The Democratic Party Fights Back Against the Socialist Takeover

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

 

Joe Biden didn’t mince words when his White House set out to kneecap the radicals in his party who nearly cost him the presidential nomination in 2020 and, it was thought at the time, robbed them of what should have been a better election cycle.

 

The presidential primary system, Biden insisted, was not only a relic of a bygone age in desperate need of an update. It was a moral abomination. “For decades,” he wrote, “Black voters in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic Party but have been pushed to the back of the early primary process.”

 

The evocative language was designed to cast defenders of the existing primary calendar as the inheritors of the legacy of racial segregation in America. Biden wasn’t the only Democrat arguing as much. “What reflects the Democratic Party more, South Carolina or Iowa, New Hampshire or Georgia?” asked South Carolina Democrat James Clayburn. “Come on now.” Jaime Harrison, then the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, agreed. “The Democratic Party looks like America, and our nominating process should too,” he concluded.

 

These Democrats weren’t dragging racial dynamics into this fight merely to strongarm progressives into submission by confronting them with the liberal consensus on race. It reflected another consensus among Democrats that the highly educated, relatively affluent, and — most importantly to the left — predominantly white Democratic primary voters overrepresented in New Hampshire and Iowa were too radical for the country.

 

“We have to commit to not saying the words ‘defund the police’ ever again,” future Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger famously barked to her colleagues in an angry conference call following a disappointing showing among congressional Democrats in 2020. “We have to not use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.” The establishmentarians in Biden’s party took that imperative to heart. And although they’ve been losing the internal messaging war against the insurgent socialists in their ranks, the Democratic machine is fighting back with some success.

 

With last Friday’s Democratic National Committee vote, Democrats finished what Biden started by voting to make South Carolina their party’s first presidential primary contest in 2028. “It will be followed by Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia,” Politico reported. Iowa, which has “led the calendar for decades,” has been relegated to the middle of the pack.

 

But if Democrats thought it could emotionally blackmail progressives into taking this one on the chin, they were wrong.

 

One irritated DNC member complained that “the establishment is trying to fight the winds of change” even as “the public is swinging left.” Clyburn — the doyen of South Carolina Democratic politics — was singled out for censure by the communist cosplay enthusiast, Hasan Piker. According to Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic, the DNC’s maneuver has nothing to do with elevating black voters. If you “give them anonymity in private,” he said of the committee, “they’re explicit the whole rationale is stopping a left-wing insurgent.”

 

Indeed, that’s what a political party that is the master of its own destiny should do. Political parties should enforce a set of shared principles. As vehicles for winning elections, they should select for candidates that are loyal to those values and have the best chance of winning majorities.

 

The socialist left is right to worry about the diluted influence of their youngish base of “downwardly mobile” white voters. Evidence has emerged in primary after primary that the people who presume to speak for the interests of minorities and the working class tend to repel both.

 

Democrats could be fighting the last war here. It took four years for the GOP to learn that its own reforms to the primary calendar after 2012, which were designed to advantage an early front-runner, cleared the way for Donald Trump’s nomination. Likewise, if these reforms are a mistake, Democrats will learn that only in hindsight.

 

For now, at least, the party’s establishmentarians are fighting back against the socialist takeover of their party the only way they know how: meekly and by committee. That’s better than nothing.