Moderate and establishment Democrats are struggling with how—even whether—to push back against a growing socialist, activist left wing that wants to take over the Democratic Party and remake American government with socialist principles. Driven by a religion-like fervor, this faction’s ascendance has left the party reeling.
The power and influence of this faction is limited for now. Explicitly socialist candidates—members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—have only won primaries in deep-blue, urban districts. However, Francesca Hong came within about 3,300 votes of winning the party’s nomination for governor in Wisconsin. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed won the U.S. Senate primary. While he is not a member of the DSA, his rhetoric, campaign surrogates, and policy positions all align with its priorities.
Moreover, it is clear that the energy behind the far left didn’t come from nowhere. It is in some ways the Democratic Party’s response to MAGA on the right. Both movements arose as a backlash to declining trust in America’s institutions—political, financial, civic, and otherwise.
So why must non-progressives push back against the shifting winds? Because while it’s true that our system doesn’t work for most people right now, socialism is plainly not the answer.
The DSA platform operates on the assumption that every institution causes inequality and seeks to fundamentally restructure American government and society. Among other things, it advocates:
Abolishing the U.S. Senate
Abolishing the current presidency and Supreme Court and creating new institutions subservient to a now-unicameral Congress
Eliminating the Department of War
Allowing for completely open borders
Abolishing prisons and police
Nationalizing healthcare, utilities, and all major corporations
They also pay lip service to democracy, but they then praise left-wing authoritarians like Fidel Castro and Nicolas Maduro. And on the home front, they have affiliated themselves with toxic figures like Hasan Piker and embraced his Mao Zedong fanboy leftism.1
Even El-Sayed, who is not a DSA member, has said things like, “Democrats should really be afraid of what I mean for their system of politics. When I say I’m coming for it, I’m coming for all of it.”
This is not a faction that wants to be part of the party. This is a religious group on a crusade.
Meanwhile, many mainstream Democrats have treated these developments as a run-of-the-mill political battle of ideas that primary voters will decide—may the best candidate win, and then vote blue no matter who. They don’t want to anger the left wing and risk losing power to Republicans. After all, the left has a lot of energy, and voters are clamoring for change.
But this isn’t the progressive left of 2016, or even 2024; the DSA offers a secular religion built around socialism. It attracts True Believers. And yet the Democratic Party establishment and moderates who oppose the DSA keep bringing knives to a gunfight.
How politics becomes secular religion
Politics can only become a belief system on the level of religion if one does not already subscribe to a religious belief system. Religion fills basic human needs for community and a deeply held personal belief system. People might eschew religion, but many will still feel that need and look for it in non-religious places—such as politics.
Notably, the share of Americans who do not affiliate with religion has been on the rise. Over the last 20 years, the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans increased from around 16 percent to about three in ten.2 This cohort is disproportionately young and overwhelmingly liberal. Moreover, many do not have strong ties to the country’s political system: about a third (34 percent) are Democrats and 14 percent are Republicans, while a majority (51 percent) are independents, another party, or no party.
These young, disaffected, unaffiliated liberals are exactly the demographic that has flocked to the insurgent left, as we have seen in both polls and election returns from places like New York City and Michigan. Young people show all the signs of disconnection from and low trust in institutions that can lead people to engage with more extreme ideologies to fill that need to belong—something to ground them and provide meaning and order to life.
Scholars have studied how SoulCycle and other fitness communities resemble secular religions. If fitness can fill the religion gap, it’s not hard to imagine politics doing the same: political beliefs become moral values that develop into a deeper belief system, and organizing provides a community of like-minded people who want to save the world in the same way.
The first implication of leftism as a secular religion is that political differences are not confined to the political realm; they become direct challenges to spreading the message that will save the world.
Activist left language around policy disputes is often existential, and many insist that their way is the only correct path. For example, El-Sayed told the New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg that he thinks “there are really quite few” people whose opposition to his ideas is sincere and not driven by “lies being put on TV.” In other words: some other force is lying to people to drive disagreement with him. Without that force, such people would recognize the obvious right path—which is to say, his path.
