meanwhile, the commentators promoting the DSA’s cause continue to breathe fire. Hasan Piker, who is emerging as a key kingmaker within the rising leftist movement, called El-Sayed’s Democratic critics “Islamophobic pieces of shit” (El-Sayed also accused his critics of Islamophobia).1
Compared to some other DSA types, though, Piker can seem downright moderate. Strident anti-American rhetoric is now standard among that faction:
And there are even less savory attitudes lurking in DSA-aligned activist spaces. Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American writer and activist, repeated Nazi accusations that Jews stabbed Germany in the back in World War I:
The leftist magazine Current Affairs, meanwhile, recently published an article claiming that electronic dance music is a tool for ignoring genocide and upholding the “neoliberal order”.
It’s easy to dismiss this stuff as fringe radicalism that will never make itself to the mainstream of the party, but — as with “groypers” on the right — that increasingly feels like cope. Francesca Hong demonstrates that anti-American ideas have become fully mainstreamed and accepted within the Democratic Party; not everyone holds these beliefs, of course, but those who do hold them are firmly under the party’s big tent, and will be given some degree of influence over policy.
A Democratic party in which leftists wield significant power will not be the Democratic Party of 2020 or 2008. It will be something else. Research shows that leftists are not liberals — they have their own distinct ideology.
That ideology is not necessarily the antidote to MAGA. Yes, if DSA types held national power, things would be different. The disastrous Iran war would end, which would be a good thing. But on foreign policy in general, a faction that sees America as an evil empire seems unlikely to restore the liberal alliance system that Trump has thrown in the trashcan. Recall that the DSA blamed the United States and NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and called for withdrawal from NATO.
On economic policy, too, a DSA administration might look more Trumpian than we might hope. DSA types say they’re now in favor of free trade (thanks to negative polarization against Trump’s tariffs), but the impulse to protect American labor and exercise more command and control over the economy would probably prove irresistible. As for the national debt — the country’s biggest looming economic threat — I just don’t see the DSA as being the balanced-budget types. Remember that Francesca Hong wants to cut property taxes by 44%.
And where the DSA would break from Trumponomics, it wouldn’t always be to the good. Trump has hurt the economy in some ways, but he has always been very careful not to mess with the AI buildout — the force that’s keeping the economy afloat. The DSA, however — like many progressive Democrats — wants to halt data center construction. This, of course, would remove the U.S. economy’s biggest tailwind.
I still think the choice of which party to vote for in 2026 and 2028 is unambiguous. Trump has been too bad, in too many ways, to think that he and his movement are the lesser of two evils. But to the degree that the DSA’s increasingly frequent electoral victories translate into real power in the next Democratic administration, it seems like we have less to hope for from the Dems now than in times past. If the U.S. is going to turn its problems around, “throw the bums out” is no longer enough.
In fact, this kind of accusation isn’t uncommon in the Democratic Party these days. One of Francesca Hong’s primary opponents claimed that her labeling of him as an “establishment” figure was racist.
This all seems a little bit social-media brained. You're essentially comparing the worst Democratic candidate in the cycle against the president of the United States. Why? Just because Hong gets talked about on X doesn't mean she's suddenly a leader of the Democratic party or a major influential figure.
Hong is very obviously an outlier in her crazy, and if you picked Democratic state candidates at random they wouldn't be like her. Ridiculous characters like Hong get the most attention on social media because they're the craziest of the crazy and people like to obsess over them. Most DSA candidates haven't been as crazy as Hong (Mamdani being the obvious positive example), and most Democratic candidates aren't part of the DSA. The actual leaders and presidential hopefuls of the near-term Democratic party aren't Hong or El-Sayed or Piker, but Ossoff and Buttigieg and Newsom and AOC. Whatever you might say about those people, none of them seem interested in cancelling Thanksgiving or declaring America a settler-colonialist state. Why is Francesca Hong the person the Democrats "just are now", but Ossoff and Buttigieg aren't?
The actual Democratic party has put on an overall good show running a bunch of fairly moderate candidates across some pretty difficult districts this cycle. Meanwhile, DSA's El-Sayed (a much more skilled and charismatic politician than his primary opponent) barely scraped through his primary in a blueish state, in a cycle when liberal voters are desperate for any kind of change and are trying a lot of different things. DSA is also being electorally bolstered by the Israel issue, the one place where most of the public agrees with them. The more liberals find an actual message on Israel (and for gods sake stop taking the AIPAC money), the less that's going to work.
This is the supposed leftist takeover? I just don't see it yet. Crazy factions of the left have always existed on the fringes, and the Francesca Hongs of the world seem far less powerful and ascendent than they did in 2014. DSA candidates are electoral underperformers so far. Why should we believe they'll suddenly take over now?
The "our communities" language was more painful than the anti-Thanksgiving stuff because that was half of my Twitter feed back in the day. Some people would use the day specifically to promote indigenous creators, digital and otherwise.