Many progressives do not—to put it at its mildest—feel they can trust Democratic Party leadership to speak for them, stand up for our values, or to protect us in a dangerous time. Various failures have led to a round of calls for a “Democratic Tea Party.” Many feel that the time is right for a revolt.
It isn’t. Irrespective of the justice, or even necessity, of replacing Democratic leaders, the structure of the Democratic Party—the way power is distributed and the contours of the ideological divides within that—makes a challenge unlikely to succeed. This structure is still more or less where it was at the end of the last revolt against Democratic leadership. Unless we understand why that failed, and reform, we will fail again.
The good news, for those who are ready to rebel, is that the reforms necessary for them to succeed, while they will require the courage to take a hard look at their own records, do not involve policy concessions. We can win on a progressive platform. Best of all, they can be undertaken unilaterally by activists within the party, without sign-off from the politicians they seek to replace.
What Even Is a Tea Party?
A “tea party” is a revolt of the activist class within a party against the political class. I use activist broadly to include people who spend a lot of time immersed in politics. Those people work or volunteer on political campaigns, knock on doors, or make phone calls; in the digital age, they are disproportionately active on social media. Each party has, in addition to full-time politicians and staff, a few million volunteer and semiprofessional workers of this kind. Usually both groups are in alignment, but if relations break down enough, activists can challenge the political leadership. To succeed, they need the core voters of the party (the primary electorate), or at least a reasonable number of them, to side with them.
This is a challenging thing to do: As in feudal systems of old, power in a party is concentrated at the top and is usually highly stable. Politicians in safe seats and good standing with their peers enjoy something like lifetime tenure. However, when the dominoes start to fall, they can fall fast. The lords rule with little accountability, but if they get unpopular enough, one of their knights might decide they could do a better job.
In the 2009–10 Tea Party, the Republican activist class had been restive for some time but were pushed over the edge by the reality of a Black president in 2008. Their racist fury was also directed at their own politicians, who they felt were insufficiently opposed to this (in their eyes) existential legitimacy crisis. And they challenged their lords to considerable effect: In the 2010 elections, their candidates won five out of the 10 Senate seats they’d targeted and 40 of 130 House seats targeted: a minority within the caucus, but enough to force a change in direction. In 2015–16, the activist class rallied around a nonpolitician who they felt represented their core concern (opposition to a Black president and a symbolically equal citizenry). Enough of the core voters sided with them that the political class was forced to accept the result.
At the same time, a similar type of revolt was brewing in the Democratic Party, albeit for very different reasons. The activist class had initially loved Barack Obama; their support had been critical to his defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary. But over time the relationship had soured. Very little of substance had been accomplished since the Affordable Care Act, and the party was getting slaughtered in downballot races.
I was squarely in the activist class at that point. To say people were losing patience would be an understatement. For one thing, we just weren’t treated very well by the political class (who enjoyed their positions because of our labor). I’ve gone door-to-door, in all weathers, for candidates and causes advocating raising the minimum wage, while earning functionally less than the minimum wage myself. “Every American deserves a living wage”—apart from us; apparently, we didn’t count.
As much as anything else, they just didn’t listen. We would read the same bland, vacuous messaging to clearly bored voters, losing state Senate race after state Senate race. We were never asked our opinion by the candidates or those who ran the messaging firms on what we thought might be more impactful. And if we offered suggestions, we were met with real contempt and anger. A good politician should be the first among activists, like a monarch leading his knights into battle from the front. Instead, they were totally removed from us and arrogantly dismissive of our perspective.
Like Voltaire’s God, if Bernie Sanders hadn’t run in 2016, we would have invented someone like him. His challenge to the Democratic Party, along egalitarian lines, was exactly what the activist class wanted to hear. They moved behind him almost in unison. People I knew gave up jobs to work for him; everyone was attending events or posting about it. The excitement was palpable.
