The Twin Crises of the Democratic Elites
How 2016 and 2024 explain where we are
We live in a strange political era. It has been that way for some time, since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator more than a decade ago, and it will be up to future historians to classify and contextualize this stretch of time. Are we witnessing the collapse of liberal democracy? The growth of a new kind of democracy? The resurgence of the hard left or the long march of the far right? In the present day, none of these questions are truly answerable, though we can try to conceive of where we are headed. I am fairly certain, for example, a Democrat will be president in 2029, but I can’t tell you who that will be. I also can’t rule out any other scenario: a Republican victory in 2028 (J.D. Vance or someone else) or Trump’s illegal attempt at a third term. All of it can come to pass. What I can do, at least, is gaze backward and consider how we got to where we are. Though Trump is obviously still president, he increasingly embodies a time that has already come and gone. MAGA cannot be said, anymore, to be on the ascent, and Trump himself is deeply unpopular. He has lost his grip on the culture. More prosaically, his party will lose the House and could, with enough luck for the Democrats, fumble away the Senate too. Trump is eighty now, sinking deeper into that second and (very likely) last term. If he is going to install his fascist dictatorship, he is simply running out of time.
That is why so much focus has been on the Democrats and why, despite all their failures, the energy resides with them. The 2028 Democratic presidential primary will be the widest open since at least 1992. There is no actual frontrunner. There are no party elites who can steer the primary in one direction or another. Barack Obama played a strong hand in the 2016 and 2020 primaries, and he helped to persuade Joe Biden to finally step aside in 2024. In 2028, he will be a relic, along with the Clintons, who loomed for so long over the party. Plenty of debate will erupt over the Democratic National Committee’s calendar for the primary, but the truth is it won’t matter all that much. This will be a long, protracted primary. There are no powers at the DNC who can do anything, really, to favor one candidate over another. We’ve come a long way from Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s 2016 DNC and the fight over superdelegates. We’ve come a longer way from a time when party leaders were trusted by the voters.
This fall, the Democrats are going to win many races. This doesn’t mean, however, voters are overly fond of the Democratic Party. We have yet to escape the era of negative polarization. Voters might like individuals, but they recoil from party brands. The Republican and Democratic parties are both widely disliked. This doesn’t mean they’ll crumble; we don’t exist in a parliamentary system. It’s two parties, red vs. blue, first past the post. This means voter frustration—and volatility—comes in the primaries. Republicans learned this in the 2010s when the Tea Party and then Trump himself toppled the establishment and wrenched the GOP in a new, radical direction. Trump remade the party in his own image. The Democratic establishment was able to stop Bernie Sanders twice and this, into the 2020s, gave them a false sense of security. A Trump-style insurgency wouldn’t overtake their party. Then came Zohran Mamdani and the democratic socialist uprising of 2026.
As sympathetic as I might be to the DSA upsurge—I am an old friend of Mamdani and even once belonged to DSA—I am not going to tell you that many millions of Americans suddenly decided they loved socialism. They’ve certainly grown discontented under capitalism and no longer fear the “S” label now that it’s been more than thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union. The economic policies DSA supports are all welcomed by wide swaths of voters. It’s not as if the American healthcare system, as it currently stands, is popular. And DSA’s strong political organizing will ensure they stay competitive for a long time. One major part of DSA’s success, beyond the socialist branding, is how they’ve been able to tap into the anti-establishment mood coursing through American politics. DSA’s critique of the Democratic Party, resented by so many high-ranking politicians and liberal pundits (an assemblage that includes the likes of Hakeem Jeffries and Matt Yglesias), is resonating with a growing share of the electorate. They like that the DSA Democrats aren’t all that fond of the Democrats. When someone like Darializa Avila Chevalier has an old deleted tweet that says “fuck Kamala Harris,” she doesn’t pay a political price. When Mamdani himself is found to have never proudly endorsed Harris in 2024—he was a strong supporter of the Uncommitted movement—the voters shrug, even as the Democratic apparatchiks fume.
Why? Why are these elites so resented? Why can’t they discipline these democratic socialists? One answer lies in 2016, the single most important year for American elections in the twenty-first century. The other, in 2024. In these two years the crises of the elites emerged, crises they have never lived down. The result of their failures has been a democratic socialist and progressive uprising, a collapse of an old order, a reimagining of who can hold power. It’s a reality that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris never welcomed and tried hard to head off. But it was their decision-making that helped make it so. Whether they know it or not, they’ve reaped what they sowed.