If that sounds a lot like Christian evangelism, which says the world’s evil forces pull people away from God and the right path, that’s because it’s the other side of the same coin. The religious right folded its religious morality into the Republican Party, while the progressive left started with politics, turned it into religion, and is now trying to wrest control of the Democratic Party.
Religion requires accepting some things as a matter of faith because logic won’t make it make sense. For the religious right, that is taking the Apostles’ Creed literally: believing in God and Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was crucified, dead, and buried, and on the third day rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
On the progressive left, that faith is the belief that their policies would save the world. For the DSA, this belief is particularly important. Interviews make clear that members of their national leadership often lack basic historical knowledge about parts of their platform and struggle to answer straightforward questions, like how “taxing the hell out of” billionaires would work, or how more diplomacy would have ended the war in Ukraine by now. Faith in the project does not waver in the absence of rational answers.
However, one substantial difference between the religious right and the activist left is what happens when their side is out of power. Many on the right believe that God is still working toward the ultimate goals. Their trust in God supersedes political setbacks, and they look toward future wins.3 Yes, they will spend lots of time arguing about how much Democrats are ruining the country, but they also turn to God as their source of hope and promise for the future.
On the left, there is no larger force moving on their behalf if they are not in power. Politics and policy are their sources of hope for the future. That’s why many view compromise as abhorrent and consider the Democratic establishment to be as great an enemy as Republicans. They firmly believe that if the establishment would get on board with their ideas, Republicans would not be a problem.
Using shame to bring (and keep) people in line
Though many politicos may find it somewhat counterintuitive, the activist left relies on shame, rather than persuasion, to bring people into the fold. It’s the same playbook many evangelical Christians use:
Offer people an explanation for what is wrong in the world and in people’s lives: people do not obey God, and the world’s evil forces pull humans further away from God;
Then offer the savior mechanism: Jesus and repentance;
Then use shame to enforce beliefs. Evangelical Christianity has a long history of fire-and-brimstone preaching—frightening people with the specter of Hell—to shame people into believing. Without God, people are wretched sinners who will spend their time on Earth and eternity in misery. Shame!
The quasi-religiosity of the secular left is eerily similar. Their explanation for what is wrong in the world is that those evil billionaires and the people in power don’t care about you and are responsible for all of our problems. Their savior mechanism is a set of policy beliefs that gives power back to the people. If you don’t buy in, they label you a bad person. You are fascist; you are racist; you are a Republican (in some quarters, the ultimate insult). Disagreement is unacceptable. The only path forward is to follow what they believe—just like Jesus is the only way to avoid Hell.
The hope on the left is to shame or scare people into siding with them. Online leftists form mobs to pile shame on people who aren’t in line with their beliefs. Recently, Piker, an ally of El-Sayed, said that those who think El-Sayed has fences to mend after the bruising Democratic primary are “Islamophobic pieces of shit.” In essence, he hopes to shame Democratic voters reluctant to back El-Sayed into thinking, “I don’t want to believe lies or be Islamophobic! I need to support him unquestioningly!”
That thought process may sound silly, but psychological shame games are tailor-made for a core demographic group in the Democratic Party: liberal white women. We saw this on display during “woke 1,” when many of them became aware of the long-time critiques of feminism as inherently racist and benefiting only white women. Afraid of being labeled racist or exuding “white fragility,” they started “doing the work” to become more racially aware. Some even paid thousands of dollars to be told how they are racist. By 2019, Democrats had shifted overwhelmingly left on race issues—driven by white liberals.
The activist left is pulling the same empathy and shame levers as the religious right, and it shows: their candidates get more support from predominantly white areas than from areas with larger minority populations.
Fighting with the right weapons
Despite the media focus on socialist candidates, the activist left is not in control yet. Michigan and Wisconsin both showed that high polling numbers for activist-left candidates were a mirage. Normie Democratic voters turned out at a high rate, including black and working-class voters—long the backbone of the party.