Despite every disadvantage, they quickly raised the money to mount a real challenge and ran it well. Clinton ultimately prevailed by 16 million votes to 13 million, but after a much harder fight than anticipated. Sanders (or really, the activist class) had proven something. Going forward, they would assert themselves much more aggressively against an arrogant, centrist, incrementalist political class. Like the Republican activists, they would reshape their party.
And yet they didn’t. On paper their challenge was as strong as the Republican one. They showed they could raise money, mobilize people on a massive scale, and dominate online spaces. Yet the result was much weaker: In the 2018 midterms, just seven out of 79 House candidates aligned with the Justice Democrats (the left-leaning insurgent group) won. Of these, four (the Squad) would form a recognizable mini-faction. Sanders would run again in 2020, but, despite a far less unified politician class, he lost ground, losing to Biden by 19 to nine million votes. Left-aligned challengers won three House seats in 2020, but all would lose them again over the coming years, and other sporadic attempts would fail throughout the Biden presidency.
For those who had aligned their identity to the revolt, this was devastating. Many felt that they had (somehow) been cheated. They hadn’t. Their failure had largely been of their own making.
The Agency Divide
Despite how this story is usually told, this isn’t primarily about a center-versus-left policy divide. The Democratic Party’s primary electorate (whom the activist rebels needed but failed to win over) is generally quite progressive (certainly relative to the median voter). They aren’t put off by a message of raising taxes on billionaires or expanding health care. Rather, the primary divide in the Democratic Party in the Trump era is in how we see Trump himself.
There are many stories about how Trump won, and how to combat him. We can categorize these by how much agency they ascribe to the right. A high-agency narrative stresses actions the right took—appealing to racism or sexism, for instance, or talking about draining the swamp. A low-agency narrative represents someone else as making the key decision, as possessing agency, and Trump’s support as a reaction to that. Interestingly, low-agency narratives can, and did, emanate from different ideological camps—they just see Trump voters reacting to different offenses. In centrist narratives, MAGA is reacting to the excesses of social justice, cultural disrespect, or incivility. In left narratives, MAGA is reacting to economic inequality, neoliberalism, and a corrupt political system.
To see the difference, imagine you’re asked at work why you gave a customer a refund. You might say, “Because I thought it was the right thing to do,” or you might say, “Because my supervisor told me to.” The former centers the agency on you (it happened because of you). The second describes the same act but puts the agency on another person. Agency is important because it’s directly tied to our moral response (who we blame) and our emotional response (who we get angry at). Changing the bearer of agency in a story transfers blame and emotion with it. When we say, “Because my boss told me to,” we’re also saying, “Take it up with them, don’t get mad at me.” Likewise, in political narratives, agency informs not only our strategy but who we blame and how we feel.
The reason the Democratic Tea Party failed is the activists who organized it explicitly ran on a low-agency “reaction” account of Trump. When asked to explain Trump’s appeal, Sanders, in a 2020 New York Times interview, said:
How did Trump become president? ... Not everybody, but tens and tens of millions of Americans feel that the political establishment, Republican and Democrat, have failed them. Maybe The New York Times has failed them too.
Interviewer: That explains the appeal of racism?
Yeah. OK. What you have is that people are, in many cases in this country, working longer hours for low wages. You are aware of the fact that, in an unprecedented way, life expectancy has actually gone down in America because of diseases of despair. People have lost hope and they are drinking. They’re doing drugs. They’re committing suicide. O.K. They are worried about their kids. I have been to southern West Virginia where the level of hopelessness is very, very high. And when that condition arises, whether it was the 1930s in Germany, then people are susceptible to the blame game.
I call this combination of political progressivism and a low-agency account the “antiestablishment left.” Post-2016, it was the most common view within the activist class. In contrast, the most common view of democratic core voters is what I call “mainline liberal”: This is also progressive but combined with a high-agency account of Trump and MAGA. They stress affirmative actions the right takes—such as directly appealing to racism or sexism. (These labels aren’t one-for-one with how people describe themselves but are close enough to give a sense.)
