The New York Times columnists Ross Douthat and Ezra Klein disagree more often than they agree, which made it significant that just before the first anniversary of the 2024 election each arrived at, basically, the same explanation for Donald Trump’s victory. “It is completely obvious that the [Democratic] party lost in 2024 because it overcommitted to a range of unpopular left-wing positions,” Douthat wrote. Whatever else the 2024 election may have been, it “was also an ideological referendum, and progressivism lost.”

Klein’s explanation was even more detailed, making it a tougher read for his followers, who are more sympathetic to the Democratic cause than are Douthat’s. “From 2012 to 2024, Democrats moved sharply left on virtually every issue,” Klein observed, with electoral results that were precisely the opposite of those expected and intended.

Democrats became more uncompromising on immigration and lost support among Hispanic voters. They moved left on guns and student loans and climate, and lost ground with young voters. They moved left on race and lost ground with Black voters. They moved left on education and lost ground with Asian American voters. They moved left on economics and lost ground with working-class voters. The only major group in which Democrats saw improvement across that whole 12-year period was college-educated white voters.

The party not only became so dysfunctional that it committed the same errors across three full election cycles, Klein went on to note, but it remains so dysfunctional that it refuses to acknowledge its mistakes and learn from its defeats. Democrats, he lamented, “do not want to confront how much of the country disagrees with them.”

Correlation of Forces

Indeed, as the 2026 midterm elections come into focus, and the 2028 presidential election takes shape on the horizon, leftist Democrats are ascendant while moderates plead for the party to avoid past excesses. The election in 2025 of socialist mayors Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle, for example, was commonly treated as an anomaly because those cities’ electorates were so unlike the national one. But those cities may be outliers because they have large numbers of Democratic voters, not because those voters are far to the left of Democrats in general. An August 2025 Gallup poll found that 66% of self-identified Democrats had a positive image of socialism, while only 42% felt that way about capitalism. (Republicans favored capitalism over socialism by 74% to 14%; Independents by 51% to 38%.)

New Jersey’s 11th congressional district, in the state’s northern suburbs, is a lighter shade of blue than Seattle or New York. In 2024, it voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by a margin of 53% to 45%. And yet, a Democratic primary earlier this year to nominate a candidate for a special congressional election in the 11th was won by Analilia Mejia, an activist and former Bernie Sanders campaign official, against a field that included more moderate and experienced candidates. Mejia’s campaign included pledges to “abolish ICE now,” without explaining what, if anything, would take the place of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; impeach Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas; cancel all student loan debt; and raise the national minimum wage to $25 per hour.

Elections analyst Henry Olsen, writing at the end of last year in the Substack newsletter Liberal Patriot, doubts that Democrats can “escape the vise grip of progressive primary voters.” As recently as 2008, a slender majority of Democratic voters still identified as moderate or even conservative, rather than liberal, which nearly allowed Hillary Clinton to deny Barack Obama the party’s presidential nomination by running to his right. By 2024, however, “the share of Democrats calling themselves either liberal or very liberal hit record highs.” As a result, Olsen writes, intra-Democratic victories like those of Mamdani in New York or Mejia in New Jersey are increasingly likely to be the rule rather than the exception.

Even when moderates do emerge from the Democrats’ process of selecting nominees, a correlation of forces within the party combines with shrewd politicians’ flexibility of conviction to accelerate the leftward shift. In November 2025 Democrat Abigail Spanberger was elected governor of Virginia. She had previously served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, during which she emerged as a critic of her party’s left wing. After barely winning re-election to a second House term in 2020, Spanberger was, according to CNN, “yelling” in a meeting of the Democratic Congressional Caucus, imploring members, “Don’t say ‘socialism.’ Don’t say ‘defund the police’ when that’s not what we mean.” A year later, after poor results for Democrats in the 2021 off-year elections, Spanberger disparaged President Biden’s grandiose Build Back Better agenda. “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R.,” Spanberger told The New York Times. They “elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”

