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Rather than continue internecine fights, Democratic elites should join the grassroots in fighting the real adversary—the brutal, violent, white-nationalist deportation campaign now tearing this country apart.
With midterms approaching and the future of US.democracy balanced on a knife's edge, a media-driven moral panic about the Democratic Socialists of America is dividing the Democratic Party. That's unhelpful. Everyone knows Democrats need to unify under a big tent to retake Congress and check President Donald Trump's authoritarianism. This isn't the first unproductive debate of its kind. Before it came another fight—over the proper role of resistance to Trump's immigration crackdown—driven by the same hand-wringing, among the same people, that has slowed progress for years. As with immigration, the lesson is the same: it is grassroots resistance, not elite caution, that is winning this fight, and Democrats' cowardice in scapegoating their own base is what's holding the party back.
CNN reports that Trump is polling lower than Herbert Hoover did in the Great Depression, and a recent Fox News poll shows that voters now favor Democrats over Republicans on immigration. That is a huge turnaround—the GOP led by eight points on immigration as recently as April. That's also a huge collapse for Trump on what was once his signature issue. But it shouldn't be shocking or surprising. Trump's (and by extension all Republicans’) popularity on immigration was bound to go down from the moment he was sworn in. The only question is why it took so long.
Trump's failure on immigration was baked in, predestined, and unavoidable. The tragedy is that too many Democratic leaders and policy influencers have never understood this. Their tepid and craven response to Trump’s barbaric treatment of immigrants has hindered emerging bottom-up national consensus that can overtake Trumpism.
For years, Democratic party elites urged immigrants and advocates to abandon their ferocious defense of immigrants' rights. They said endlessly that the only way to win good immigration policies was to compromise on the bad ones. Their path to comprehensive immigration reform required grassroots activists to fall in line. Pundits, think tank thought leaders, and the philanthropic donor class insisted it was smart politics not to challenge the Republicans' dishonest framing of immigration. That is, as a crime and jobs problem to be solved only with more policing, as a security threat to be solved with militarized borders, and a public-health emergency to be solved by ending asylum. And that's not to mention the cultural panic.
While Democrats continue to read polls and ruminate over slide decks, the vilified street protests are doing their work for them.
Talk tough, they told us. Give Republicans what they want on the border, the prisons, the boots, and guns. Avoid using the word “amnesty” to talk about legalization. Say no to "sanctuary cities,” say yes to the Chamber of Commerce, and shut up about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Then they might let you have some extra green cards. And if we don’t win immigration reform in Congress, we were told, at least we will have an issue that will keep Latinos voting for Democrats in the next election. And we can even tell undecided voters and moderate Republicans that we’re just as tough as the other guys. In short, the Democratic elite felt confident it could play all sides.
But the visas never came. Reform never happened. Trump won the White House, and won again (this time with a higher share of Latino support), and the Republicans took Congress and the Supreme Court along with it. How did prospects for immigration reform and the Democrats political advantage disappear into thin air?
Democrats, consultants, and talking heads needed to pin the blame. Immigrants themselves were the first scapegoats. Newcomers made lunch-pail voters nervous. Asylum-seekers were next. Too many, too fast. America was full. "No vacancy," said the cover of The Atlantic magazine.
But then, curiously, a new culprit emerged: grassroots immigrant-rights organizations like mine—known derisively by collective shorthand as "the groups” among the Acela corridor class. They said "the groups" had pushed President Joe Biden to be too radical on immigration. Too "open borders." Too tolerant of people fleeing poverty and death and seeking refuge here. Too heedless of public opinion. Too sanctimonious.
That view was always wrong. Let's unpack why.
Trump's first presidential campaign began with an explicitly racist anti-immigrant lie about Mexicans. He ran on his promise to build a border wall to keep out criminal rapists and terrorists and to win back jobs for native-born Americans. He made his racist, xenophobic agenda more explicit when he ran for and won a second term, replacing the promise of the big, beautiful wall with a pledge to do mass deportations.
