The Progressive Ouroboros

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, November 11, 2025

 

Ezra Levin is fit to be tied. Speaking to the New York Times, the executive director of the progressive activist organization Indivisible described the deal to end the government shutdown to which eight Democratic senators consented as an act of “surrender” to “bad policy.” He went much further in an interview with podcast host Aaron Parnas.

 

The “Republicans were on the ropes,” Levin insisted. The Democrats’ demands were popular. Last month’s “No Kings” protests were well attended, and they preceded one of the best election nights Democrats have had in several years. Everything was going great for Democrats until they were stabbed in the back by their supposed allies.

 

“It’s been a year of us trying to convince them to fight back against the regime,” Levin mourned. “I don’t think they’re going to be convinced. I think the only thing that is going to build the kind of unified opposition party that fights back is going to be primaries.” Levin’s first target, oddly enough, is a Democratic lawmaker who tried unsuccessfully to prolong the government shutdown and lost control of his caucus in the process: Chuck Schumer.

 

To survey the discourse on the left, Levin is speaking for much of the progressive movement. Thus, Democrats may be about to experience a speed-run version of the Tea Party-style enthusiasm that remade the GOP in the last decade. But what began as an effort on the right to compel Republican lawmakers to observe conservative ideological consistency devolved by the end of the 2010s into a spectacle in which the theatrics of opposition were held in higher value than the competency of that opposition. Ideological consistency took a backseat to high dudgeon and drama. The outlines of a similar degeneration, one that took years to fully mature on the right, is already apparent on the left.

 

Nancy Pelosi’s retirement announcement has set off a mad scramble among Democratic aspirants for high office to secure her safe San Francisco-based congressional seat. One of several candidates vying to replace the longtime representative, Saikat Chakrabarti, has spent the better part of the last ten years positioning himself as the progressives’ progressive.

 

As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Chakrabarti was among the chief proponents of the Green New Deal — an enterprise that “wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” he confessed, but, rather, “a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” He was quick to adopt the language of intersectionality when that was the fashion, retailing unimaginative progressive policy prescriptions as a means to achieve racial justice. He co-founded Justice Democrats — an activist organization that campaigns on behalf of congressional “Squad” members, including AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.

 

The Washington Post deemed him the “chief of change” and a “movement” leader. The New Yorker styled him one of a handful of progressive figures in Washington who “supplanted the Obama generation.” And he was no go-along-to-get-along type. Chakrabarti picked fights inside the Democratic tent, up to the point that the New York Times described him as the “unelected symbol of the party’s growing disunity.” During one forgettable legislative conflict over a border security funding package that progressives opposed, for example, Chakrabarti said the Democrats who voted with the GOP are “hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s.”

 

That sort of talk isn’t going to win you many friends inside the Capitol, but it does signal a sufficient level of radicalism to the progressive base. Or so Chakrabarti thought.

 

Today, however, Chakrabarti’s progressive credentials, “or lack thereof,” are now being called into question by the very elements on the left he set out to court. The San Fransisco Gazetteer reported late last month that the Democratic Socialists of America are working diligently behind the scenes to derail Chakrabarti’s candidacy because he “does not have a track record of pushing radical politics in the Bay Area” — not to the DSA’s satisfaction, anyway. That and the fact that he amassed a fortune for himself working in San Fransisco’s fintech sector are assumed to be off-putting to the masses he would presume to lead.

 

Beyond the DSA, radical elements in the Bay Area have condemned Chakrabarti for being insufficiently committed to far-left candidates for municipal office. As one former city supervisor insisted, his “moderate political donations” to Democrats who fall short of the revolutionary ideal render AOC’s onetime right-hand man suspect. “Why on Earth would anyone believe that Saikat Chakrabarti will move the Democratic Party to the left?” one activist with the Bernie Sanders-backed group Our Revolution insisted. After all, “Nearly all he’s done in San Francisco is move it to the right?”

 

That otherworldly perspective may not have much purchase outside the circles populated by progressive activists, but it could be illustrative of the mania that might overtake the far left if it embarks on a hunt for heretics in its ranks. The revolution eats its own. And after having spent his entire career in public life cultivating a revolutionary political ethic, Chakrabarti may find that he’s about to become lunch.