Since Election Day 2025, however, Spanberger has failed, or refused, to consider the possibility that nobody elected her to be Virginia’s Joe Biden. Rather, like the president she once rebuked, Spanberger campaigned as a moderate before setting out in office to appease the Democrats’ progressive advocacy groups. Since being elected, Spanberger has canceled all cooperative agreements between ICE and Virginia’s state police and prisons. She stacked state universities’ boards with trustees committed to standing aside while administrators and faculty members reinvigorate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. Spanberger’s choice for Virginia’s chief diversity officer, a Cabinet-level appointment, is Sesha Joi Moon, who previously served as “chief brand strategist” for Jasmine Crockett, the Democratic congresswoman from Texas whose brand is being a strident, foul-mouthed leftist. “I feel like DEI is just getting started,” Moon said on a 2025 podcast. “You can defund and dismantle all you want, but the work continues.”

The Woke Tribe’s Folkways

Part of the reason why leftists are gaining strength at the expense of centrists is that the former have set aside most of their intramural disagreements in the interest of making the Democratic Party into a political force that will defeat Trumpism without making concessions to Trumpism. The Occupy Wall Street Left and the woke, identity politics Left spent much of this century’s second decade as frenemies. In July 2015, when Ezra Klein was editor-in-chief of Vox, which he had founded the previous year, he upbraided presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for opposing open borders. “That’s a right-wing proposal,” Sanders replied during their interview, “which says essentially there is no United States.” The Vermont senator brushed aside Klein’s suggestion that bringing tens of millions of new immigrants to the U.S. would significantly alleviate global poverty: “It would make everybody in America poorer—you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that.” The fact that such rhetoric would not have been out of place at a Trump rally was one of the reasons that, during his second presidential campaign four years later, Sanders joined what had become the Democrats’ anti-restrictionist mainstream, promising to decriminalize border crossings and reduce both the penalties for illegal immigrants and the federal government’s enforcement powers.

More broadly, in 2016 Hillary Clinton was determined to prevent Sanders from laying claim to the party’s left, the mistake she had made in her race against Barack Obama. This had proven an insoluble problem in 2008. Obama’s wedge issue was the war in Iraq, a venture deeply unpopular with Democrats that Clinton had voted to authorize while serving in the Senate. It was equally futile for her to outflank Sanders on economic policy—especially after he began denouncing Clinton for pocketing six-figure speaking fees from Wall Street investment banks. Instead, after Sanders crushed her in the 2016 New Hampshire primary by a margin of 60% to 38%, Clinton chose to deride his left-wing populism as a distraction from the more important goal of advancing identity politics. “Not everything is about an economic theory,” she told a labor union audience in Nevada, the site of the caucuses that took place eleven days after the New Hampshire primary. “Would that end racism?” she asked about Sanders’s proposal to break up the big banks. “Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan later wrote that this speech made Clinton “perhaps the first person to launch a woke argument during a presidential campaign.” Clinton went on to a narrow victory against Sanders in Nevada, salvaging her effort to win the Democratic nomination.

A decade later, the preoccupations Clinton spoke to have been folded into the Democratic agenda. It’s difficult to imagine any Democratic politician berating economic populists for not caring enough about systemic discrimination. As a result, social justice Democrats are no longer discernible as a distinct faction within the party. The rising cohort of left-wing Democrats, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, appears to believe that a serious commitment to socialism and identitarianism entails no conflicts and few trade-offs.

Many commentators had said confidently during the Biden presidency that America had reached “peak woke.” That is, the “Great Awokening,” thought to have become manifest in 2014 around the time of Ferguson, Missouri’s racial unrest, ran its course at some point after the protests and riots set off by the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. Even writers sympathetic to the Great Awokening’s goals worried that the resulting tactics and rhetoric were sometimes so ill-judged as to discredit the entire effort. In May 2024, for example, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote nostalgically about 2020’s “enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities,” even as she scorned such woke innovations as the “white-lady struggle sessions inspired by the risible Robin DiAngelo,” author of the bestselling White Fragility (2018).