But that fascist tactic—promising quick, brutally simple answers to complex problems—was bound to fail. Lofty promises on immigration are easy for candidates because immigration is a meta issue that encompasses the fiction that a country tells about itself. For the MAGA movement (always a minority of the country, it’s worth remembering), America is a secure homeland for white English speakers. For Trump, it’s more like a vast country club, exclusive and gated like his fabled Mar-a-Lago.
In his first term, Trump’s deranged fantasies about immigration and other things started vaporizing immediately. Support for his false promises precipitously and steadily declined soon after his inauguration and throughout his term. The wall never got built. America didn't become Great Again.
Now, just as in Trump's first time in the White House, a huge chasm has opened up between lies and reality. The gaps are many. Get criminals? They're already covered by the criminal-justice system. Seal the border? It already was. Make America Great Again, again? With masked death squads terrorizing American cities? Yeah, right.
Mismanaging expectations is nothing new for modern presidents. George W. Bush had the right instincts on immigration, but he couldn’t close the bipartisan deal handed to him by Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). President Barack Obama had lofty goals and rhetoric. But he became the deporter-in-chief, a terrible stain on his historic legacy, and one that prefigured Trump’s outright war on immigrants. President Biden’s brightest moment in an otherwise dismal campaign was his promise to defend asylum. Until he ended it.
That cycle of promise and betrayal on immigration had become the rule, not the exception. Everyone knows the immigration system needs modernizing—amnesty paired with sensible enforcement measures—but with Congress dysfunctional beyond all recognition, no president has been able to deliver legislation. So they have all reached for executive power instead, using it not just to govern but to wedge and divide the opposition party. For a while, it worked. Republicans were in full-scale disarray after Obama's 2012 reelection, with voices from Sean Hannity to Charles Krauthammer calling for surrender on immigration reform.
This all changed with Trump. As a candidate, he defied the conventional wisdom of Republican elites with overt racism. In office, he became truly unique: the first president to triple down on an authoritarian, white-supremacist agenda rather than tack to the middle. Trump has a lap-dog Republican Congress and more leverage than any other recent president to cut a comprehensive immigration deal. But he likely won't—certainly not when his top ghoul, Stephen Miller, is pursuing a vast ethnic-cleansing campaign instead. By now, the only constant in Trump’s addled mind is probably a belief in his own lies about immigration and in the notion that punching down at immigrants is the only way to save himself.
With Trump's popularity on immigration destined to fail, and with daily images of ICE cruelty that shock the conscience, all Democrats had to do was stay united in opposition. First, to help the people they had been promising citizenship for more than 20 years. Second, to help themselves. Instead, their divisions in the face of Trump's campaign of white supremacy have been uniquely ugly and counterproductive. Democratic elites made the same mistake Republican elites made in their 2012 autopsy, only in reverse. They mistook the repudiation of Biden’s failure as a ratification of Trump’s racist vision of America. The difference is that this time, far more people are suffering for it. And democracy itself is now at risk if Democrats don’t change course.
Cecilia Muñoz and Frank Sharry—the two leading Obama-era voices guiding Democrats on immigration from inside and outside the White House—should have blamed themselves for decades of failure. Instead, they conveniently blamed "the groups." Senate Democrats surrendered on the racist Laken Riley Act. Two supposedly progressive Democrats, Sens. Jon Ossoff (Ga.) and Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), are already calculating how much this capitulation will cost their 2028 presidential ambitions.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) assailed Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) for standing up for Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the former day laborer whom the Trump administration defamed, abducted, and disappeared into a torture prison in El Salvador.
And it's not just Obama alums and elected officials. Pundits from Matt Yglesias to the Pod Save America bros have warned of doom if Democrats don't keep the groups in check and moderate on immigration. How many New York Times op-eds have blamed the 1965 immigration act for the rise of right-wing xenophobia? How many have blamed immigrants for upsetting white voters? Not even hashtags were spared—somehow #AbolishICE got blamed for everything.
