Liberals Are Now Fighting a Two-Front War - The Atlantic

Listen−1.0x+<br>Seek<br>0:009:27

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.<br>When left-wing insurgents defeated a trio of progressive House members in New York, the House Democratic leadership suffered merely an embarrassment. Last night’s primary election in Michigan, by comparison, is an outright catastrophe for the party’s leaders. The Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, who defeated the four-term Representative Haley Stevens, has attacked the party as corrupt, offends some of its heretofore-cherished principles, and is currently trailing the Republican candidate in a race to hold a Democratic seat that ought to have been safe this year.<br>Parties generally follow bitter primaries with talk of coming together and moving forward. But the center-left liberals who have run the Democratic Party for decades need to be honest with themselves: They just suffered a crushing blow, and more will come unless they quickly absorb bracing lessons from this debacle.<br>Read: The anti-Democrat<br>Some of the fixes are obvious. AIPAC has become a poisoned brand among Democratic voters. 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. Democrats also have to stop passively allowing multiple candidates to split the mainstream vote while the leftist vote consolidates behind a single candidate, as occurred in Michigan’s Seventh District and the Wisconsin governor’s race.<br>But the greatest challenge for mainstream liberals is to find a way to engage in and win the substantive argument with the left. This is inherently difficult, because within any political party, the extreme faction can appeal to ideological purity without concern for the opinions of voters outside the party. Democratic socialism, for instance, is unpopular with the American public as a whole, yet it wins the approval of three-quarters of Democrats. As a result, Democratic Party moderates who have good reason to oppose socialism have a hard time convincing partisans who show up to vote in primaries to feel the same way.<br>A similar dynamic has played out in Republican primaries for years on end. Conservatives have lost winnable Senate races because hard-right candidates such as Herschel Walker, Kari Lake, and Todd Akin won their primaries by emphasizing positions that appealed to most of their party’s voters but repelled a majority of the electorate. Political consultants use the term wedge issues for positions that separate a candidate’s views from those of a majority of voters. But in primaries, the wedge can work the opposite way: It can discredit a broadly popular stance in favor of a narrowly base-pleasing one. El-Sayed does not endorse socialism, but he does support abolishing ICE, providing health insurance for undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, and making private health insurance “redundant and unnecessary.”<br>Policy is only part of the disagreement between the factions. Left-wing insurgents have won support less by appealing to ideological disagreements within their party and more by expressing a broad frustration with its failures.<br>The Democratic Party establishment lost credibility by standing behind a wan, ineffective president who failed in his fundamental goal of burying Trumpism. Democratic voters, writes the former Barack Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer, “just don’t trust Democratic politicians to tell them who can really win. This is a very understandable impulse after 2024 and every Democratic leader backing Biden when he clearly shouldn’t have run.”<br>What makes the Democratic revolt so perverse, however, is that the party’s left provided Joe Biden with his longest-lasting and most enthusiastic base of support. Biden gave progressives a free hand to shape his domestic policies. Elizabeth Warren had more influence than anybody, perhaps even Biden himself, over the administration’s personnel. And even after Biden’s catastrophic debate performance laid bare his unfitness to run for a second term, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood behind his candidacy. It was the dread party establishment, including Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, that was trying to push Biden out of the race, while Ocasio-Cortez was attacking the efforts to replace Biden as a putsch by “a bunch of rich people.” Amazingly, however, the left has turned this history on its head. The establishment now bears the brunt of Biden’s failure, whereas the left positions itself as an untried alternative.<br>And the deeper you wade into the left’s view of the Democratic Party and its legacy, the more bizarre and counterfactual that belief system becomes. Left-wing activists and intellectuals have settled on a historical account that blames the Democratic Party for everything that has gone wrong in America, including Donald Trump’s...