"Fork in the Road": Does The Democratic Party Move Center or Left?

Last week's off-year elections simultaneously represented a unified backlash to Trump's first year in office and an impossible crossroads for the Democratic Party.  Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Shirrell won their respective gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey several points above and beyond expectations or what the polls prepared us for, and did so by running on a centrist platform that didn't scare off any faction of their coalition.  On the same night, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor New York City with a majority of the vote running unapologetically as a Democratic Socialist.

This incoherent set of results is a preview of the 2028 Democratic nomination fight, and it won't be pretty.

It's also not at all clear which path is better for the Democratic Party or more importantly for the future of the country.  The establishment will assure us that the upside potential is greater if we elect mushy moderates, but keep in mind that the Republican Party's establishment 10 years ago likewise assured us with similar cocksure certitude that softening its edges and courting more nonwhite voters would be its path to long-term survival.  Instead, Donald Trump ran on explicit ethnonationalism, driving up his numbers among whites by enough to win without minority voters......and eventually winning over a huge chunk of the minorities who he managed to co-opt into his coalition by doubling down on the same ethnonationalist message.  Expect any hypothetical Democratic comeback to likewise function with significant defiance to what the party establishment tells them is the formula for revival.

To be sure, there are both features and bugs to whichever path the Democratic Party ends up taking.  Let's break them down a bit.

The moderates are likely right that they'd be better positioned for victory by running to the center....but only as it applies to the NEXT election.  The long-awaited generational tug-of-war has arrived and politicians are gonna have no choice but to pick sides.  Do they serve the older voters who have secure 401Ks, homes with inflated values, and a steadfast refusal to pay another nickel (can't say penny anymore!) in taxes?  Or do they serve the increasingly destitute younger voters coming of age into an economy that has no use for their human capital and little interest in elevating them from their parents' basements?  

It's hard to envision a path forward for one group that doesn't operate to the exclusion of the other, but certainly any politician running as a centrist would feel duty-bound to serve the interests of the older faction of its coalition, which will only alienate and radicalize the younger faction.  A centrist might unify both groups in opposition to the unpopular governing party in the short term, but that coalition will come apart when the "moderate" puts their thumb on the scale for policies that lock young people out of the job market, lock them out of the housing market, keep them from ever considering procreation, and still invest in the insurance market risk pools consumed mostly by their grandparents.  There's not gonna be much in it for younger people, and they'll respond by gravitating in one of two directions:  to Donald Trump and Nick Fuentes, or to Zohran Mamdani and AOC.

It only took one week after the election of "centrists" Spanberger and Shirrell before voters were reminded of what "centrists" do when put in the position of governing:  a complete capitulation to hard-liners in the form a "deal" that represented complete surrender.  Whatever spin defenders of the "Gang of Eight" grace us with in the aftermath of surrender, the message will get through loud and clear to the faction of the Democratic coalition demanding policies that fix what's broken.  This same template will play out over and over again on issue after issue.  The "centrists" will obstruct meaningful policy initiatives in service of the "haves" while the "have-nots" keep getting told to wait another day for their piece of the pie.  The have-nots will quickly recognize this pattern and when said moderates ask for their vote again the next time, there will be little motivation to return the favor.

So socialism is the way to go then right?  Uh....about that.

As has been proven everywhere outside of New York City and Vermont, socialists have a vastly more challenging entry point with the electorate than do the moderates, meaning its much harder to put together a winning coalition at the outset.  And if you can't win elections, you're assured of getting your teeth knocked in on absolutely everything.  Until socialists prove they're able to be victorious outside of a few city council wards in left-wing enclaves like Seattle or Minneapolis, it's gonna be hard to take them seriously for carrying Pennsylvania in higher-profile elections.