As part of my research for this article, I interviewed around two dozen Democratic primary voters from different regions and demographics. I’ve included direct quotes from many. Unless otherwise indicated, all supported Biden over Sanders in the 2020 primary. I started by asking them to discuss Trump and his support in an open-ended way. Every Biden voter gave me a high-agency account: racism, sexism, conspiracy theories, and the power of propaganda were common themes.
I then asked them to compare and contrast two theories to explain Trump support. The first was a high-agency account, wherein Trump appeals to the history of U.S. racism, to the white people who believe that Black people are inferior, and encourages more to adopt these views. The second was a low-agency “reaction to economics” account, by which economic insecurity drives some white people to adopt racist views and support Trump. Some considered both before settling on the high-agency account, some went straight for it, and others decisively rejected the reaction narrative. “Living in the South, you are quickly disabused of any notion that ‘economic anxiety’ is anything more than a convenient cover for bigotry,” Mae, a 33-year-old white woman working as a data engineer in Kentucky, said by email.
Monique, a 38-year-old Black woman who works in retail in Florida, told me: “I don’t buy that narrative. I recently read … about the rise of the Klan in Indiana, and the people most active in the Klan, they were doctors, they were lawyers—people who did not have economic anxiety. I think that racist people are just racist people. They come in all stripes. This notion that you can … improve their economics and somehow they’re gonna stop being racist, I just don’t see that.”
This is not primarily an issue of policy but narrative. Many Biden voters differentiated (without me giving any prompt to do so) between support for Sanders’s egalitarianism, as such, and its framing as the cause of racism. Marc, a 46-year-old white consultant who lives in Maine, said in an email that he agreed “that the United States is far too economically unequal; it’s just that I don’t think that shrinking the inequality will solve the anger and resentment … people live in their own alternate reality … the MAGA anger is largely delusional.”
Blaming the Wrong People
In shifting agency, reaction narratives also shift blame and anger. This was a natural enough move for the activist class to make after their primary loss in 2016. Many of their grievances were with the Democratic Party, so a story that blamed it for Trump’s rise was very appealing.
Some sections of the antiestablishment left followed this instinct with an almost comedic consistency. Jacobin, a publication firmly in this camp, published article after article insisting “Democratic Party Elites Brought Us This Disaster.” When Republicans undeniably did something bad, they were quick to shift blame back to the Democrats: “The Democrats Have Been Embarrassingly Useless on Abortion” after Dobbs, or “January 6 Was Scary. The Democrats’ Inability to Respond Has Been Scarier.”
When challenged on the fact that they seem to be giving the MAGA right a pass, many on the antiestablishment left will respond with the firefighter analogy. I’ve heard this dozens of times, both online and in person. Basically: “If my house is on fire and the firefighters show up but refuse to put it out, I’m going to yell at the firefighters, not the fire.” For those mercifully unversed in intra-left disputes, the fire represents Trump and the right; the firefighters, the Democrats and liberals. In other words, they focus on the Democrats, and are angrier at them, because they do not understand the right as having agency.
Voters who do perceive the right as having agency, who do blame it, and do focus their anger on it, hate this kind of rhetoric. “I find Sanders’s relationship with the Democratic Party to be highly transactional, bad politically, and quite frankly insulting,” Maurice, a 49-year-old Asian software developer in New York City, told me by email.
Some Biden voters were quite critical of the party. Many held nuanced views. They all however felt the left went too far. There’s a difference between a flawed good guy and two bad guys; between someone on your side who has failed and someone who caused the problem to begin with.
In the 2020 Democratic primary, this could be seen particularly clearly in how the leading candidates described their relationship with Obama. Biden called him his friend. He talked of his former boss as, if not quite a god, certainly more than a man. Sanders, in contrast, had a much cooler appraisal; he was running against both parties. To many of the activists who made up his campaign, Obama was a neoliberal sellout who had let us down and paved the way for Trump.