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait wrote in December 2024 that woke had been not merely ridiculous but dangerous. Accordingly, he was relieved to declare that the “illiberal-left movement has not merely declined,” but “is dead, or at least barely breathing.” The illiberalism resulted from “tactics [that] ignored the possibility that any charge of racism might be erroneous, or that it might be possible to overreact to its scale, and had no limiting principle.” It is true that the folkways of the woke tribe, from cancel culture to pronoun declarations, are less visible these days outside of Left-dominated spaces, such as college campuses and the social media website Bluesky. Chait’s assessment notwithstanding, it is too soon to dismiss the possibility that this retreat is merely tactical and temporary.

Consider an especially striking reassessment of the social justice movement by Matthew Yglesias. Writing in 2019 for Vox, of which he had been one of the co-founders with Ezra Klein, Yglesias said that the Great Awokening had seen Democrats move “the goalposts in terms of what kind of racial views one is expected to affirm as a good liberal.” As a result, it “is forcing the Democratic Party to confront the legacy of America’s racial caste system squarely.”

Six years later, Yglesias was no longer with Vox and no longer sanguine about the Great Awokening’s meaning and impact. Instead, in his Substack publication The Argument, Yglesias wrote that he had come to realize that “critical race theory and the identity left” had been a Trojan horse. Liberals, bemused by these causes’ opaque academic jargon, too readily dismissed the possibility that they were malignant. The record of identity politics in action revealed to Yglesias that the Great Awokening had, in fact, created an “ideological construct aimed at undermining core liberal values—rights, reason, and the concept of neutral legal principles.” It was not, in other words, as most liberals had credulously assumed, “the newest update or extension of [the] liberal commitment to human equality.” He went on to deplore the fact that “the demands of postliberal racialism really do elevate group membership over individuality.”

From Weber to Ames

Conservatives can welcome the evolution of Yglesias’s thinking while also noting that the threat to sacrifice rights and neutral principles for the sake of greater equality emerged from within the left-liberal project decades, not years, before the Racial Reckoning of 2020.

Consider that in the 60 years since the enactment of the landmark civil rights laws, liberals have tirelessly insisted that it is possible to have it both ways: to effect greater equality of groups’ socioeconomic outcomes while respecting individual rights. How this was possible was never made clear. Explication sometimes gave way to mystic incantations, as in the Supreme Court’s 1978 affirmative action decision in Regents of University of California v. Bakke. In his separate opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun claimed there was no contradiction between the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of racial discrimination and a medical school’s policy of setting aside a portion of its admission slots for non-white applicants. “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race,” Blackmun wrote. “And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.”

In the complicated Bakke ruling, a divided Court ended up holding that putting a “No Whites Need Apply” sign on the fence encircling some educational opportunities did indeed violate white applicants’ right to equal protection of the laws. (Murkier, circumspect affirmative action policies, however, remained permissible, and quickly became ubiquitous.) Blackmun’s hope to square the circle was realized more fully in the Court’s 1979 decision, United Steelworkers of America v. Weber. He joined the majority opinion, written by Justice William Brennan, which held that the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibitions against racially discriminatory employment practices were compatible with a training program at Kaiser Aluminum that attempted to compensate for past racial discrimination by choosing black applicants while rejecting whites with greater seniority. (Seniority had previously been the sole basis for ranking applicants.) According to the Court majority, Brian Weber, the white plaintiff, had erred by relying on a “literal construction” of the Civil Rights Act, such as its provision that it shall be “an unlawful employment practice” to “discriminate against any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in admission to, or employment in, any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.”

Weber’s obdurate refusal to accept that the law did not proscribe actions that its language clearly did proscribe was “misplaced,” the Court maintained, because he failed to grasp that “Congress’ primary concern in enacting the prohibition against racial discrimination…was with the plight of the Negro in our economy.” The Court’s way of letting Weber down easy was to point out that the training program to which less senior black employees were admitted ahead of him did not “unnecessarily trammel the interests of white employees, neither requiring the discharge of white workers and their replacement with new black hirees, nor creating an absolute bar to the advancement of white employees.” This reassurance suggested that there were some types of actions against white employees that would violate their statutory rights against being subjected to racial discrimination. But the exact nature of those violations, the justices pronounced, was for them to know and the nation to guess at. “It is not necessary in these cases to define the line of demarcation between permissible and impermissible affirmative action plans; it suffices to hold that the challenged…plan falls on the permissible side of the line.”

