Opinion
If you can tear your eyes away from the Trump administration for a moment, you’ll notice that an electric shock is running through the Democrats right now with the most unpredictable consequences.
A bit like the Republicans did in the early-mid 2010s, the Democrat establishment is now under a sustained insurgent attack. A bit like for the Republicans, that insurgency seemed like long odds to succeed. And a bit like the Republicans found, it has proceeded to make serious inroads. In the game of radically remaking the terms of American party politics, the progressive side of the coin has finally come up.
The big moment this week occurred in Michigan, where the insurgent, Abdul El-Sayed, vanquished the establishment’s Haley Stevens in a Senate primary. El-Sayed is not the first in this vein. The flagship case is, of course, Zohran Mamdani, who stormed the establishment to become New York City Mayor. Mamdani is a card-carrying democratic socialist – by which I mean he’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – in a country where socialists are simply meant to be unable to win such a major political office.
Mamdani has since backed three other candidates to victory in Democratic Party primaries in New York, two of them fellow DSA members. Meanwhile, other DSA members won primaries in Denver and Philadelphia. But these are all victories in heavily progressive areas. None of these is a statewide vote in a swing state like Michigan. That’s why El-Sayed’s win is a watershed. This was not a normal primary. Michigander Democrats were being asked to choose sides in a now well-established Democrat civil war.
To give you a sense of it, consider Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of the DSA members to win a Democrat primary. “F!@# Kamala Harris” she tweeted when Harris was vice president. A year prior she’d called Joe Biden a “rapist”. When Chevalier won her New York primary, a former Bill Clinton aide said the party “should not seat her in the caucus” because she is “not a democrat”. Another establishment Democrat was moved to post: “if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination. Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Focus on building the party you actually support.” The establishment senses this is not an evolution, it’s a takeover bid.
That’s because Donald Trump has thoroughly changed the political game. Most obviously, he’s shown it’s possible to seize control of a major party, and remake it in a once unthinkable image. But he also lit a fire under progressives who sought a takeover of their own, and took inspiration from Bernie Sanders. When Trump first entered office, the DSA had an influx of tens of thousands of new, young members. That plateaued when Biden became president, but Trump’s second victory has brought the energy back. And this energy isn’t just threatening to transform the Democrats. It’s transforming the very DSA that is currently besieging it.
The DSA was established in the ’80s with the aim of pulling the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction. It was socialist – committed to bringing about the end of capitalism – but also anti-communist. It upheld liberty, free speech, and free elections. It specifically banned communists from becoming members. But the post-Trump influx contained a new hardcore of genuine communists and Marxist-Leninists. The past decade has been one of internal DSA ructions, with some of its founding members leaving in protest. One Marxist-Leninist faction, called the Red Star caucus, now boasts that “nearly half” of the members of the DSA’s highest leadership body “openly identify as communists”. Meanwhile, the DSA officially removed its ban on communist members.
As a result, the DSA is now divided in its aims. One group retains the old vision of influencing the Democrats. Another wants to establish a separate party and fight them. A third group wants to run candidates in Democrat primaries, win new members to the DSA and then break away and form a new party, leaving a shell of a Democratic Party in its wake.
With all these active fault lines, anything could happen. Even the insurgent candidates are difficult to categorise. Chevalier, for example is a member of the Red Star caucus (but denies she’s a communist). Meanwhile, El-Sayed says he supports capitalism and isn’t a DSA member at all, but carries endorsements from high-profile DSA members. All of them, though, are running on a very similar platform: the Medicare for All bill, heavily taxing billionaires, abolishing ICE, and ending US military aid to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Israel. It goes nowhere near abolishing capitalism, and doesn’t talk of defunding the police, but it goes much further than mainstream Democrats would like, especially on Israel.
That so many Democrats went for this in Michigan is hugely significant because the stakes are so high. El-Sayed now has to face a Republican opponent in November. If he loses, the Democrats almost certainly won’t win back the Senate. The case against El-Sayed was largely that he couldn’t win that contest because he would never be able to win over independents and disillusioned Republicans when it came to the crunch. Clearly, we’re now in a world where Democrat voters are prepared to take that risk. Either they are so disillusioned with the establishment they’d rather lose with the alternative, or they think the times have now become radical enough for the insurgents to win. After all, Trump was meant to be unelectable, too.
We’ll see. But it’s unlikely politics on either side is going back to normal. The Republican Party might never be the same, and even Trump’s failures aren’t enough to guarantee a business-as-usual Democrat revival. It’s telling that as Trump’s approval ratings plunge to historic lows, the Democratic Party’s approval ratings are in similar territory. The insurgents will keep laying their inroads. It’s now only a matter of how much traffic flows their way. In a country as polarised as America, the idea that the system is broken is now its most unifying principle.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