There are two scenarios for where things go from here. One is that the activist left becomes an enduring faction within the Democratic Party that pushes its policy agenda and wins some elections but is part of a larger, more powerful machine, somewhat akin to the religious right in Trump’s Republican Party. This scenario becomes likelier if the Democratic establishment stops coddling the DSA and allowing it—an entirely separate party with its own platform—to leech off of the Democratic Party.
The second scenario is that Democratic Party leaders accept the DSA into the party, including its platform and takeover goals. This would be a mistake. The DSA platform is unhelpful to the Democrats’ agenda, and accepting it puts the “big tent” at risk of collapsing when moderates flee.
One way to neuter the activist left’s momentum and push back on its existential framing is for non-progressives to answer voters’ anger better and offer a clear, long-term vision for the country. They would also do well to stop arguing about incrementalism versus overhauling the system because that is fighting a political battle—even worse, a political process battle—rather than facing the religious fervor of the left head-on.
Moderates have some very popular policy positions! These include:
Adopting a public health insurance option (rather than throwing the current system out the window for $30 trillion);
Overhauling the tax code to simplify it and closing loopholes so that billionaires and corporations pay their fair share;
Replacing ICE with a border enforcement agency that focuses on security and deporting dangerous criminals; and
Investing in education at all levels, including addressing higher education costs and promoting trades and technology training needed for jobs that exist now.
Stick to these policies and talk about them as if they are what will save the party and the country. This isn’t a matter of mere politics or policy nuances when socialists are on an existential crusade. Amp it up—or lose more ground.
Editor’s note: this piece first appeared on Stuck in the Middle.
Natalie Jackson is founder and principal of Centerline Research and Strategy. Read more of her work at National Journal and on her Substack, Stuck in the Middle.
It is unclear whether Piker is a member of DSA, but he aligns with and campaigns for DSA candidates. Also, while I agree it wasn’t the United States’ job to go arrest Maduro, wanting him back in charge of Venezuela when he didn’t legitimately win his last two elections is quite something else.
Unaffiliated includes agnostics, atheists, and people who say their religion is “nothing in particular.”
Notably, this does not describe how Donald Trump thinks about being out of power.
This is an excellent perspective. It's what happens when the Augustinian concept of City of God is confused with what he called City of Man. In other words, when religion and faith ceased to be spiritual realms and were incorporated into the state. Socialism is essentially a secular religion with no God. It's also known as secular humanism, and it's a substitute for religious faith. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, because since there's no God, some human being is, in effect, made God. In a Soviet system, that was Lenin or Stalin or Marx. By definition, it's what religious people refer to as idolatry, because every human being has feet of clay and has a dark side.
I couldn't agree with you more that moderates in the Democrat Party need to push back on this, because it will be the ruination of our nation. I can assure you that those of us who are independent and center-right will fight to the last breath to defeat these people. We know what happened under socialism in the 20th century and what's happening today in the 21st. Look at North Korea. There's a perfect example of a tin-horn god-man that is driving his people into the depths of despair. They are prisoners.
We're not going to do that. We'll resist it by literally any means necessary. The Democrats better do it too, or they're doomed. They are no longer going to be Democrats. They're going to be communists, because that's what DSA is. In fact, I think they're worse than communists.
So kudos on a magnificent perspective on this whole issue, and I hope that it is disseminated far and wide through the Democrat Party. I think people like James Carville understand this, and Al Hunt, and some of the more courageous and conscientious Democrats. But a lot of them are really held hostage by these crazy DSA nutballs, and they need to break free of that, because in the end, it will be their doom.
Great article!
The DSA defenders who call for a big-tent Democratic Party forget what FDR’s big tent looked like. Socialists and communists had their own parties in the 1930s, and FDR’s coalition included lots of conservative Democrats (and I don’t just mean Southern segregationists). A big Democratic majority today that resembled FDR’s would be formed by winning back the moderate and conservative-leaning Democrats alienated from the party by social and cultural issues over the last decade or more, not by embracing a far left that will alienate those people even more.