The Dems’ Left Turn on Their Establishment
COMMENTARY
By J.T. YoungFebruary 25, 2025
The Dems’ Left Turn on Their Establishment
Frustrated by President Trump, Democrats are again turning on their establishment. However, this time, it’s not just moderates and lower-profile members who must worry. Now, even old-guard warhorses with impeccable liberal credentials must watch their left flanks.
Shock waves recently rolled like a tremor from San Francisco when Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff announced his intention to challenge former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 2026 primary. In announcing his challenge on X, Saikat Chakrabarti said, “Watching Trump and Elon freely unleash chaos in their illegal seizure of government, it’s become clear to me that the Democratic Party needs new leadership.”
AOC’s onetime campaign manager, Chakrabarti is taking a page from their 2018 playbook that took down Rep. Joe Crowley. A solid, 10-term Democratic Party stalwart, Crowley was influential in the Washington establishment, had a seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, and was seen as a possible House speaker.
AOC didn’t care. Despite being heavily outspent, she shocked Crowley and then waltzed to general election victory. Her improbable win introduced “the Squad” to Washington and emboldened the Democrats’ far left.
Pelosi, then Democrats’ undisputed House leader, was savvy enough to ride the wave and turn it on Trump. Now that wave may be turning on Pelosi and her establishment allies.
The old guard’s response has been barely articulate. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posed with an avocado and a Corona at a press conference against Trump’s threatened tariffs on Mexico. Sen Elizabeth Warren regularly attacks any Trump administration proposal. Democratic senators later pulled an all-nighter protesting Russell Vought’s nomination as director of the Office of Management and Budget. With fewer procedural tools at their disposal, the efforts of House Democrats have been even less effective: protests outside USAID, Treasury, and the Department of Labor.
The Democrats’ establishment was already discredited in progressives’ eyes. The old guard forced Joe Biden down their throats as an electable compromise back in 2020 – even though the liberal base much preferred Bernie Sanders. They then kept Biden under wraps to keep him in office once he won. Their lawfare strategy against Trump didn’t work. They stayed with Biden too long, then executed an awkward and public push to remove him. Next, they preempted an open nomination process by coronating Kamala Harris.
In the end, the establishment’s machinations came to naught. Now back, bigger and badder than ever, Trump is like a bull in a china shop and particularly intent on knocking over the left’s crystal – DEI, transgender participation in girls’ sports, lax immigration laws, and increasing the size of government. And he shows no signs of stopping.
Pelosi and the Democratic establishment find themselves stuck. As political pros, they can read polls and election returns; they know Harris lost because of her leftist past and Democrats’ leftist present. From opposite ends of the Democrats’ spectrum, James Carville and Bernie Sanders have said as much.
To win, Democrats need to get their party off the dead-end road they are now on. Even a recent plurality of rank-and-file Democrats agree: According to a recent Gallup poll, “Support for a more moderate Democratic Party among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents has grown by 11 percentage points, to 45%, since 2021.”
But their inability to check their party’s leftward lurch means risking losing more elections – and party members. According to an earlier Gallup poll, 35% of Democrats identify as moderates and 11% as conservatives. To understand the electoral threat, look at 2024’s exit poll: just 31% of voters were Democrats (down from 37% in 2020), losing just their conservatives (11% of Democrats) equates to 3.4% of overall voters – over twice Harris’s 1.6 percentage point popular vote margin of defeat and, which, if shifted to Trump, would have meant a 44.9%-53.2% wipeout.
Yet, as much as Pelosi and the Democratic establishment veterans know this, their hands are tied because 53% of Democrats are liberal, and despite 45% of Democrats wanting the party to become more moderate, 55% do not.
For their part, the antsy members of the Democrats’ leftwing base have nothing to lose. They get to act out their rage. Should these actions have electoral consequences, they will fall on party moderates who hold more precarious seats. So, the left wins either way: If lashing out works, they gain absolutely; if lashing out fails, they gain relatively within the party as moderate members are driven out.
Democrats have been moving left for a long time (in 1994, just 25% of Democrats were liberals). Now, they are threatening a stampede. And it may be the Democrats’ establishment – even those like Nancy Pelosi – who get trampled underfoot.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
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XIII
The Proud Minister
One day there came into the Garden a man in torn clothes badly bruised and cut, who said to the Lover, “In the name of the Beloved I demand your help.”
So the Lover and the Disciple let him in and dressed his wounds and prepared the best of the vegetables from the Garden for him to eat. When his wounds had been dressed and he had eaten and rested the Lover asked him how he had fallen into this plight, to which the man replied, “I was Minister of the Beloved in a city near this place, where I preached His gospel and expounded His doctrine to the people. I pointed out to them how their sins had made them wholly hateful to the Beloved and how therefore they were utterly beyond the range of His love and He would condemn them to eternal torments, whereon some fell into despair and wept bitterly but many were angry. One day the magistrates called me before them and begged me to leave the city and preach elsewhere for they said I had made many people so angry and desperate that they feared there might be a riot and they might not be able to protect me but that I might suffer some injury. I, however, very zealous for the Beloved and believing that the magistrates only feared that their own sins might be proclaimed, preached the more vehemently, denounced the magistrates and made it abundantly clear that the whole wicked city was foredoomed to eternal punishment by the just provision of the Beloved. Whereon a mob, stirred up no doubt by the corrupt and venal magistrates, fell upon me with sticks and stones, nearly killing me and driving me out of the city in the state in which I came to you.”
“My friend,” said the Lover, “this was not a good deed of yours, for besides denying the unfathomable compassion of the Beloved, you have by your obstinacy caused these people to commit a grievous sin, and this cannot be pleasing to the Beloved, that through you who profess to be His minister the people should become worse. Surely you remember that He Himself said, ‘If they persecute you in one city flee to another.’”
Therefore the man was very angry, and cursing the Lover, said, “I see that I have had a very false report of you and I do not believe that you are a servant of the Beloved at all. When I came to you so injured for the Beloved’s sake you set before me only herbs and fruits although the garden is full of birds which you could have killed to make me a worthy meal. I shall proclaim everywhere that you are no true servant of the Beloved but a mere falterer who dares not suffer in the cause of the Beloved. Be sure that you are foreordained to eternal torments who suffer nothing here.”
For the man was so blinded by his own pride that he could not perceive the scars on the hands and feet and the brows of the Lover nor how the cloth beneath the armpits of his tunic was dyed with a red dye. So he went out of the Garden cursing and shouting.
But the Lover looked sad and said, “A man like this does much harm to the cause of the Beloved, for by thus speaking falsely about the Beloved he may bring men to fear Him but none to love Him, and by love alone can any man approach the Beloved.”