Forty-six years later, a completely different Court arrived at a completely different answer about the relation between groups’ advancement and individuals’ rights. Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services concerned a claim by Marlean Ames that her employer had discriminated against her because of her heterosexuality, causing her to be denied a promotion to one job she sought, and then to suffer a demotion from the one she had held, in both cases to less qualified gay employees. The Supreme Court did not address the question of whether Ames had in fact suffered discrimination. Rather, it took up the case because some federal appeals courts did, and others did not, require plaintiffs who are not part of a discrete and insular minority to bolster a claim to having been victimized by employment discrimination with a delineation of the “background circumstances.” That is, the plaintiff must plausibly account for an employer being the outlier that discriminates against members of majority groups, such as whites or heterosexuals. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes Ohio, was among the courts that required such showings, on which basis it ruled that Ames had failed to demonstrate or explain a pattern of anti-straight discrimination by her employer.

Writing for a unanimous Supreme Court in 2025, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson held that the background circumstances test was irreconcilable with the Civil Rights Act and must be abandoned. The standard for proving employment discrimination, she wrote, “does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group.” The law, in other words, “draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs.” Rather, “by establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’—without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group—Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone.”

Ames did not, as a matter of law, overturn Weber. As a matter of politics, however, it was an important qualification of the idea that a law prohibiting discrimination permits, or even requires, enforcement through discriminatory mechanisms. Much of that political force derives from the fact that the 9-0 Ames decision included the Court’s liberal bloc, the three justices (Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Jackson) nominated by Democratic presidents, and was written by that bloc’s most outspoken member. These justices were the only dissenters in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the 2023 decision holding that affirmative action in college admissions, as practiced at one of the nation’s most famous universities (Harvard), and one of its most representative (University of North Carolina), violated applicants’ constitutional right to equal protection of the laws. There are, as yet, no Court cases or even arguments indicating that any of the liberal justices are prepared to reconsider their commitment to affirmative action. And yet, Jackson’s key argument in Ames aligns perfectly with Chief Justice John Roberts’s insistence in his Students for Fair Admissions majority opinion that the “guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color.”

In other words, the Court’s liberals’ endorsement in Ames of the principle that a law prohibiting discrimination against any person applies fully and equally to all persons will only compound affirmative action’s legal and political vulnerability. Among those who noticed was Elie Mystal, The Nation magazine’s justice correspondent. He was left in the awkward position of contending that Ames was: a) correctly decided; and b) deplorable. As the Court rightly understood, according to Mystal, “Congress could have written Title VII [the portion of the Civil Rights Act dealing with employment discrimination] to include a heightened burden for white folks, but it didn’t.” Alternatively, “It could have amended Title VII to include an additional burden if it felt ‘reverse’ discrimination claims were getting out of hand, but it hasn’t.” In effect, Mystal’s argument means that the Weber Court upheld the Civil Rights Act that it (and he) wished Congress had written, and the Ames Court upheld the Civil Rights Act that Congress actually did write.

Mystal’s use of sneer quotes for “reverse” discrimination explains why he detests Ames while conceding that it was correct: a unanimous Supreme Court decision that the hypostasized, redistributive Civil Rights Act has been abandoned in favor of one that says what it means and means what it says will get people’s attention. Employers and employees will think, act, and litigate as if the prohibition of discrimination protects all people in the same way and to the same extent. The consequences are sure to come at the expense of the employment practices regime that had been predicated on the belief that the imaginary Civil Rights Act upheld in Weber was entrenched and unassailable.

The Right Side of History

It took half a century for a few powerful liberals to admit the possibility that the Civil Rights Act, as constructed, cannot serve as an instrument for imposing social justice through aggressive social engineering. This durable aversion to acknowledging disagreeable realities has a direct bearing on the question of why the Democratic Party’s left wing grows stronger even as its track record in general elections grows worse. Or why the Great Awokening continues to resonate and even inspire, no matter how many pundits dismiss it as an embarrassing relic.