It sounds obvious to say it, but Democratic primary voters did not respond well to this. Alex, a 32-year-old white Hispanic chemist from New Jersey, told me via direct message that while she had differences with Obama, “Sanders’s rhetoric always rubs me the wrong way. He’s not actually a Democrat, so it annoys me when he runs as one and then badmouths the only good Democratic president of my lifetime.”
That Sanders portrayed himself as being “outside” the Democratic Party was a sticking point for many. I think it particularly hurt him with the local community leaders whom primary voters looked to for endorsements. I talked with the Reverend Johnny Noble, the pastor of the Second Nazareth Baptist Church—a large, historic faith community in Columbia, South Carolina, with a mostly older Black congregation. He had provided a key endorsement for Biden in the 2020 primary. His rationale was mostly positive—he liked the way Biden had conducted himself as Obama’s vice president and felt he had the experience needed to pass his legislative agenda and turn the economy around. On Sanders, he had met him, but for him and many in his community the “independent” label was an issue:
We’re going to vote for a team that has a track record. We want to know that we’re going to win.… Either be a Democrat or a Republican. But as an independent you’re splitting votes. A lot of times we see independents as imposters who are working for the enemy. For Democrats, the enemy are Republicans. So when you’re an independent, you’re taking votes that could be going to the Democrat; you’re actually working for the enemy. And we will shun that in a heartbeat.
Even if, I asked, the independent in question was now running in a Democratic primary? No. “We don’t trust you.” Attempting to be both inside and outside the party struck many as inauthentic; “it reminds us of a chameleon.” There were two teams—a pro–working class, pro–diversity and inclusion, pro–economic stability team and the enemy. People needed to know you were on their team. Biden was perceived that way (“We know Joe”), and positioning himself as close to Obama reinforced that. To the Reverend Noble, this was obviously the right approach to messaging his community: “[Biden] was his vice president, and the idea of him being against Barack Obama just would be idiotic. It wouldn’t make any sense. [Obama] was a beloved president.”
Gender and Race
The antiestablishment left’s reaction narrative blames not only Democratic politicians but also ordinary liberals. Another Jacobin headline illustrates this: “Liberal Democracy Is in Trouble—And Liberals Won’t Save It.” In online spaces, progressives who do not quite align with their exact rhetoric are dismissed as “resist libs,” “blue MAGA,” “girlbosses,” “wine moms,” and more. If this all sounds very gendered (which is to say misogynistic), it’s because it is.
There are two reasons for this. First, the 2016 revolt was also about gender: Liberalism and the Democratic Party had become increasingly female-coded over the last two decades as the result of highly gendered framings by the political right. This made the activist class (young, majority male, majority white) uncomfortable. The prospect of the party being led by a woman was too much for many. Second, the denial of agency to the right is itself reflective of gender biases. In everyday life, we often move agency from a man to a woman to avoid blaming men for their actions. “What did you say to make him hit you?” or “You shouldn’t set him off.” The same thing has happened here—these activists removed agency from a male-coded entity (the political right, or Republican Party) as a way of absolving it and placed agency (hence blame and anger) onto a female-coded entity (the Democratic Party or liberalism).
The antiestablishment left has flatly refused to ever consider that there might be a gendered aspect to its core narrative. Core voters, however, increasingly started to see it. Alex (a second Alex), a 31-year-old mixed-race scientist from California, had supported Sanders in 2020 but came to question some aspects of his narratives. She told me by D.M. how the only voices she heard pointing out the gendered aspects of the reaction narrative “were (mostly female) libfems” who were dismissed by both left and center in overtly gendered terms. She found this difficult and damaging: “When you hear from all sides that gendered explanations are silly, hysterical, or cringe (that one’s surprisingly powerful), it does affect you, even if you still profess those beliefs.… I called that a kind of self-gaslighting.”
