This is the final installment of a two-part series. The first installment can be found here.
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Like Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), America’s center-left Democrat Party faces a challenge from its extreme flank.
Unlike the CDU, which has abandoned its past strategy and adopted one of confrontation, the Democrat Party is sticking with its strategy of co-option—not fusion—with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
But will the Democrat Party’s strategy prove any more successful in staving off its possible extinction than the CDU’s?
Presently, the Democrat Party has a ringside seat at the continuing struggle between the GOP establishment and President Trump and his MAGA movement, which constitutes a halting attempt at fusion. This occurs when the party establishment and its insurgents, be they internal or external, join together to defeat a common enemy or promote a common position. The fusion can be an ephemeral alliance of convenience or a more lasting union between the two factions, wherein each accepts the ground rules for mutual coexistence going forward.
In co-option, however, one faction, usually the larger party, remains dominant, and on its own terms entices into it the nascent party of the ideological insurgents. Such a political union is to be enduring and often entails buying off the leadership of the insurgents and, for the less venal among them, agreeing to champion some of the now former insurgents’ policy goals.
For example, consider the GOP establishment’s co-option strategy toward the Tea Party. The GOP was able to successfully integrate large swaths of the Tea Party movement’s agenda and supporters into its ranks (indeed, at the zenith of the Tea Party, the GOP nominated Mitt Romney as its standard-bearer with nary a peep from these activists).
Alternatively, having lost in its initial confrontational stance toward Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, early in the administration the GOP establishment unsuccessfully sought to co-opt the new president and his movement. When this proved equally unsuccessful, what has transpired is a mutual attempt at a hostile fusion between the two movements, each disdaining the very name of the other political faction and loath to apply it to themselves. Indeed, at present the state of the GOP and MAGA’s fusion efforts is more akin to a defense against a hostile takeover.
This is what the Democrat Party establishment and rank and file seek to avoid.
The Democrat Party is challenged by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), “the enemy within.” DSA candidates contest and win Democrat Party primaries. This is due to America’s “two-party system,” which only affords the practical, if however improbable, opportunity for a new “party” to take over an existing party from within rather than from without.
Consequently, the insurgent wing of the party utilizes a strategy of initial grassroots subversion to infiltrate and capture the rank-and-file membership and, ultimately, usurp the old party’s leadership. The choice facing the Democrat establishment, then, is to either oppose the DSA by endeavoring to dry up its money and defeat its candidates in Democrat primaries or to try to co-opt the DSA’s agenda and candidates, especially the successful ones, prior to, during, or after an election.
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Having long sought to put a moderate veneer on its extreme agenda, the Democrats are determined to prevent the DSA and its radical leftist insurgents from capturing and becoming the public face of their party. This, as the party did in 2020. To defeat their despised President Trump, the Democrat Party engaged in an uneasy fusion with Bernie Sanders progressives to elect Joe Biden. Succinctly, the candidate was the moderate public face who served as the Trojan horse containing the progressives’ radical agenda.
Now, in the 2026 midterms, the Democrats are again opposed by President Trump and his GOP Congressional majority. And, once more, President Trump and his “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement serve an unwittingly conciliatory purpose between the Democrat Party and the DSA.
In this latest marriage of connivance, after numerous failed attempts at confrontation during the primary season, the Democrat Party’s leadership has embraced DSA candidates who have won their primaries for two reasons.
First, the obvious, overriding need to defeat President Trump, the GOP, and MAGA.
Secondly, to continue their stealth strategy of co-opting DSA members by incorporating them and some of their less electorally noxious policies into the Democrat Party.
The danger for the Democrat Party? A strategy of co-option can be the path of least resistance and, in the short term, provide measures of electoral success. But deliberately hosting such ideological extremists within your ranks is risky. Yes, such a co-option strategy can work. But it can also prove akin to injecting cancer cells into your party’s body politic and, in the long term, metastasize and kill it.
And the last thing the Democrat Party wants to do is emulate the “strange death” of England’s Liberal Party, the desiccated corpse of which was stuffed into history’s dustbin by the emergent Labour Party.
As with Germany’s CDU and Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), both the Democrat Party and GOP establishments are under populist pressures from both extremist flanks. The issues and attacks upon both countries’ centrist parties are very similar, too: such as socialism and expropriations to alleviate affordability concerns; nativist appeals to xenophobic and anti-Semitic views; and an overarching failure by the political center to articulate a lack of forward-looking, aspirational visions for both nations. (As noted, MAGA is by definition a paean to hearken back, not a call to charge ahead.)
Thus, what we see in challenges to and the strategies of both Germany’s and America’s political centers is how, in the age of instant communication, instant gratification is becoming the norm, and patience is becoming a rarer virtue. And in the bustling hedgerow of politics, teeming with venality and vice and occasional virtue, there is cause to be alarmed. For when the center does not deliver, desperate people seek out extremes.
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And hard times impend to test both countries, and try our souls.
