Applying a therapist’s understanding to the Democrats’ relationship with their progressive activists.
There is a strange spectacle unfolding in American politics. The Democratic establishment calculatingly spends its dwindling energies bowing to its growing and increasingly radical left wing that has openly declared its intention to replace it. The Democratic Socialists of America, the streamers, the campus activists, and the insurgent candidates who style themselves as the party’s conscience have never hidden their goal. They do not want a seat at the table. They want the whole tent, and they have said so. Yet the establishment responds not with resistance but with flattery, cheerfully murmurating about how big that tent is. That now proverbial tent has become a cage, and the Democrats are in it.
To understand why, we have to understand the historically peculiar power of the radical left. In raw numbers, it remains a minority within the party, but numbers have never been its weapon. Its weapon is intensity. The far left is rich in volunteers who knock on doors in the rain, the small-dollar donors who give again and again, and the online armies that can make or break a candidate in a single news cycle. It punches far above its weight, and in an era of razor-thin margins, a few points of enthusiasm or apathy decide who sits in the Senate. The establishment knows it cannot win without that energy, and it knows that if it crosses these activists, it will be primaried out of existence. So the Democratic leadership is simultaneously dependent on and terrified of the very people who have promised to unseat it. Conservatives will recognize the dynamic from the Tea Party years, with one crucial difference: The Tea Party demanded that politicians keep the promises they campaigned on. The nouveau left demands that Democrats break them. That is not a coalition. That is the establishment’s captivity.
The enslavement takes two forms, and voters should learn to recognize both because failure to do so could truly create an existential threat to democracy. In the first, the candidate genuflects during the campaign. He obsequiously praises the radicals, adopts their language, nods along with positions he privately thinks are foolish, and quietly hopes that once he is safely elected with their help, he can shed the costume and govern as the moderate he claims to be in private conversations with donors. In the second form, the process runs in reverse. The candidate campaigns as a sensible centrist, wins the suburbs and the swing voters, and then, once in office, governs from the left, which is where she intended to go all along.
Whether the candidate fakes radicalism to win or fakes moderation to win, the voter is the mark in a shell game. He is never quite sure which cup holds the pea, and he is not supposed to be. He just needs to be kept confused well enough and long enough to stay in his own plebeian version of the cage.
The deeper humiliation is that the actual masters do not even pretend to be the junior partners they are. They aggressively say the quiet part out loud. Hasan Piker, who has become a kingmaker of sorts among young progressives, recently turned to the subject of James Talarico, the Democrat Senate candidate in Texas. Piker said his movement would need to remind Talarico that they are “the force that allowed him to win this seat of power,” and that if Talarico wanted to keep it, he would have to play ball. This is not the language of a constituent addressing a representative. It is the language of a creditor addressing a debtor, or of a taskmaster reminding a laborer who owns his time. Mixing metaphors is usually considered problematic. In this context, the chaos is so rich that such mixing is genuinely called for.
This is the trap from which there is no clean exit. The establishment Democrat imagines that if he just endures one more cycle, one more primary season, one more term, the radicals will eventually leave him alone and he can finally govern as he wishes. But the radicals will not leave him alone, because their leverage never expires. Every vote he casts and every position he takes is measured against the question of whether it will provoke a primary challenge, and so every vote is cast looking over his shoulder rather than looking ahead.
My clinical work with couples is rooted in the principles of differentiation, the capacity to hold on to yourself while remaining in meaningful connection with people who are pressuring you to abandon yourself. A well-differentiated person can say, “I hear you, I care about you, and I still disagree,” without collapsing into appeasement, exploding into rejection, or launching a frontal attack. A poorly differentiated person attempts to regulate himself by self-correcting according to the anxiety of those around him. He does not ask what he believes. He asks what will keep the loudest person in the room calm. The modern Democrat establishment is a case study in poor differentiation at the scale of a national party. It has fused itself to the emotional reactivity of its most intense faction, and it has publicly mistaken that fusion for unity.
That is why it cannot lead. Leadership requires a fixed point, a set of convictions you are willing to hold even when they cost you. A leader is a compass. He points in the same direction regardless of the weather, and those who follow him know where they are going. What the Democrats have offered instead is a weathervane, an instrument exquisitely sensitive to every gust from the left, spinning to face whichever direction the wind happens to blow that week. You cannot navigate by a weathervane. You can only learn from it which way the storm is going.
American voters deserve to know what they are choosing. When they vote for a supposedly moderate Democrat, they are not voting for the person on the ballot. They are voting for whoever holds that person’s cage key. And on the evidence of the past two years, the key is held by a uniquely energized and organized mob of activists who have announced, without embarrassment, that they intend to collect on their debt.
Daniel Winston is a marriage and family therapist who studied with Dr. David Schnarch, creator of the differentiation-based Crucible Approach, from 1998 until Schnarch’s death in 2020. He runs twelve-hour intensives for couples, has trained more than 150 senior therapists worldwide in the Crucible Approach, and volunteers as a first responder medic and on a search and rescue team.
American Thinker