The reaction narrative also advances a theory of racism at odds with how most Black Americans understand their experience. Monique told me Sanders had “a tendency to completely ignore race and gender.” Specifically, she felt that for many Black voters her age and older, the left’s story was perceived as minimizing or trivializing racism:
Some of it might be a little generational. I’m the first generation of my mom’s family to never attend a segregated school. And I’m 38, I mean it wasn’t that long ago.… I hear these stories from people who are still living, from people who are still active.… It’s not like I need to go to a history book, I just talk to a relative.… It’s an everyday part of our lives. We see it in—and it doesn’t have to be overt—we see it in interactions. And to minimize that, it’s … offensive, irritating.
Ivy, a 33-year-old Black woman who works for a nonprofit in New York, echoed these points. She identified as a leftist and had supported Elizabeth Warren in 2020 because she felt she addressed social issues better. Sanders “just didn’t get it.” She also doubted an egalitarian program that didn’t factor in enduring racism could achieve lasting change: “The thing is, white people have often destroyed public programs if they believe Black people will also benefit from them.”
Like gender, concerns about how Sanders talked about race had been raised as early as 2015. The activist rebels had four years to rethink and adapt. But they didn’t. I know multiple people who attempted to raise this internally (within the movement) and encountered real hostility. I’ve personally heard many (young, white, male) left organizers talk about older Black voters as “low information” or bemoan how we need to “educate” them about Bernie’s platform. After some initial wins in the first primaries of 2020, Sanders put his message to the first majority-Black primary electorate in the calendar—South Carolina—and was annihilated, losing Black voters 61 to 17 percent. He also performed worse with women (only 17 percent of all women to 24 percent of all men), as he would in most of the coming Super Tuesday states. The primary would drag on for a bit, but the writing was on the wall: The activist revolt had failed.
And could they really have expected anything else? You can’t win over voters who you openly don’t like. Beyond being suicidal strategically, there’s something morally toxic here: The subsection of the left most angry at the Democratic Party, most invested in the reaction narrative, asks for us to have endless empathy and understanding for white “working-class” racists but has none at all for “cringe” suburban moms or “uneducated” older Black voters. The low-agency narrative has led these activists to a very ugly place indeed.
Tarnishing the Brand
The low-agency narrative has also changed how the antiestablishment left has engaged with liberalism and the Democratic Party in the Trump era. Consider the act of voting: To a mainline liberal, voting against Trump is the most obvious decision in the world. (Is the Democratic candidate also a fascist? No? Then vote for them!) If, however, you see the party as responsible for MAGA, in some sense to blame for its rise, then that choice looks very different. Imagine being in pain and being offered a painkiller, but one that would exacerbate the condition causing the pain in the first place. That’s how voting looks when you hold a reaction narrative. They also just feel differently about it: Casting a ballot for a Democrat feels dirty. Impure. Morally contaminating.
Left abstention was my Rubicon moment with the antiestablishment left. As the 2016 primary dragged on, and it eventually became clear Sanders would lose, many people I knew started to declare they would never vote for Hillary, even to stop Trump. Some latched onto a conspiracy theory, eagerly promoted by the right, that the election had been “rigged.” Others came up with various half-baked rationalizations. But they really couldn’t be talked out of it. I recall being called a “sellout” to my face, trying to persuade someone to back the Democratic ticket. (To use the language of the internet: Wait, you guys are getting paid?) Ultimately, a little over a quarter of Sanders primary voters (interestingly, the quarter with the highest levels of modern-day sexism), or around 3.5 million voters, would sit it out or vote third-party.
The leading commentators of the antiestablishment left have never quite reckoned with this moment. They feel it’s unfair that they’ve become defined by abstention in the eyes of liberals. But, again, they really only have themselves to blame: It’s not just that it happened, it’s that the left themselves kept reminding primary voters of it. Sanders in 2019 and 2020 made allusions to the 2016 primary being “rigged,” and left candidates have often refused to concede primaries. Anyone who spends time on the politics side of social media knows the antiestablishment left loves to publicly threaten not to vote. A particularly striking case came just after the 2020 election when Nina Turner (a prominent Sanders supporter) was running for a special House election. She was initially favored. She had name recognition and support on the ground, and she raised a lot of money. During the course of the campaign, however, she repeatedly refused to say if she voted for Hillary over Trump (presumably she didn’t) and compared voting Biden to eating “a bowl of shit.” Predictably, she lost.