Enter Zohran Mamdani.  As mayor of New York City, he'll represent our highest-profile socialist experiment thus far.  And from what I've seen so far, he has the eloquence and charisma to be the movement's most successful salesman to date.  It's nonetheless delusional to imagine that socialism could ever work at a municipal level, commandeered by a mayor who lacks the ability to print money to finance his ambitious agenda.  He's already on record saying he'll need to go to New York's Governor and Legislature for authorization for revenue generation, and there's little indication any of them would have an interest in extending that authority to him.  The likeliest consequence is a web of broken promises so deep that the odious Elise Stefanik gets elevated to the New York statehouse next November.  

But even if Mamdani falls on his face as I think is more likely than not, don't expect socialism to go away.  With each passing month, another wave of Gen Z voters comes of an age into a society locking them out of every aspect of a middle-class life.  They're not gonna permanently accept their parents' generation and the tech oligarchs hoarding absolutely everything for themselves.  Mamdani wasn't born in the United States so he could never be a national emissary, but as the status quo continues to break down for an increasing share of the electorate, somebody else is assured of filling his shoes.

The widely held argument is that socialism can't work because "eventually you run out of other people's money".  That's probably 90% true, but there are nations throughout the globe who have made a version of socialism work.  The places that have made it work generally have two things in common though:  they have small populations coupled with large oil reserves, and they have ethnic homogeneity.   I suppose the United States could nationalize its oil companies and free up billions of dollars in resources, although that alone would trigger a civil war. but the toothpaste is never going back into the tube with ethnic diversity.

And history has also proven that the quickest way to derail even a successful experiment in socialism is an increasingly diverse population.  It invariably becomes an exercise in "us versus them".  The closest America ever came to socialism was during the New Deal and after World War II when the country was 90% white, but it all began to unravel with the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  This was no coincidence, just as it's no coincidence that the Scandinavian countries' longer experiment in socialism is currently breaking down as large-scale immigration is altering its homogeneous population.  For whatever reason, humanity likes to sort itself by race and ethnicity, and if the majority no longer sees a socialist experiment as serving "our people", it's doomed for failure.  We'll accept nihilistic plutocrats sodomizing us before we let "those people" have a win.  It's sadly the way it's always been and most likely always be.  The fact that America's older population is majority white and its younger population is majority nonwhite will instill both racial and generational fault lines that will be all the more difficult to penetrate.

With all that said, who is best-positioned to win the Democratic Party's 2028 nomination tug of war?  The Abigail Spanberger wing or the Zohran Mamdani wing?  My money is on a fleeting Spanberger wing prevailing, but quite possibly for the last time, and it will be complicated by two other predictions that I stand by.

First, I don't see Trump going away willingly.  He'll do whatever he feels he needs to rig the election either for himself or for his hand-picked successor, confident that the Supreme Court's ruling of unconditional Presidential impunity will protect him.  The signs will be there in advance that Trump will be putting his thumb on the scale, and Democrats will consolidate toward the "safe" choice believing that a consensus moderate can run up the score high enough to overcome the dirty tricks Trump has up his sleeve to steal the election.

Suppose for the sake of argument that this consensus moderate prevails and goes on to govern the nation in 2029.  It's impossible to imagine that the same wing of the party that just folded like a cheap accordion in ending the government shutdown will have the moxie to bulldoze the rule book as will be expected in a post-Trump world.

As I said last year, the future is autocracy.  The public has gotten a taste of a President who elbows his way past constitutional guardrails to get things that he wants done, and voters aren't gonna accept returning to the recalcitrant paralysis of our constitutional system as their lives swirl the drain.  If the moderates won't discard constitutional guardrails and hold their political foes at the end of a gun barrel just as Trump has done and Republicans will continue to do post-Trump, then Democratic voters will move on to the next socialist candidate who will.

It's a bleak prognosis on the future of our politics, but when you couple the choice voters made to give autocracy a try last November and the public's comprehensive subjugation at the hands of a tech oligarchy keeping all of the globe's resources for themselves, I struggle to see an alternative.