The Political Center Is Getting Squeezed

Good Saturday morning and thank you for joining us. With a number of primaries completed (46 by our count) we’re taking a look at some of the political trends emerging from this year’s primary season, and what they may tell us about where both parties are headed.

American politics has always had its factions. We think you’d agree that what feels different today is how the most energized wings of both parties are testing the boundaries of their coalitions, and forcing establishment leaders to respond.

On the right, the Tea Party and then MAGA fundamentally reordered the Republican Party, displacing many of its longtime leaders and challenging longstanding GOP positions on trade, foreign policy, institutions, and the proper role of government. As President Trump approaches the midpoint of his second term, Republicans are already confronting questions about what comes after him and which version of the party ultimately survives.

On the left, a different but increasingly consequential movement is taking shape. The Democratic Socialists of America remains relatively small in Congress, but its candidates are winning primaries, its membership is gaining political relevance, and ideas once well outside the Democratic mainstream are increasingly part of the party’s internal debate.

These movements are not mirror images of one another, and treating them that way would obscure more than it illuminates. But both raise an important question: What happens when the ideological edges of America’s political parties begin exerting greater influence over the people trying to govern from within them?

Let’s take a look. 

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It’s always worth looking at both sides of the political equation. We’ll start with the development that may be less familiar to many readers, and given its recent electoral gains and the breadth of its stated ambitions, deserves a closer look in its own words.

Visit the Democratic Socialists of America online policy platform, and you’ll find this query: “What if you didn’t have to think about paying rent or loans at the end of the month, or saving for college, or affording groceries? What would that be like?”

In all likelihood, it would be like the Soviet Union in the 1930s and China in the 1950s, when tens of millions of people starved.

You might challenge that proposition by noting that “socialism,” as they called it in the Soviet Union, was led by a small autocratic governing committee, usually helmed by one strongman. Surely these modern progenies don’t wish to abolish the very structures of American democracy. Right?

“Complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up,” the DSA’s policy platform reads.

It gets even more prescriptive: “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress . . . and abolish the Senate.” If a distinction exists between this new, all-powerful “Congress” and the politburos of the Soviet Union and China, it’s uncomfortably small.

A cadre of candidates for federal office are proudly running under the DSA banner – under this policy platform. And they’re winning. DSA members have won primaries for the U.S. Senate in Florida and the U.S. House in Colorado, New York, and Pennsylvania, in addition to state and local races elsewhere.

The DSA platform goes on:

• “Build new, publicly-owned social housing, strictly regulate investment properties, [and] establish universal rent control.”
• “Fully abolish[] the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.”
• “Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.”

Acerbic pundit and comedian Bill Maher earlier this month implored people to take this movement seriously: “I must take them at their word when their words include, ‘Our commitment is to the long-term struggle for a fully liberated, classless society – in a word, communism.’ What do they have to do? Tweet out, ‘Elect more communists’? … People have to realize this is going on.”

The DSA’s rise may strike many as a shocking departure from the past, but the underlying concern is hardly new. For much of the 20th century, Western leaders worried that voters in capitalist democracies might ultimately vote against the system itself. That possibility shaped decades of American domestic and foreign policy, from the end of World War II through the 1980s.

Yale University historian John Lewis Gaddis is one of the world’s preeminent scholars on this history. In his book, The Cold War: A New History, he explains that America funded reconstruction in Europe and Japan precisely because they feared voters there would choose communism. “The gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention,” Gaddis writes, “but rather the risk that [post-war] hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into office, who would then obediently serve Moscow’s wishes.”

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Where does this leave American politics today? While much could be said about the pitfalls of the DSA, the same could be said for extreme factions on the right that have guided the party into politically unfavorable terrain in the past. The most extreme wings of both major parties are squeezing the sober-minded realists who carry a larger perspective on the American project. Those realists, whatever flaws they may have, are informed by history and the long view on what radical governance changes today might bring about in the decades to come.

Over the past 15 years, that squeeze on the right pushed out leaders like Paul Ryan, John McCain, Eric Cantor, Richard Lugar and more recently, John Cornyn. We’re now seeing a similar dynamic on the left threatening House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and any would-be 2028 standard-bearer who runs from the middle.

Yes, the DSA will indeed have less than a dozen Members of Congress in 2027. But that’s more than double what they had last year. An angry plurality of Democrats is dragging the party leftward, much like MAGA and the Tea Party impacted or transformed the Republican Party.

In the 1990s and 2000s, questions of character and economic policy defined the various corners of the national political contest. Might private financial markets produce better returns for Social Security? Who would you rather have a beer with? What’s the best way to return to budget surpluses after post-9/11 tax cuts and military spending?

Today, the national political contest is coming awfully close to centering on whether the American project as we know it ought to continue. It’s defined by questions of whether capitalism itself should exist, and on how many additional justices to pack onto the U.S. Supreme Court. Radical, passion-fueled populism and radical, quasi-communism are becoming the boundaries within which the national debate occurs.

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Every cycle that Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer spends looking over his shoulder at his own left flank is a cycle in which the debate shifts from how to manage a market economy to whether one should exist at all. That is not a healthy argument for a major party to be having in public. 

Even though there isn’t a direct equivalent of the DSA on the right, the Republican Party is confronting its own internal pressures as President Trump nears the halfway mark of his second term. While the president’s endorsement remains a force in Republican primary elections, an increasing number of candidates he backs are losing, as we witnessed this past week. 

According to Real Clear Politics, Trump’s job approval today is roughly six points lower than at this same point in 2018, when he was entering the midterm cycle of his first term. And since the start of his second term, Trump’s favorability rating among voters has declined by about eight points. 

As the post-Trump world draws nearer, it’s impossible to forecast what might replace it. Who, or what, will come after MAGA? Will the more traditional governing wing of the GOP, represented by figures like Sen. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, retain control, or will the party move further toward the populist and isolationist politics represented by voices like Vice President JD Vance and others? 

The lesson of the Cold War was never that capitalism was self-evidently superior and needed no defense. It was that democracies which fail to make the case for their own systems (specifically, economically and morally) leave a vacuum that someone else will fill. The realists who built the postwar order understood that lesson because they had just watched half of Europe fall behind an Iron Curtain. 

Today’s realists, on both sides of the aisle, would do well to remember it before they’re outnumbered by people who never had to.