Many of the Biden voters I interviewed brought up left abstention without me asking about it. The antiestablishment left “refused to vote for Harris and killed our turnout,” said Daniel, a white 56-year-old retiree from Florida, in an email. Another Daniel, a 41-year-old white man who works in marketing in California, made a similar interjection: Sanders had “attempted to create factions within the Democratic Party,” which caused division and had “driven voters toward third-party candidates.”
Put all this together, and you have a brand that has deteriorated in the eyes of the primary electorate over the Trump era. Biden attempted to reintegrate the rebels back into the party with an economically populist policy offer (the political class had been moving this way anyway). Sanders himself backed this—he was a loyal Biden supporter during his presidency—but among his rank and file, it never really stuck. Their reaction narrative—and with it, their animus toward liberals and the Democratic Party—remained, but any viable electoral path to power was gone.
A Roadmap for Reform
It is no accident that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, of all the politicians who came up in the activist revolt, the one most liked by mainline liberals. Early in her career, her rhetoric often referenced the reaction narrative, and her staff feuded online with other Democrats. As time went on, however, she refocused (and got better staff). While she still has differences with Democratic leadership, her anger and moral condemnation are directed rightward. She’s talked passionately about social issues and not just folded them into an economic narrative. Impressively, she’s also retained the trust of most of the antiestablishment left.
One good candidate does not make a Tea Party, however. AOC might—and I stress might—make a credible challenger to Chuck Schumer, whose Senate seat is next up in 2028. But if you want a broader activist assault, then you will need better activists. There are basically two paths here. The first is that mainline liberals write off the antiestablishment left and launch a second Tea Party themselves. I’m not against this on principle, but I think we should be realistic that we don’t have the capacity for it right now. Weakened though they are, most of progressive new media is in the hands of the left, and they dominate social media. Mainline liberals are just not very loud and not very visible.
The other path is, instead of replacing the activist class, they reform. Here’s how a left-progressive alliance could learn from their failures to win a Democratic Tea Party today:
None of this feels awful or impossible to me. Much is stuff we should have done years ago. The reaction narrative is wrong. It does function via misogyny, its implications can be racist, and it certainly downplays racism. Abstention was a catastrophic mistake. Liberal core Democratic voters have been largely right about Trump. An activist class that does not listen to them does not deserve to lead them.
Recent events also give some hope that such a reform project might be possible. Sanders’s initial response to the election loss was a disappointing reversion back to “Democrats abandoned the working class.” Subsequently though, he seems to have rebounded: His and AOC’s “Fight the Oligarchy” tour has largely focused rage and anger rightward. The crowds and energy the tour has drawn have shown that—for all its failures—his movement still has something positive to offer U.S. politics. My optimistic read of this is it’s a moment of succession, a passing of the crown. Leadership of the faction that formed to support Sanders in 2016 is now passing to a younger politician who shares many of his strengths but who lacks his liabilities and baggage. Who may be able to reach primary voters he cannot.
This, as I say, is optimistic. And if AOC does emerge as the leader of the left, her task will be considerable. While she is generally liked by liberals, her faction is distrusted. Work will need to be done to repair the brand. The responsibility for this will not just be hers but that of the broader activist community: Do we welcome reform or fight it?
After their deeply painful loss in the 2016 primary, activist rebels faced a choice, though they did not recognize it at the time: They could build a movement that would win real power or they could hang onto their anger at the Democratic Party, their desire to blame it, to punish it with abstention. But they could not do both.
I’ve found myself drawn back to that primary. Revisiting it again and again. The simplicity of the test. The totality of our failure. The scale of the consequences. Every part of me yearns to stretch across time, to make the movement of scrappy activists I lived and breathed for many years do better. And I can’t. None of us can. All that is left is to learn from it.