Meanwhile, the maligned groups in the field have labored on—with far more to do, with far fewer resources, and with none of the luxury enjoyed by the elites who spent their time pointing fingers. There's no time for that when the work itself is the emergency.
They are helpers to those in need. Across the country, in response to what is now a full-scale domestic human rights crisis, leadership has come from the streets, not from those in elected office. People assisting neighbors. Defending their communities. Protecting kids. Showing up at courthouses and ICE check-ins so no one faces fascism alone. And immigrants and citizens standing and marching together, courageously, in the streets to demand: ICE out of our cities.
While Democrats continue to read polls and ruminate over slide decks, the vilified street protests are doing their work for them. The resistance that Beltway Democrats shun has become their lifeline—turning the tide on the one issue Trump was supposed to own.
And those sanctuary policies, once treated as the source of Democrats' problems back in 2016? They have literally stopped hundreds of thousands of deportations—in police stations, in jails, in courthouses across the country.
The Beltway Democrats' skittishness—their craven blaming of immigrants to conceal their own failure—has been a brake on progress. Those people need to join the resistance. Do something. Help someone. And stop bashing the people you claim to defend.
Absent the mother of all pivots from the White House, the downward trajectory for Trump on immigration will continue inexorably. The only questions are about the rate of decline and what comes next.
Rather than continue internecine fights, Democratic elites should join the grassroots in fighting the real adversary—the brutal, violent, white-nationalist deportation campaign now tearing this country apart. They should get out of their conference rooms and Zoom calls and hit the streets with us. A number of members of Congress have already followed Sen. Van Hollen's lead, forcing their way into the warehouses where immigrants are jailed in defense of their constituents. Every Democrat should do the same. Not as a photo op, but because it's right. And because in every election to come, Democrats will be judged not by their campaign promises, but by what they did in years Trump was in office.
The stakes go beyond the midterms. Fighting back now, unequivocally, is what will get Democratic leaders ready for what comes after Trump's inevitable downfall. They need to think about the vast possibilities ahead—restoring truth to immigration discourse, and pursuing policies that make a real difference in the lives of real people. They should be as ambitious in proposing new ways to help immigrants and rebuild this country as Trump has been in trying to destroy it.
The mega-billionaire's promise to spend somewhere between $100 and $120 million on congressional races this year shouldn’t be viewed as a problem. It should be recognized as an opportunity.
Elon Musk will be spending $100 million to $120 million in at least eight states to help elect Republicans in November, according to The New York Times.
Musk’s spending is set to begin next month, targeting Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio, and potentially North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. Musk will also spend in House races in states including California, Wisconsin, and Washington.
The money won’t be spent only on TV advertising. Musk’s “America PAC” is lining up firms that focus on knocking on voters’ doors. Fake grassroots.
But Musk’s money shouldn’t be viewed as a problem. It’s an opportunity.
A Republican candidate who stinks of Musk must be presumed to be against average working Americans.
Recall that Musk spent millions of dollars on a pivotal election for Wisconsin’s highest court in April 2025. It pitted Musk’s candidate — Trump-endorsed former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel — against progressive Dane County Judge Susan Crawford. The winner would determine the supermajority of the court.
Schimel lost, largely due to Musk’s support — which backfired. The public was outraged that the richest person in the world was spending some of his massive wealth on the election. They also recoiled at the wreckage Musk wrought at DOGE. And his unbridled racism.
In Crawford’s victory speech, she acknowledged the significance of Musk’s money to the outcome of the race. “As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin,” she said. “And we won.”
She described the election as a victory over an “unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court,” adding “Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”
Musk’s support will backfire again this year, in race after race — if voters know about it.
So let’s make it a kind of smell test for any Republican that Musk and his “America PAC” are supporting. A Republican candidate who stinks of Musk must be presumed to be against average working Americans.