Viewed from outside the debate, Democratic moderates would appear to have an irrefutable argument against the party’s immoderates: To do the things that you (and we!) want to do, to help the deserving constituencies that you (and we!) want to help, it is not enough to win arguments on social media or in graduate seminars. The party needs to win elections, which are indispensable to gaining and wielding power. And the democratic reality is that electoral viability will routinely counsel against flying your freak flag. To do as much as possible of what we Democrats want to do, the first step is to accept the reality that we cannot do everything that we want to do right away, because there are some things the public rejects, now and for the foreseeable future. Such as promising publicly funded sex-change operations for federal prisoners. Or releasing “an estimated 5 million additional migrants and asylum seekers into the country for future court dates as far off as 2033,” as Jim Geraghty once summarized the Biden Administration’s immigration record for National Review.

The Democratic center continually yields ground to the party’s Left, however, because the centrists’ disagreements with the leftists are not very fundamental. As the arc of Abigail Spanberger’s political career suggests, those differences are more about tactics and messaging, less about policy substance—and far less about political principles. Indeed, the only true principle of the modern Democratic Party is that it is on the right side of history. This, after all, is progressivism distilled to its essence. But because moderates believe this vaguely, while leftists believe it fervently, it is nearly impossible for the former to induce the latter to be patient and restrained. Since believing oneself to be on the right side of history is unfalsifiable, the fervent view any setback as temporary, a speed bump on the social justice highway. To concede anything more is not prudence but cowardice, shameful pandering to the bigoted, reactionary forces progressivism exists to discredit and defeat.

What’s more, because being on the right side of history is the one axial precept binding the Democratic Party, the progressives’ commitment to what Yglesias describes as “core liberal values,” such as natural rights, objective reason, and neutral principles, becomes qualified and contingent. Different people have different values, after all, and the same person often values things differently depending on the times and circumstances. If free speech by reactionary opponents of trans rights or open borders, for example, threatens progress toward a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable future, social justice permits or even requires curtailing free speech. Because they are mere values, modern liberalism’s “core” commitments turn out be quite peripheral.

This phenomenon is far older than the Great Awokening. In The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Allan Bloom described Cornell University’s capitulation to armed student radicals in 1969. The radicals were emboldened by their realization that the “pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom” could not bear “to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea.”

In our day, the defense of such abstract ideas as inalienable rights and constitutionalism is equally timorous. If Ezra Klein wants to understand why so many Democrats prefer losing elections to confronting the party’s social-justice wing, a good place to begin would be the podcast interview with historian Ibram X. Kendi that Klein conducted in 2021.

To be fair, Klein was not alone in taking Kendi seriously that year, which saw Kendi move from American University to Boston University, where he became the director of the new Center for Antiracist Research. The Center, Kendi declared, would find solutions for the “intractable racial problems of our time.” It turned out that the Center could not even solve such tractable problems as spending purposefully the nearly $55 million it had raised to line up researchers for projects that had been promised to grantors. By 2025, the university had closed the Center and laid off its staff, and Kendi had left B.U. for Howard University, having become an even bigger laughingstock than Robin DiAngelo.

But when Klein conducted his interview, he did already know that in 2019 Kendi had called for the creation of a Department of Antiracism through the enactment of an antiracist amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The “department” that Kendi envisioned was much, much more than a Cabinet-level agency, and not much less than an entire government unto itself. It was, in his bland and therefore chilling description, clearly totalitarian, as anti-democratic as it was antiracist. It would, in the first place, be unburdened by any constraints derived from the consent of the governed. Unlike every other governmental entity in the U.S., the department would be permanently funded, and instead of having even one political appointee, it would be staffed entirely by “formally trained experts on racism.” These experts, subject to no restraint besides one another’s training and moral zeal, “would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas.” The new department would be equipped, too, with “disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” As noted, there is no reason to believe that policymakers and public officials would possess any countervailing disciplinary tools to wield over and against the Department of Antiracism.

Listeners otherwise unfamiliar with Kendi’s plan to overthrow the Constitution would have learned nothing about it from Klein’s hour-long interview, which was continuously respectful and intermittently obsequious. (“I think some of what you were saying there was incredibly powerful.”) Klein’s one question about Kendi’s antiracism amendment was as wonky as possible: if you outlaw policies that increase racial inequality, how do you treat those that have mixed consequences, such as low interest rates, which increase black employment but also raise the value of stock and bond portfolios, disproportionately owned by whites? For the record, Kendi knocked that one out of the park: “[T]hat’s when we, of course, have to make a decision.”

Oprahfication

The idea that the Democratic center confronts the Democratic Left so ineffectually because it shares too much of the latter’s DNA can be considered in another way. In “The Great Feminization,” a much-discussed October 2025 Compact magazine article, Helen Andrews (a regular CRB contributor) argued that wokeness is best understood as “an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” That is, in a growing number of important professions—law, medicine, journalism, academia, the clergy, publishing, private foundations—the number of women has increased so steadily that “gender parity” has either been achieved or is a near-term inevitability.

The pattern, Andrews observed, is that gender parity brings with it a transvaluation of values. “Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.” She cited a survey of American professors in which 71% of men said free speech was more important than social cohesion, and 59% of women said the opposite. “The field that frightens me most is the law,” Andrews wrote, because if gender parity in that profession elevates “feels” over rules, then we risk losing a legal system where we adhere to the letter of law even in cases where it results in “an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.”

Andrews argued persuasively that demographic feminization is strongly correlated with ideological and operational feminization. But it is worth pointing out that the two are not perfectly correlated. As unrecently as 1987, long before there was gender parity in any influential profession, intellectual historian James Nuechterlein wrote a thoughtful article in Commentary, “The Feminization of the American Left.” The essence of feminization, he argued, is “the establishment of traditionally feminine virtues (those normally associated with the private realm) as norms of behavior for public life.” Our nation’s left-liberal project, according to Nuechterlein, has always been beset by a tension between a pragmatic focus on results and a softer emphasis on feelings. This tension may have been intensified by earnest, powerful women, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, but the fact that nearly all the important policy and rhetorical choices in the 20th century were made by men means that the Left’s feminization cannot be explained solely in terms of gender ratios. Nuechterlein cited The Great Depression: America 1929–1941 (1984), in which historian Robert McElvaine argued that the “moral economics” of the New Deal discredited what McElvaine described as the “self-centered, aggressive, competitive, ‘male,’ ethic of the 1920’s.” That ethic may have been male, but so were most of its detractors, then and thereafter.

Similarly, in The Liberal Mind (1963), Kenneth Minogue argued that modern liberalism had come to be defined by a preoccupation with “suffering situations,” thereby reducing politics to “a melodrama of oppressors and victims.” This may well qualify as a feminine disposition, but one with a long history of being proclaimed by masculine persons. In his 1984 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, for example, New York governor Mario Cuomo celebrated what Nuechterlein merely described: the commitment to the idea that private life provides all the moral guidance necessary for the conduct of public life. “We believe,” Cuomo said, “in a single fundamental idea that describes…what a proper government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings—reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race, or sex, or geography, or political affiliation.”

Demographic feminization’s finite ability to explain political feminization is also applicable to the field of law, Andrews’s greatest concern. The victim impact statement, for example, was introduced as a measure to restore law and order during the great crime wave that lasted from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. These statements are now routine parts of sentencing and parole hearings. Whatever their benefit in fighting crime, the statements have also contributed to the Oprahfication of our legal system. As author Pamela Haag wrote in a 2012 American Scholar essay, “Death by Treacle,” the belief that we should severely punish the perpetrator convicted of killing someone who goes on to be extolled in tearful victim impact statements has an implied corollary: a criminal should receive “a more lenient sentence if his victim was someone of so little charm or social worth that he had no one to testify movingly for him.”

And, to bring the discussion full circle, it must be noted that the 1979 Supreme Court, woke avant la lettre, which ruled against Brian Weber because it got weepy about the “plight of the Negro,” consisted of nine men. The Ames Court of 2025, which ruled unanimously that Title VII said what it said, end of story, included four female justices, the closest the Court has ever come to gender parity.

