Some readers who follow US elections might remember a backroom political strategist named James Carville, who is credited with having almost singlehandedly rejuvenated the Democratic Party way back when, guiding Clinton into the presidency after three successive GOP wins.
He was irascible, rude, brilliant and focused, and his very Southern accent tended to disguise his rapier tongue. He is 82 now, as sharp as ever, and somewhat of an icon, a hero to many in the party.
Last week he was interviewed by Al Hunt on a show called Politics War Room about the sudden leftward shift of the Democratic Party where, in the wake of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s support, three congressional candidates, so-called progressives, upended well-funded Democratic centrist incumbents.
Carville’s reaction?
“These people are not Democrats…I’m done, I’m not in that fucking political party.”
What happened on 23 June was, in hindsight, not that surprising. Two of the candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, belong to an organisation called the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) along with Mamdani, joining Chris Rabb, who had won a few weeks earlier, and 29-year-old Milat Kiros, on 20 June. This organisation is now the core of the Democratic extreme left-wing arm, boasting Bernie Sanders, AOC and Rashida Tlaib as members.
The core policies of DSA are vanilla left wing-planks, barely worth repeating (pro-union, anti-big business, anti-landlord, pro-expanded government and state programs for the poor and middle class, free education, etc). But at the edges of these positions something shriller can be heard by some of the new candidates. First, an obsession with Israel to the exclusion of all other global affairs (and to the point of proposing its dismantling as a state, which was the reason for Carville’s meltdown). Also, the praising (in at least one case) of Hamas, the removing of national borders, the defunding of police, the closing of prisons, the immediate legalisation of all undocumented workers and other previously politically suicidal propositions.
Gift to the GOP
To be fair, some of these positions are well outside of DSA’s core, but one can be assured that this will be a gift to the GOP, who will seize on the worst of these and present them to the public as what will happen if the Democrats win. And the GOP, well on the way to trouble at the midterms may pull victory from defeat by using DSA-provided fearmongering.
Many centrist Democrats are panicking because the swing to the left is not a mirage – one report has DSA-aligned candidates taking 10% of congressional seats at the midterms. They have discovered their voice and a mainly young constituency willing to vote with their feet.
It seems to me that this was an inevitable reaction to what has happened to the GOP which, under the near-hermetically sealed ownership of Trump, has moved ever rightwards, sporting its own disquieting extremities like endless ICE detentions, DOGE, the suppression of free speech, the adversarial stance against erstwhile global allies and the wielding of previously independent agencies like the FBI as tools of political revenge.
And so we get the two parties, separated for 100 years by minor and manageable differences in policies – some cultural matters (abortion, religion, gay and other minority rights and protections) and some economic matters (taxes, protectionism, regulation). But the width of the political spectrum is much wider now. A yawning chasm would be more accurate.
Worse, it now seems as though there is a diminishing definition of what it is to be an American. One section of the country will not talk to the other (let alone break bread with them), and they wish each other ill. One is tempted to use the cliché “a country divided” but it is more complicated than that, because there is at least an anxious middle, shrunken perhaps, but still there.
Unrestrained tribalism
None of this, in truth, has very much to do with Mamdani, or Avila Chevalier, or Claire Valdez, or any single candidate’s fondness for a particular slogan. It is what happens when a primary system collides with a generation that has watched the Republican Party demonstrate, in real time and at considerable profit for loyalists, exactly what unrestrained tribalism gets you.
Gallup found that the share of Americans calling themselves political moderates had fallen, by 2025, to a record low of 33 per cent. Pew has found something similar from the other direction – Democratic frustration with their own party has spiked sharply in the past year, and the chief complaint is not that it drifted too far left but that it did not push back hard enough against the right.
A flank does not need a conspiracy to form. It only needs a vacuum and an audience that rewards conviction over compromise – and American politics, courtesy of algorithmic feeds and social media, currently rewards almost nothing else.
Which is how a normal, survivable disagreement calcifies into something closer to mutual excommunication. In 2016, fewer than half of partisans on either side thought the opposing party was more immoral than ordinary Americans. By last year that figure had risen to 72 per cent of Republicans and 63 per cent of Democrats.
This is not a disagreement about marginal tax rates. It is two tribes that have each concluded, with matching confidence, that the other is not merely wrong but bad. That, with midterms around the corner, is a harbinger of a messy divorce from common cause and nation-building.
There is precedent in US history.
Tore the country apart
Lincoln, on the eve of a war that tore the country apart, reached not for a policy but a sentiment, urging Americans toward “the better angels of our nature.” It did not work, not in 1861.
What eventually did – after four years, more than six hundred thousand dead, and one more inaugural address later – was the harder, plainer instruction to proceed “with malice toward none, with charity for all”.
Whether enough Americans are willing to extend that charity to neighbours they currently consider unrecognisable – not after a war this time, but instead of one – is the only question that matters, and it will need a great statesman to deliver, from whichever party.
He or she is not really visible right now, but perhaps they are there, somewhere in the shadows, waiting to save America.
[Image: Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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