cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/60052
The corporate wing of the Democratic Party is looking to fight back after three insurgent progressive candidates knocked off establishment favorites in primary elections in New York this week.
Axios reported on Thursday that centrist Democrats are gearing up to organize against progressives and democratic socialists, who have been racking up victories over the last two years by presenting themselves as an alternative to a failed status quo that lost the 2024 election to President Donald Trump.
One anonymous centrist Democrat predicted to Axios that “there’s going to be a war” between factions in the party, referring to democratic socialists as “bomb-throwers, not problem solvers.”
“Clearly there has to be organization,” another centrist Democrat explained to Axios of their faction’s plans. “You can’t just wring your hands on this stuff.”
To push back against recent victories by democratic socialists, 15 centrist Democrats on Thursday announced their support for the “Promise to America” manifesto in which they emphasize their support for capitalism, law enforcement, and “fiscal discipline.”
In an interview with The Washington Post, Jessica Killin, a Democratic candidate running for US Congress in Colorado who signed the manifesto, said that moderate Democrats need “to be organized and clear in our vision,” arguing that democratic socialists “should not be the face of our party.”
Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY), another signatory of the manifesto, told the Post that he gave the democratic socialists credit for their organizing, while warning that “that kind of campaign and that type of ideology is not going to play with the people in our districts.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), however, pushed back on the centrists’ efforts to marginalize progressive insurgents.
On the floor of the US House on Friday, Khanna made the case for the growing number of progressives within the ranks of elected Democratic Party officials by saying that voters across the country have shown their hunger for this brand of politics.
“The progressive movement is winning across the country, from the heart of New York to Michigan to Maine,” Khanna said. “The people are saying no to foreign wars and they’re saying no to genocide in Gaza. They’re saying no to the unfair and lopsided economy that has allowed a few people to hoard extreme wealth and power, and they’re saying yes to Medicare for All.”
Progressives are the future.
No war, no genocide, no oligarchs, and yes to Medicare for All. pic.twitter.com/sJQLoXX5e2
— Rep. Ro Khanna (@RepRoKhanna) June 26, 2026Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the New York Health Campaign, accused the centrist Democrats of offering a substance-free platform that would not improve Americans’ lives.
“‘Centrism’ is just performative compromise devoid of critical thinking, policy, or ideology,” D’Arrigo wrote. “It’s a political vehicle that gives permission to do nothing in service of protecting a status quo that benefits large corporate donors and special interest groups who fund both parties.”
In an interview with The Independent, Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, argued that centrists’ fears are misplaced if they believe that the democratic socialists would act as obstructionists and saboteurs as the Tea Party once did.
“I don’t want to replicate the Freedom Caucus on our side,” Balint insisted, “because it has made this place completely and totally dysfunctional, and we are not delivering for Americans.”
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
Is there even a mechanism to kick someone out of the Dem party?
No, which is why entryism has any validity in the first place.
People here often give DSA candidates shit for not just running in bourgeois elections (which Lenin said explicitly socialists should do, it was a huge part of how the RSDLP became a revolutionary vanguard) but for running for a bourgeois party, but that ignores that the Democratic and Republican parties aren’t political parties in the traditional sense of the word, and DSA is much closer to what the RSDLP was.
They have no mechanisms for removing people. They have no real membership structure to speak of. They’re less of a political party and more like another layer of the political infrastructure, like the house and the senate. They’re explicitly built into our political system, not just in practice but written into laws. There are states where the voting maps are specifically drawn by an equal committee of republicans and democrats for example.
My only criticism of socialists running as democrats is that in certain areas socialists should run as republicans instead. They’re equally valid strategies and in some ways the Republican Party is structured to make it even harder for them to kick out members they disagree with.
Intriguing. I had that thought as well. But most socialists and progressives are falling for the kayfabe where the Democrats are the face while Republicans are the heel. If they actually see the Democrats and Republicans for what they really are, you’ll see a lot more entryism into the Republican party. I don’t see why entryism into the Democratic party is somehow so much more viable than entryism into the Republican party to the point where entryism into the Republican party isn’t even attempted.
Entryism is about commandeering the party from within, so how viable the strategy is is more about how you could actually seize power from within more than the current party platform and current party leadership since the platform would be changed and the leadership would be purged anyways once socialists are in control. Entryism into a fascist party would make sense if the fascist party has absolutely no guardrails to prevent a hostile takeover from within.
100%, and the Republican Party has less guardrails
yeah i sort of agree with you. dems dont function as a political party. however, i dont think socialists should run as dems still. its a deeply deeply bourgeois org. its like trying to buy amazon shares in an attempt to nationalize it.
How should they run though? That’s my whole point is the Democratic Party isn’t really an organization as such, anymore than the House of Representatives is an organization. It’s a piece of the deliberative assembly of the United States.
I’m stretching to make a point here, but you could almost say the US legislature is actually a quadricameral legislature, where the House and Senate are each further divided into two separate assemblies, the Republicans and the Democrats. They’re not really organizations in their own right the way that the DSA is.
i see your point, and it is kind of stretching it. personally i am against associating with dems or reps, and building an independent party. i feel like continual support of the dems (by running actually good / popular candidates with them for eg.) just legitimizes them and further sustains their (donor money-racking + genocide support) operation. like, in the end it just funnels more money and labour into the dems that could be used for a worker party, no? of course the same critique applies to electoralism as a whole, but campaigning as an independent org is a different story than taking on the dem branding / image.
The problem is the American electoral system is designed to include the Republican and Democratic parties and exclude others. Again, in many states it’s not just de facto, it’s de jure, literally written into the law to give the Democratic and Republican parties certain powers.
Saying we should “build an independent party” feels like it’s like one level off from saying “build an independent House of Representatives” which is like, not how this works.
There could be something to trying to avoid being subsumed as “part of the Democratic Party” but if that’s the worry it would be more effective to run socialists both as republicans and democrats rather than an independent party, as the systems are specifically designed to prevent independent parties from forming.
If we are already stretching terms, then building a party is sort of like that. You are building an alternative democratic system that represents the masses.
On running as dems and reps, I imagine that would be very confusing, but also very interesting to see.