Keep your nose to the ground. If you get a whiff of Musk, alert your family, friends, neighbors, and associates. If they’re even slightly uncertain about whom to support, the Musk test should convince them.
Given our scale of inequality, the egalitarian reforms of democratic socialism are only the start of what we should strive for.
Other than the continual circus in the White House, the most important political story in America may be the resurgence of democratic socialism. Ignited by the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the movement achieved its biggest victory last year when self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. Now, fueled by backlash to the extremist MAGA agenda and multiple ongoing crises, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have claimed 38 electoral wins so far this year and 120,000 active members, making them the largest socialist organization in US history.
Naturally, this has the establishment's hair on fire in both political parties. On the Democratic side, leadership oscillates between snubbing democratic socialists and disowning them outright, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) calling Mamdani’s rise a “gift to the Republicans” that makes Democrats look radical. Centrist-liberal magazine The Atlantic referred to DSA as “a parasite” that was “hijacking the Democratic Party.”
On the Republican side, the hysteria is even more severe. President Donald Trump, who seems quite enamored of Mamdani on a personal level, called him a “100% communist lunatic.” Recently Trump has been trying to resurrect the Red Scare, labeling DSA candidates “hardcore, godless communists” and invoking communism some 94 times in just a few weeks. Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller, connected leftist politicians, communism, and political terrorism into one vast conspiracy and declared it the “fatal cancer of civilization.”
Despite the delirium, many democratic socialist policies are popular, particularly those that expand public services and safety nets for healthcare and childcare. Such ideas only sound radical in a nation grown numb to the extremes of capitalism. But following decades of upward redistribution, worsening public services, deteriorating labor power, and all the other abuses of our current system, democratic socialism isn’t radical at all—it’s a compromise.
Like most political labels in America, “socialism” has been thoroughly twisted and misused. In 1952, President Harry Truman remarked that socialism was “a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.” It was a Republican slur for the New Deal, public power, social security, bank deposit insurance, free and independent labor organizations, and “almost anything that helps all the people,” in Truman’s words.
To this day, that’s about as good a definition as any. In America, “socialism” is often used to describe—or denigrate—almost any publicly funded, government-run service: libraries, parks, fire departments, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, highways, public schools, safety net hospitals, animal shelters, community pools, and so on. Under this definition, the US military might be the most expensive socialist program in history.
Elites should feel relieved that people are only demanding, say, a few public options for groceries, rather than revolting.
This American concept of socialism, though, bears little resemblance to the theories formulated by Karl Marx. Marx articulated socialism in direct opposition to capitalism, under which individuals or companies own and control land, natural resources, and means of production. Capitalists rent labor—at least in societies where they can’t own it—and fight to make the terms of that rental as favorable to themselves as possible. This tug of war between owners and workers, in Marx’s view, is the central struggle of history. Marx sought to invert that structure, advocating that ownership, control, and the fruits of labor belong to workers, and theorizing that the only way to achieve such a reality was through revolution.
Democratic socialism, then, is also distinct from Marxist socialism. Both may strive for populist control of the political economy, but democratic socialists in America largely pursue their goals through reform, working within existing institutions. Democratic socialism often more closely resembles the Nordic model: a capitalist economy in which government takes a larger role in protecting human rights and guaranteeing certain essential goods and services.
Actually, this compromise of preserving the fundamentals of capitalism while trying to achieve the egalitarian goals of socialism is precisely what more committed Marxists don’t like about democratic socialism. They might argue that capitalism is inherently unsustainable, exploitative, and unreformable, relying as it does on never-ending growth and abuse of labor, and that working within it is doomed to only limited successes at best.
Whether or not one agrees with such ideas, it’s a discussion that free people are within their rights to have. Though we often treat capitalism as a national religion, there’s nothing sacred about it. Even the US Constitution is surprisingly agnostic on questions of economic organization. It’s not encoded in our DNA—in fact, we are much more naturally inclined toward cooperation than competition. Humans have a virtually infinite number of ways we can arrange society, and we are in desperate need of rethinking ours.
Because for the last few decades, the American economy has grown ever more off-balance, to the point where many analysts now say we’re in a second Gilded Age. We recently minted the world’s first trillionaire, while about half of us would be wiped out by any major illness, accident, or job loss. Workers have lost power, essentials like housing and healthcare are increasingly out of reach, and practically all the gains of our productivity have been accumulated at the very top, with corporations posting record profits. Billionaires are multiplying their wealth faster than ever, building anti-revolution doomsday bunkers, and plotting to rule their own fiefdoms as CEO-kings.
We live in a society that’s obsessed with law and order for things like shoplifting or overstaying a visa, but largely looks the other way on corporate crimes like pollution, wage theft, and fraud—not to mention war crimes and genocide. The president is a convicted felon who wants you to ignore his decades-long friendship with a child sex trafficker and instead fear and hate the immigrant next door.
In such a system, elites should feel relieved that people are only demanding, say, a few public options for groceries, rather than revolting. The wealthy surely all took note of the public reaction to Luigi Mangione, who is accused of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York City. Mangione became a cultural icon who was openly celebrated in many circles, making clear the rage simmering within America’s dispossessed.
There’s a reason the progressive California Rep. Ro Khanna refers to a tax on wealth as an anti-revolution tax, or an attempt to save capitalism from itself. Progressive Democrats like Khanna often mediate between capitalist centers of power and the party’s left-wing base, who largely feel fed up with the party’s incremental approach of making small tweaks here and there. Democratic socialism, as practiced in today’s America, is still essentially incrementalism, but they’re much bigger increments.
Such a model works well in places like Finland, Iceland, and Denmark. These countries have high taxes, but they get far more out of them than we do. As a result they are consistently ranked as the happiest countries on Earth, with excellent numbers for education, homelessness, poverty, healthcare, life expectancy, and infant mortality—all areas in which the US, with its profit-first approach to every problem, is lagging behind.
High taxes and a mixed economy also once worked well in the United States. We dug ourselves out of the Great Depression with the New Deal. Government programs brought electricity to rural areas and established safety nets and Social Security. Our middle class boomed after World War II, when taxes were the highest they’ve ever been.
Republicans and Big Business called that socialism, too. They even conspired to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Now, faced with another socialist menace, they’re playing just as dirty.
The rich and powerful pay good money for their political representation, and the main things they expect in return are to be untaxed and unregulated. When Mayor Mamdani announced a pied-a-terre tax on luxury second homes, The Washington Post—which is owned by megabillionaire Jeff Bezos—published a column criticizing Mamdani’s “‘creepy and weird’ attack on success.” Billionaire Steve Roth said on an earnings call, “I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’... to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs… [the rich]... should be praised and thanked.”
So it goes whenever anything similar is proposed: Socialism punishes success; the rich will flee if we tax them and leave us simple folk immiserated; and the government will take your home, car, TV, coffee machine, and everything else until, eventually, we’re all sitting in the dirt, eating worms and hitting each other with sticks.
There is no limit to the hysteria Republicans can drum up around socialism, no lie so bold that they won’t tell it with a straight face on TV. In 2016, for instance, the right-wing Institute for Policy Innovation accused the Democratic Party of going even beyond full-blown communism for supporting things like higher wages, vacation time, a 30-hour workweek, maternity leave, and universal health insurance—each of which sound like terrific ideas that would improve human lives, and almost none of which, sadly, are actually supported by establishment Democrats.
Rather than push people to the depths of despair while society breaks down all around us, progressives and democratic socialists want to prioritize human needs over the bottomless appetites of corporations and capital.
