A recent chair of the Democratic National Committee apparently wants democratic socialists to get out of his party. “If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” Jaime Harrison tweeted on election day last week, shortly before results showed that three of those socialists had won Democratic primaries for Congress in deep-blue New York City. He didn’t identify his targets, but the implication was clear.
Harrison’s call for self-expulsion was the bizarre opposite of a welcome mat: “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” The tweet turned reality on its head. Socialist candidates have been winning because they inspired multitudes of people to volunteer and provide what’s needed to win.
The little tirade from Harrison attracted a lot of attention, with more than 5m views on X. What’s widely known about him is that he served as Joe Biden’s DNC chair for four years after running for the Senate from South Carolina in 2020, when he raised a record $130m and lost to the Republican senator Lindsey Graham by 10 points. But little-known information about Harrison puts his evident broadside against socialists in context.
Between 2008 and 2016, when Harrison worked as a lobbyist for the powerhouse firm the Podesta Group, he represented scores of huge corporations. They included Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Boeing, BP, General Motors, Google, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Oracle, United Technologies, Walmart and Wells Fargo. He also lobbied for trade associations like the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity and the National Mining Association.
Harrison is an archetype of the political operatives telling democratic socialists to leave the Democratic party. If they followed such advice, the new mayors of New York and Seattle would no longer be Democrats. Nor would the next mayor of Washington DC, or the member of the Los Angeles city council now in a runoff for LA mayor.
Many prominent mainline Democrats are suddenly insisting that their party’s big tent should get smaller. One of them, James Carville, declared last week that the socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district, “is not a Democrat” and House Democrats “should not seat her in the caucus”.
Carville’s political insights are notable in a pair of essays for the New York Times. One came in October 2024, when he wrote about Kamala Harris’s campaign against Donald Trump: “Harris will be elected the next president of the United States. Of this, I am certain.” A few months later – amid assaults on immigrants, attacks on civil liberties and much more by the new Trump administration – Carville wrote a piece “calling for a strategic political retreat”. His strategy? “It’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.”
After gaining fame as the campaign manager for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory, Carville served as a consultant overseas for corporate and conservative candidates from Greece to Latin America. He and Harrison are just two of the eminent Democrats now publicly melting down about the left’s advances in this year’s primaries. The surge of voter support for strong progressives is a shock to seasoned lobbyists and political consultants for corporate America along with Democratic politicians who serve it.
A major factor is the drastic shift away from public support for Israel during the last two years, now showing up on ballots. Mainstream Democrats have been knocked out of their denial comfort zone. Even though it has lately become expedient to distance oneself from Aipac, the main pro-Israel lobby group, most Democrats in Congress (along with Republicans) remain closely aligned with Israel – despite the genocide in Gaza.
The Democratic leaders in Congress, Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer, have always been stalwart advocates for Israel. Each has received more than $1.7m in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups. Steadfast allegiance to Israel is one of the key reasons for their mutual antagonism with the left.
Less obvious than the clashes between the surging left and the party’s establishment are the new divisions within that establishment on how to handle the socialist barbarians at the gate. The spectrum of reaction ranges from Carville’s open hostility toward strong progressives to the DNC chair Ken Martin’s congratulations to each primary winner, regardless of ideology.
On election night, Martin put out a statement praising the socialist who won the Democratic race for an open seat: “Claire Valdez has devoted her career to serving New Yorkers and making life better for her neighbors. As a union organizer and New York State assemblymember, she has focused on improving workers’ rights, advocating for renters, and advancing economic fairness.” For Martin, seeking party cohesion is paramount, even while he does his best to quash any moves within the DNC to depart from its ongoing pro-Israel stance.
In sharp contrast, Carville gives voice to the party’s deeply corporate, militaristic and pro-Israel id that finds democratic socialists to be absolutely repugnant.
At least until the midterm elections this fall, Schumer and Jeffries will try to calm rather than roil the waters within the party. But make no mistake: both are hostile to the politics and movements represented by democratic socialists. And for Jeffries, any turn to the left within the Democratic caucus might interfere with his path to become House speaker.
Jeffries might live to regret a challenge that he aimed at the left during an interview with the Atlantic five years ago. “It’s time for the virtue signalers to stop shadowboxing on social media,” he said. “Recruit a candidate, put on the boxing gloves, get in the ring, and we can work this out on the ground.” By the time 2028 arrives, Jeffries is likely to be in the ring with an opponent backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, and the winner of the bout is uncertain.
Longtime boosters are now fretting aloud that Jeffries’s constituents might vote him out of office. And worries are that the party’s leader in the Senate, up for re-election in two years, is in jeopardy as well. Last weekend, under the headline “Jewish leaders rush to defense of Hakeem Jeffries as emboldened DSA puts him in crosshairs,” the Times of Israel reported: “Schumer could also be challenged from the left before next election, with opposition to Israel a significant factor in campaigns by the Democratic Socialists of America against leading Democrats.”
In May, polling by the New York Times found that Democratic voters “began to turn against Israel in large numbers during the Gaza war and now are four times more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel”.
The day after the 23 June election, a call to political arms came from New Jersey’s five-term representative Josh Gottheimer, a conservative Democrat who has received more than $2m from pro-Israel groups through the end of 2024 – more than any other current member of the House or Senate. “Obviously, the socialists had a big win last night,” he said. “The question is, are we going to let them take over the party? Or are we going to stand up and fight back? Many of us believe, as I do, that if you’re a socialist, you’re not a Democrat.”
But a Gallup poll last year found that 66% of Democrats nationwide view socialism more positively than capitalism. In effect, Gottheimer, Harrison and like-minded Democrats want to excommunicate a huge number of people from the party. Meanwhile, the new group Promise to America, launched by Gottheimer and nine other “moderate” Democrats in Congress, declares in bold on its website: “We are capitalist, not socialist.”
Not all “moderate” Democrats are willing to throw down the gauntlet right now. Representative Seth Moulton, campaigning to unseat the progressive Democratic senator Ed Markey in the Massachusetts primary later this summer, told CNN viewers last week: “We’ve gotta have a big tent if we want a majority, and the reality is that while the media and a lot of talking heads like to try to point out all the differences here, there are a lot of things that we’re united on, you know, like let’s make sure that we stop ICE from terrorizing our cities. I’ve said ICE not only needs to be abolished, they need to be prosecuted. I think there’s a lot of Democrats who’d agree on that.”
The New York Times reported: “If Democrats do seize a House majority in the November midterm elections, the growing faction of leftists could cause headaches for Mr. Jeffries, both for his ascent as speaker and governance if a majority is narrow.” Genuine progressives could have major impacts, well beyond merely causing Jeffries “headaches”.
The trio of victorious New York socialists running for Congress “joins over half a dozen other left-wing candidates who have won primaries this year and another half-dozen vying to unseat more moderate Democratic incumbents”, Axios noted. “Add that to the current ‘Squad’ members in the House and their allies, and you start to get Congress’ most sizable leftwing bloc in the 21st century.”
But euphoria about victories in New York and elsewhere this year should give way to the sobriety of realism on the left. Socialists and allies in the House could exert real leverage in the next Congress. But they will remain a small minority on Capitol Hill compared with the corporate Democrats and fascistic Republicans who don’t give any ground without a fight. Winning the pivotal struggles ahead will require nationwide grassroots organizing of a scope, depth and quality yet to be seen.
-
Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book is The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy
