Democrats

A lonely caravan, ambushed on the open frontier, circles the wagons. The settlers bring out their long rifles to fight for survival. They endure the first onslaught, but dusk is falling – and the battle has only begun.It’s a familiar scene in Hollywood westerns. In recent weeks, on Washington’s political prairies, the mainstream Democratic establishment has been living it, too.The Democrats of the old established order are hunkered down behind whatever cover they can find, defending themselves against a rising, radical flank of their own party. The insurgents call themselves "the Resistance" – but they’re not just resisting Republicans. They are contesting normalcy within their own party.

Michelle Obama says Donald Trump’s immigration policies “keep her up at night.” But if immigration enforcement is a moral crisis, why wasn’t she losing sleep when her own husband deported more immigrants than any president in American history? Instead of helping the Democrats, this kind of out-of-touch moral posturing only highlights the party’s elite detachment from reality – and it’s costing them working-class voters who live with the consequences of the failed policies they are still defending.Michelle Obama may lie awake thinking about immigration enforcement. Many of us stay up worrying about what happens when our neighborhoods, wages and public schools are strained by policies designed to win applause, not provide order.

The barrage of media coverage and political activity surrounding the deportation of an illegal migrant to El Salvador might suggest the story plays to the advantage of Democrats targeting President Trump’s immigration crackdown. But that’s actually not the case according to new poll data provided to The Spectator. Polling this week conducted by OnMessage, one of the top Republican-aligned firms, found that despite the drumbeat in support of the Democratic storyline on Kilmar Abrego Garcia over the past several weeks, American voters are evenly split on the issue overall – reflecting how quickly this case has become a simple partisan divide. Overall, support for the Garcia deportation is dead even at 49-49.

To understand what’s wrong with the American left and the Democratic party – two different but entwined things, to be sure – look to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Look also to the work of the historian Sean McMeekin, including his latest book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Earlier this spring I emceed an event in McMeekin’s honor, as he received the award for “Conservative Book of the Year” from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It gave me the opportunity to chat with him about Lenin’s doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism” and much else, including the fairy tale the West tells itself about how communism ended.

If you have ever been desperate and adrift, you understand the Democratic Party’s frustration. One day, James Carville tells his party to do nothing and let President Trump destroy himself. Another, the Montgomery Burns of American politics, Senator Chuck Schumer, advises a strategy of sustained resistance, rallying his troops to “make Donald Trump the quickest lame duck in history.” The old Senate Minority Leader feeds his angry, cannibalistic followers in hope they won’t eat him. Some Democrats protest their party has been too woke. Others, not woke enough. Pete Buttigieg, a man not often confused with a lumberjack, swaps “darn” and “shucks” for saltier words to demonstrate his party’s determination.

Ex-Media Matters influencer Kat Abughazaleh announced a run for the US Congress today, telling Democrats, “It’s time to drop the excuses and grow a fucking spine.” Abughazaleh is fed up with the Democrats “cowering to Trump,” and says the party should be “standing up to authoritarians, not shrinking away when the fight gets tough.” So she decided to run herself. I'm Kat Abughazaleh and I'm running for Congress. pic.twitter.com/tEtaNcc5xL — Kat Abughazaleh (@abughazalehkat) March 24, 2025 The young graduate of George Washington University is bidding for the House seat of the 9th district of Illinois, where she will be facing off against 80-year-old incumbent Jan Schakowsky, who has now served the Prairie State for more years than Abughazaleh has been alive.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s failed fiscal gambit last week proved as obvious as it was predictable. Yet Schumer's flub has had an outsized impact in prompting open conversation among Democrats about whether they need to move on from the New York Senator. The leftist activist group Indivisible called for Schumer to step down, saying he needs to be replaced with “a Minority Leader who’s up for the fight this moment demands.” Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania went on Bill Maher Friday to criticize Schumer’s misuse of legislative leverage. And prominent party voice MSNBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend announced she was quitting the Democratic Party live on air.

It isn’t just a weekend of warmer weather for the President, who took off for Mar-a-Lago yesterday evening. It is possibly a weekend full of calmer news. The decision from Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer to let the spending bill advance in the Senate allowed the six-month extension to get over the line last night, as the Senate voted 54-46 to see it through. This seemed to give markets a temporary sense of relief as well, as growing expectation that the bill would pass saw stocks rally. Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq had their best day gains since Donald Trump took office again, while technology stocks also appeared to make a major comeback by the time markets closed yesterday.

The Senate may be filled with octogenarians, but it defied the odds this week with a marathon “vote-a-rama” that lasted almost ten hours — just in time to set it up on a collision course with the Republican-led House across the Capitol.Despite the stated preference of President Donald Trump for “one big, beautiful bill” for reconciliation, the Senate pushed through a giant reconciliation bill, which will be smaller than whatever the House seems poised to pass. The Senate’s version tackles one of Trump’s top priorities, border security, while punting votes on other Trump measures, like extending his namesake 2017 tax cuts, to later.

Donald Trump’s triumphal return to the White House is the end of more than just the Joe Biden era. Since Bill Clinton’s presidency, Democrats had adhered to a formula they thought unbeatable: They would be socially progressive, economically centrist and staunchly internationalist. Republicans, they thought, had staked their future on demographics that were in decline — whites and the most conservative Christians. Democrats were the party of twenty-first-century America, an ethnically diverse and more secular, or at least religiously liberal, land. What went wrong? When Trump won in 2016, Democrats dismissed it as a fluke.