By design, Americans have come to expect very little from our system. We’re taught to regard the very concept of government as fundamentally incompetent, wasteful, and oppressive, rather than a tool we can take control of and use to improve lives. Despite the popularity of socialistic policies and goals, the word itself remains divisive. Some of those who have the least are the most aggressively anti-socialist. For this reason, there’s an open debate whether the movement should even label itself socialist.
However, public opinion is slowly evolving. Self-identifying as a socialist could have upsides, like signaling loftier aspirations for people who are desperate for change. And since Republicans will call anyone left of Sean Hannity a communist anyway, reclaiming the word could also blunt their attacks if people come to equate socialism with popular reforms like raising taxes on the wealthy and public options for healthcare.
Unfortunately, winning hearts and minds may not be enough. Because if the wealthy are unable to protect their power legally at the ballot box, the Trump administration has already declared its intention to combat democratic socialism with brutality and repression.
According to polls, Trump and the Republicans are heading toward a trouncing in the midterms, particularly in the House. As a result, Trump is already setting the stage for rigging or cancelling the election, using the threat of communism as one of his predicates. Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have also been on the offensive, attempting to characterize leftist movements as inherently terroristic and calling on the state to “keep our people safe” from such threats.
Rubio said: “They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist or Marxist… It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice liberation.” Leftists, Rubio said, are “an encroaching darkness” and “the enemies of civilization.” Miller said: “The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred… We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”
These dehumanizing comments echo some of the worst periods in history, including the Red Scare of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Exactly what the administration plans to do is kept vague on purpose. The framework to take extreme actions—effectively criminalizing certain political beliefs—is laid out in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). Perhaps, if democratic socialism appears too strong on the ballot in November, they will see fit to protect the voters from their own bad decisions.
While the establishment tries to trigger a panic about democratic socialism, Mamdani remains popular in New York and his brief tenure as mayor has already been, by many measures, a success. There are no gulags, and he hasn’t seized anybody’s home. He’s the first high-profile politician in recent memory to speak to, and start delivering on, people’s desire for more access to dignity, time, and their personal pursuit of happiness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that message is resonating.
Every society has a mix of public and private endeavors. America is no different. The goal of the left is, broadly, to tilt the balance toward public support for education, healthcare, environmental initiatives, jobs programs, and so on. The goal of the right is to eliminate public investments, if not civic life altogether, and let people fend for themselves in a cutthroat social Darwinism. Our challenge as a society is to find a balance that fosters the kind of world we want to live in.
Capitalists will argue that our inequality is a natural consequence of the brilliance and drive of business leaders, that we all benefit from the largesse of the rich and anyone can get a piece of the pie if they work hard enough. But our inequality goes far beyond, say, a brain surgeon owning nicer golf clubs than an op-ed writer. The issue is a rigged system powered by insatiable greed, where a tiny handful own private islands and the masses can’t afford insulin.
Make no mistake: Corporate America wages class war constantly. Profit is their main motivation, and by definition, profit is created by getting more out of a deal than you put in. A little bit may be fine. Most people happily pay extra for good service or a worthy product. But trillions in profit means trillions in unpaid wages, overcharged rent, exorbitant medical bills, unpaid insurance claims, usurious lending, or any number of other ways the rich and powerful squeeze the poor.
In a business-run, profit-oriented society, human needs will inevitably suffer because they are simply not a factor in the decision-making. Libertarian right-wingers will argue that free-market capitalism meets human needs naturally through the invisible hand, but this amounts to a lot of hocus-pocus. If you value a more egalitarian distribution of labor, leisure, comfort, health, education, and happiness, the only way to achieve it is through some form of socialism.
Once you peel back the hype and fearmongering, democratic socialism looks more and more reasonable. Rather than push people to the depths of despair while society breaks down all around us, progressives and democratic socialists want to prioritize human needs over the bottomless appetites of corporations and capital. They want to pool our collective resources, distribute them communally, and work toward a more dignified life for everybody. It wouldn’t actually be socialism, though Republicans will surely call it that—but it could be a start toward something better.