I submit that demographic feminization fortifies wokeness, without solely and fully accounting for it, because the gender parity-driven desire to make institutions and organizations more empathetic leans against an open door. There has been little pushback because the moral sentiments prevailing before the advent of gender parity, with their increasingly obsessive focus on suffering situations, were already highly receptive to making politics, and life, a melodrama of oppressors and victims.

For much the same reason, the Democratic center has a losing record against the Democratic Left because it shares leftism’s moral priors. “Kindness covers all my political beliefs,” President Obama said in 2013. What “binds us together,” and “how we’ve always moved forward,” is “the idea that we have a stake in each other’s success.” Obama’s incessant urging for Americans to be on the right side of history meant being on the side of a future that becomes ever more compassionate and inclusive, ever less judgmental.

In the resulting Democratic framework, centrists are condemned to fight uphill against leftists. Whenever centrists advise caution or patience, leftists can always invoke “the fierce urgency of now” to rebuke them for being cowardly, equivocally committed to the great cause, or secretly supporting the mean-spirited conservatives on the wrong side of history. Like the Cornell professors in 1969, few Democratic centrists are so committed to pragmatism that they will endure such lacerating accusations for very long.

Test-Tube Progressives

None of this is to predict Democratic defeats in 2026, 2028, or beyond. Political parties often secure victory without resolving their internal disputes or theoretical contradictions. In a two-party system, it’s usually sufficient to be the party that is less screwed up. For Democrats contemplating the next election cycles, this goal does not seem unattainable.

And yet, Democrats have had a decade of bitter regrets when recalling the gratitude they felt for drawing an opponent as easy to defeat as Donald Trump. One of his strengths is to induce overconfidence and complacency in his opponents. Another, less apparent, is Trump’s ability to tempt Democrats into a brawling style of politics which suits him better than them. One can understand why Democrats, watching Trump and Trumpists win elections by expressing the Republican id in the most provocative ways, would come to believe they could exercise an equal but opposite freedom without forfeiting their electability. The simplest explanation for their problem would be that America is a closely divided but still slightly center-right nation. If both parties put all their cards on the table, the party on the right will usually prevail against the one on the left.

Dartmouth University political scientist Sean Westwood, quoted in a January 2026 New York Times column by Thomas Edsall, offers a more subtle account of how Trump gets Democrats to put their worst foot forward. “Trump hasn’t cleared a path for Democratic renewal,” Westwood maintains, “he’s possibly made one far less likely. By casting himself as the nemesis of progressive excess, he has paradoxically strengthened its hold on the Democratic imagination.”

His heavy-handed assault on D.E.I. and campus speech codes hasn’t prompted soul-searching on the left; it has supplied a new grievance narrative, confirming for activists that they were right all along, that the backlash proves the threat. Victimhood, once claimed, is rarely surrendered.

It is as if, Westwood concludes, Trump had goaded Democrats into “engineering a super-strain of progressive in a lab, purpose-built to alienate the middle of this country and the middle of the ideological spectrum.”

There is a long history of Democrats recognizing that they have a problem appealing to swing voters, but then dealing with it entirely in terms of optics instead of policy substance. John Kerry’s decision to make the 2004 Democratic convention a week-long display of military imagery was an early instance. Most recently, Minnesota governor Tim Walz explained that the logic of his selection as the 2024 vice presidential nominee was that he “could code-talk to white guys watching football fixing their truck.” Lakshya Jain, of the election analysis firm Split Ticket, derided Walz’s rationale for his 2024 nomination as “hilariously stupid.” “If you’re trying to pick up moderate voters,” Jain wrote on X.com, “the way to do it is to be more moderate. Drinking beer and driving trucks aren’t substitutes.” If, however, progressives in the Age of Trump are increasingly woke, increasingly disdainful of any voter who doesn’t detest Trumpism as much as they do, and increasingly powerful within the Democratic Party, dubious signaling tactics are likely to be the only concession Democrats are prepared to make, no matter the electoral consequences.