Turn on the television and every Democratic talking head wants to tell you how big their tent is. I spent 30 years pricing risk for a living. You learn fast that the riskiest positions are the ones nobody bothers to price because everyone assumes the status quo holds. That is the mistake Republicans risk making with the modern Democratic Party. We keep laughing at the circus tent instead of reading the room, and that tent has three rings: socialists, communists, and progressives insisting they are the reasonable middle.
Read more Drones Won’t Win Wars, But they are Dangerous and Have Changed Warfare
Start with why the tent needed a new act. Four years of Biden and Harris left the party’s own voters hungry for something that resembled competence. The border remained open long enough to produce record illegal crossings before enforcement tightened. A president who insisted his memory was fine was later found by his own Justice Department’s special counsel to have willfully retained classified material, but was spared prosecution partly because jurors might see a sympathetic elderly man with a poor memory. Biden closed out his term by issuing preemptive pardons to family members and several loyal allies, including Hunter Biden and Fauci, before anyone had filed charges. Hunter’s federal gun conviction was already on the books. Fauci’s pardon shielded him from accusations that never got their day in court, and newly released records explain why he needed one. Texts show him privately warning the CDC director and Surgeon General in January 2021 that a vaccine dose could theoretically trigger first-trimester miscarriage, then telling the public there was no indication of increased risk. Emails from that year show him telling Francis Collins and other colleagues to delete the message after reading. Under oath in 2024, he told Congress he had never deleted an official record. That reads less like a governing philosophy and more like a party hoping nobody would check its math, needing a rebrand badly enough to let the loudest clowns run the show.
In July, the Democratic Socialists of America released their new platform called Workers Deserve More: abolish the Senate, scrap the Electoral College, and replace the presidency and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by, and subordinate to, Congress, alongside public ownership of the largest corporations, aggressive wealth taxes, a jobs guarantee, defunding the Pentagon, and abolishing ICE with a path to citizenship for those here illegally. This is the largest socialist organization in the country, running on real field infrastructure rather than a handful of kids venting on a group chat, and it has been winning.
Ask Diana DeGette. The 15-term Colorado congresswoman got run out of her Denver primary by a DSA-backed candidate. Ask Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens for the Senate. Ask New York City, which has a democratic socialist mayor in Zohran Mamdani, opening city-run grocery stores and doxxing homeowners while free buses stall. And ask Florida, where state Rep. Angie Nixon just became the first DSA member ever to win a major-party Senate nomination, beating a well-funded impeachment veteran, the same Senate her platform wants abolished. This is the party’s energetic wing.
I watched a similar dynamic decades ago, working Republican campaigns in Los Angeles in the 1992 elections. Party infrastructure gets built by whoever shows up to do the hard work. Nobody in leadership notices who is holding the machinery until someone tries to take it back and finds the locks changed. A recent national DSA gathering featured members in red shirts wearing the group’s rose insignia, a bookseller whose copies of The Communist Manifesto sold out by evening. Members reportedly shrugged off comparisons to French revolutionaries as harmless, arguing that their wins prove voters are moving toward them.
Here is the part my industry understands better than most: capital follows control, not branding. The people doing the party’s actual work, knocking on doors, running phone banks, and staffing field offices increasingly answer to DSA chapters, not the DNC. A consultant class can keep cutting ads calling itself the sensible center, but sensible centers do not win primaries when the volunteer army and the money belong to somebody else. One Democratic strategy group is reportedly spending $15 million beating back the socialists, a landlord discovering a tenant changed the locks.
Read more Why Higher Education Is Likely Doomed
The establishment’s counter is to insist this is fringe and will burn out before November. I would love to believe that, and to be fair, not every DSA-aligned or progressive candidate signs on to the entire platform. Reporting this month shows internal disagreement among democratic socialists over how far to push abolishing police and prisons or how loudly to talk about a state-run business. Some just want cheaper insulin and better transit, the third ring, hoping the harder left settles down. They will be disappointed. Primaries get decided by whoever shows up, and the people showing up wear red while the median voter worried about property taxes stays home.
I have kept reading Scalia and Madison since taking constitutional law as an undergraduate, where I found the framers more interesting than most classmates did. Federalist No. 10 exists because Madison assumed factions were permanent and dangerous, and he built a structure with enough friction, an upper chamber, an independent executive, and a court answering to neither to keep any faction from running the table. The DSA platform dismantles that structure rather than tinkering with it. Abolish the Senate, fold the presidency and courts into Congress, and you have a parliamentary system with no brakes, run by whichever coalition holds the House. Thatcher had the line on the economics: eventually you run out of other people’s money. Madison had the line for politics: you run out of checks on the majority in charge.
To be sure, not every ringmaster in that tent wants the same finale. Socialists want public ownership through the ballot box. Communist currents that helped found the DSA decades ago want the ballot box replaced. Progressives mostly want to be left alone to talk about abortion and boys in girls’ sports. Congressional Democrats’ own job approval sits at 18 percent in the most recent Quinnipiac survey, the lowest reading in that poll’s history, a party watching its base grab the wheel while the front office pretends it is still driving. The establishment markets itself as the sensible alternative to a divided GOP while its fastest-growing faction circulates a document that would have startled Wilson. Both are true at once; pretending otherwise amounts to a mispriced bond nobody wants to mark down before the quarter ends.
Here is my recommendation, and it costs nothing but attention. Every Democrat running for Congress this November should be asked, on the record, whether they endorse abolishing the Senate, the Electoral College, and an independent Supreme Court, since that is the platform of the fastest-growing force inside their own party. Some will say no. Good, hold them to it after they win. Most will dodge, since dodging is the oldest trick in their tent. Voters do not owe any party the benefit of the doubt on the separation of powers. The big top has three rings now—socialism, communism in all but name, and progressives caught in between—and the show has moved to the main ring, auditioning for the country.
Read more California Democrats Embrace Failure–What Can Republicans Do?
