WASHINGTON _ The fight over the future of the Democratic Party has been decided in the streets.
The swelling crowds at women's marches and the chanting airport cadres protesting President Donald Trump's new immigration plan have pushed the party to the left after years of mincing steps in that direction, most recently in the presidential contest.
After the November election, a convulsion began within Democratic ranks over how to rebuild from a stunning defeat. The options were to carve a path toward the white working class and suburban residents of Middle America or toward the Obama coalition of urban, young and minority voters _ or to sharpen a message that appealed to both.
Trump's presidency has shunted that debate aside, and the ensuing protests have defined the party as more liberal and more activist than it was even months ago. While some Democrats fear a fracturing of the party, others are convinced that opposition to the president will force unity on the factions.
"Trump has electrified the Democratic progressive base like nothing that has happened in the last 25 years," said Ace Smith, a San Francisco-based Democratic strategist. "As depressing as what he's doing is, he's building an army that's going to fight him."
Protesters have quickened the outrage metabolism among members of Congress, encouraged disruptive tactics, including the boycotts last week of Senate hearings on Trump's Cabinet nominees, and mostly ended the argument within the congressional caucuses over whether Democrats should work with Trump on occasion rather than universally oppose him.
Democrats now are experiencing both an ideological and a generational upending not unlike the one that decades ago gave many of today's Democratic leaders power they have been reluctant to cede. And it is one that some Democrats fear is too radical for the party as it looks toward 2018 Senate contests in swing states.
Howard Dean, the former party chairman, said Democrats must embrace the priorities of the street or risk demise.
"This is their Edmund Pettus Bridge, their Kent State," he said, referring to sites of civil rights and anti-war struggles that propelled earlier activists into Democratic politics. "A party composed of all of the activists in the '60s and '70s _ they changed the world, but they can't figure out how to hand this off to the next generation. The time for that is at hand."
Still unclear, however, is whether the fiery passions of the protesters might end up consuming Democrats, much as a grass-roots rebellion on the right, which started a decade ago, caused warfare within the Republican Party.
"The radical nature of this government is radicalizing Democrats, and that's going to pose a real challenge to the Democratic Party," said Rep. Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif.
"The more radical the administration is, the more radicalized our base becomes ... and who knows where that ends."
Evidence of the potential for difficulty appeared last week on the website of MoveOn, a liberal activist group.
"The public _ which voted decisively against Trump _ is demanding clear, principled, and total opposition to the Trump administration's extreme and unprecedented agenda," the site said. "We hope Senate Democrats will hear that message _ and quickly."
Protesters angry that Democrats were voting for some of Trump's Cabinet nominees gathered at the homes of several party leaders, including Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and minority leader Charles E. Schumer of New York.
At a CNN town hall last week, a student identified as Trevor Hill asked a polite but pointed question of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Even as he praised the party's leftward moves on social issues, he noted that a poll last spring had found a slim majority of millennials opposed capitalism.
"I wonder if there's anywhere you feel the Democrats could move farther left to a populist message?" he asked.
"I thank you for your question, but I have to say we're capitalists," Pelosi replied. She continued with a longer explanation of the nature of income inequality, but it was her somewhat dismissive opening remark that ricocheted across the internet.
How far the party goes to satisfy its newly vocal activists is particularly important to Democrats up for re-election in 2018 in states won by Trump, including Missouri, West Virginia, North Dakota and Montana. Each has a Democratic senator facing a potentially hostile electorate in two years.
If the election focuses on national issues and positioning _ a safe bet, given Trump's dominance of American politics _ the leftward pull could hurt in those states, risking a Senate with fewer Democrats than the 48-seat minority the party has now.
Party leaders in the past have given red state Democrats some license to move to the center in order to strengthen their standing at home. But with protesters demanding liberal purity, those officeholders are caught between activists who, if displeased, can hurt a candidate's support among the party faithful and more moderate voters who are needed to put them over the top.
A similar tension helped cripple Hillary Clinton, as a not-insignificant chunk of Democrats last year found her too centrist and too tied to Wall Street elites to support. Barbara Boxer, the liberal California Democrat who retired from the Senate in January, suggested the lowered turnout for Clinton among some groups should be a warning sign for today's protesters.
"I think the marching is good. I think the activism is great," she said. But, she added, what "people haven't seen is that what happens when you demand perfection is that you get a disaster," she said. "My view is that people should see the price that they have to pay and that the country has to pay if you all demand perfection and marching to a particular ideal."
To many Democrats, however, the desire for more vocal, passionate and leftward voices trumps that concern. Some of the party's potential 2020 presidential candidates have rushed to airports to protest the Trump immigration ban and to the stages of the women's march to rally supporters. When Trump nominated federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch to the open Supreme Court seat, the announcement had barely occurred before Democratic emails flaying him appeared in inboxes.
The fervor at the protest rallies contrasts sharply with the reaction to Clinton through much of the 2016 campaign. She tabled blunt passion most of the time in favor of an approach more carefully calibrated to appeal to a wide range of voters, and her support was, in turn, more measured.
"We didn't have a message in 2016; we had a slogan," said Smith, the San Francisco-based strategist. "Politics is never about how people are; it's about how people feel. The Hillary Clinton campaign was run by a bunch of people executing a paint-by-numbers strategy, and at the end, they didn't realize you don't win campaigns with an algorithm, but rather you win with passion and positions."
Clinton did move incrementally to the left during the presidential contest as she adopted some policies of her challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders, in an effort to appeal to his mostly young supporters. But her long political and financial associations left her suspect among many who had been drawn to Sanders.
One problem for Clinton and other Democrats of her generation and ideology is that the issues important to many Democrats have shifted. While she was perfectly in line with them on social issues that used to define the party's ideology, Clinton was playing catch-up on measures like income equity, worry over the high cost of education and distrust of corporations and Wall Street.
Not by coincidence, the biggest roars at Sanders' events followed his criticism of her ties to Goldman Sachs, the giant financial firm.
Concern about those issues _ and a surge in liberal views _ had been growing for years, but debate over them was masked while President Barack Obama controlled the White House.
In 2000, a Pew Research survey found that 27 percent of Democrats called themselves liberal. By 2015, the percentage of self-described liberals had risen by 15 points. The biggest leap _ 8 points _ occurred between 2010 and 2015. (At the same time, Republicans have grown more conservative and the once-vibrant center has nearly vanished.)
Now, with Trump radicalizing Democrats, the two parties appear to be moving even farther apart. The demonstrations that have met the first two weeks of the Trump presidency may be only a harbinger of more intense struggles to come.
