The Democrats’ Coming Civil War
At a time when the world press is obsessed with US president Donald Trump and his often imbecilic machinations, perhaps a more consequential struggle is taking place on the other side of the aisle. Trump and his minions may completely control the GOP, but the future of the Democrats is uncertain. The party’s left is locked in battle with those who embrace the party’s traditional values, like support for economic growth and enforcing the law.
Right now, on a national level, the Democratic Party seems to be continuing its movement leftwards. Kamala Harris is still its front-runner for the 2028 presidential election and representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett, who are further to the left, are widely seen as rising stars. Looking at the behaviour of the Democrats and their media allies, they seem to be reprising Talleyrand’s quip that the Bourbon kings of France ‘learnt nothing and forgot nothing’ after the revolution.
At the recent Democratic National Committee election for the party’s new leadership, there was an enduring obsession with race and gender. Veteran Democrat Ruy Teixeira described it ‘like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal-arts college’.
We saw similar scenes in November, with the backlash received by Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton when he dared to share concerns about his young daughter potentially having to compete against male athletes. As a result, he faced the resignation of key staffers, as well as threats from one university to cancel an internship program associated with his office.
Yet even as the national party drifts off the reservation, there are hopeful signs of growing anti-woke pushback in the Democrats’ modern heartlands – namely, in America’s big cities. There have been successful revolts against the progressives in such unlikely places as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle. These kinds of insurgencies could prove the best hope for the party to revive itself in the coming elections and recover more moderate voters.
It’s important that the Democrats get their house in order, as the MAGA movement may be more short-lived than many anticipate. Having won by only a modest margin against an awful candidate, Trump and his conspiratorial, rightist supporters may already be pushing away some voters who supported him last year. His popularity, never strong, is showing some minor decline as he picks unnecessary fights, such as with Canada. His willingness to allow his billionaire bro, Elon Musk, to take such a prominent role in government, despite his frequent buffoonish online outbursts, appears amateurish to many. Even some Trump allies fear that Musk and the other MAGA oligarchs are undermining the president’s populist appeal.
Given Trump’s unsteadiness, by 2026 and even more so by 2028, whoever controls the Democrats has a good shot of winning the presidential sweepstakes. If I were a partisan Republican, I would be rooting for continued the ascendency of the progressive ideologues. At the moment, the Democrats seem intent on continuing to lose. The new party head, Minnesota’s Ken Martin, is a close ally of failed vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. Walz himself has even mooted running for president in 2028.
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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: FDL via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.
