Can't Stop Won't Stop

This was a lead story in The New York Times today.

The short answer, which is actually rather long, is "No".

This is roughly the 12,258th "think piece" on progressive outsiders winning a few Democratic primaries.  It's nearing the "But Her Emails" saturation point. And these articles tend to come either in one of two flavors.  

First, Dire!Warnings! cursing Democrats for risking dooming us all by not becoming GOP Lite in order to chase the votes of disaffected Republicans.  These articles tend to come from (small wonder) recently-former Republicans whose "advice" to Democrats has always been -- rain or shine -- to keep moving rightward, ever-rightward -- in pursuit of an imaginary Center which is always, somehow, slipping over the horizon.  

Second, there are the breathless articles touting how a few members of the Democratic majority (do the math) are fighting back hard against a small number of progressives with whom they have no intention of sharing even a small corner of the Democrat's Big Tent.  Mind you, they had no fucking problem when it came to sharing our Big Tent with ghouls like Liz Cheney who spent their entire career slandering Democrats in the most monstrous language imaginable...but us New Deal Democrats get nothing but the stink-eye and a boot in the ass from the gatekeepers who own the velvet ropes. 

From The New York  Times, August 6, 2026:

Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left

One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.

The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful defeat of the year.

Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism. 

It will not shock you to learn that Third Way gets its money from Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech as well as outfits such as ExxonMobil and various health insurance companies.  All the usual suspects who would rather see a MAGA flag flying over this country forever than share the Democratic Party with actual progressives.

Now, it is rumored that this “Better Dead than Al-Sayed” gang of Regressives is led by a shadowy figure known only as “David Fucking Brooks”.  And two Fridays ago Mr. Brooks left his Bethesda Maryland compound just long enough to appear on the PBS News Hour where, practically in tears, he said this.

Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.

That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which the party is moving further and further away from the center, and therefore…

At which point, Brooks co-panelist, Jonathan Capehart, reached his limit of politely tolerating this old fraud's endless bullshit and interrupted him with:

I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket argument that the Democratic Party is running far left. 

That was the signal for the host – Amna Nawaz – to do the PBS thing of quickly moving on to the next topic at the slightest sign of conflict.

However, since I do not abide by PBS rules, I will just add that it is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at this moment".  

It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.

And of course Third Way is not a solo act. They have plenty of fellow travelers who are horrified that a few Democratic candidates have won their primaries in ways that Third Way, LLC does not approve of.  

From The Washington Post, June 3rd, 2026:

Centrist Democrats launch new pledge: ‘We are capitalist, not socialist’

Two Democrats in Congress who flipped Republican-held seats in 2024 are launching a pledge for their party’s candidates they hope will act as a rallying cry for centrists, calling for a “politics of persuasion over purity” and declaring that “we are capitalist, not socialist.”

The pledge is a direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt as democratic socialists such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) capture the party’s energy and activism.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Adam Gray (D-California) said they will unveil the pledge Wednesday afternoon at the center-left conference WelcomeFest, and hope to get candidates up and down the ballot to join them in signing it. 

From Common Dreams, February 9th, 2026:

‘One More Billionaire Front Group’: Centrist Dems Mocked Over New Initiative Led by Corporate Lobbyist

In fact, establishment panic over even mildly social-democratic ideas predates the current cycle by years.

From In These Times, seven years ago,  February 7, 2019:

Why Is the Political Establishment So Afraid of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal?

So, the short answer is "No".

The longer answer -- the reason why the answer is "No" -- is uglier and deeply embarrassing to the legacy media, which is why you will never hear them speak of it.  Because it has to do with what the "Tea Party" actually was.

For several years I bored you all silly with post after post after post about how the Tea Party was not some new, insurgent outsider group who were storming the barricades of the moribund Republican party.  That they were the Republican party: the same ignorant, racist, shoutycrackers Republican base they'd always been, but now that the Bush administration had shit the bed hard enough to crack the Earth's mantle, they needed their own, incredibly inconvenient past to go away so they could get on with the important work of having a full-on, eight-year-long, screaming mental breakdown over the election of a Black man as president.

And they accomplished this by A) Putting on stupid hats, waving Gadsden flags, and swearing that they'd never even heard of George W. Bush and, B) Getting the legacy media to go along with this massive fraud, which the legacy media was only too eager to do, given their own despicable complicity with the various crimes and treasons of the Bush administration.

And it worked.  And, as is our eternal fate, the only people willing to straight-up call bullshit on the whole scam were us dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically not a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam.  Ed Kilgore wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and E.J. Dionne. There was also this July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:

The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

No, no, no!  Definitely could not say that because that would violate the post-Dubya Generally Accepted Beltway Narrative that all problem are caused by "the extremes on Both Sides" and in the middle there is a "vital Center" full of millions of political virgins who had been moved by the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.

And to this very day, that lie continues to be one of those "Zombie lies", which everyone sorta knows is nonsense -- like Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves -- but has so completely passed into the realm of myth that the legacy media keeps right on pretending that it was actually true.  

In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth was so secure that by 2016 Joe Scarborough could finally come right out and say of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all knew it  and know with perfect certainty that there would be consequences (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

And that's the longer answer.  The Democrats are not facing their own "Tea Party" moment because There. Was. No. Tea. Party.  There was just the Bush-Off Machine goin' like 60 to rebrand the Republican base.  

What corporate Democrats are facing are ... New Deal Democrats.  People who revere FDR as the man who crushed fascism, and whose programs built the Middle Class, strengthened the union movement and helped insure that old age and poverty weren't a death sentence.   

People who remember that FDR was called a commie by the Republican party and the Republican media every inch of the way.

People who look at the mess the establishment has made of this country and think the Middle Class could used some help, the aged, infirm and poor could use some help, that good health care should be affordable, that unions are a good thing, that robber barons and Republican looters are bleeding us dry and, most importantly, for any of that to happen, fascism in America must be discredited and destroyed, root and branch.  

I Am The Liberal Media!