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Democrats: Run by the Lefty Activists
It’s obvious, I guess. But up until I read this piece, “Why the Democratic Party Can’t Moderate” by Alicia Nieves, I hadn’t really formalized the notion in my head.
The situation in the Democratic Party is quite simple. As a Democrat, you cannot vote against the “national and state progressive advocacy groups” or you are politically finished.
Nieves starts her piece describing the end of the political career of Shawn Thierry, a Democrat in the Texas House, “an African-American woman, a lawyer, and the daughter of a city maintenance worker and an English teacher.”
Never mind. She voted for “SB 14, a bill to ban gender transition treatments for minors,” after giving a speech saying that her “religious convictions and her own research required her to vote in favor of the legislation.”
That was enough for the progessive advocacy groups.
Less than a year after that vote, progressive groups and aligned unions poured more than $1 million to help a hand-selected challenger defeat Thierry in a heated primary and runoff campaign.
Liberal commentators call them “The Groups.” If you want to get money as a Democrat to run for office you need money and support from The Groups. Otherwise, oblivion. Nieves had experience in dealing with The Groups when working on a campaign. In other words, getting funding.
To access this funding, my candidate and I spent hours completing detailed questionnaires that functioned as ideological purity tests. The answers determined whether we would receive money and how much.
What are The Groups?
[A] relatively small but highly organized ecosystem of national advocacy groups, politicized unions, and ideological nonprofits exerts outsized influence over the party’s candidate selection, legislative and policy drafting, and internal discipline.
Nieves got to be a staff member for the minority leader in the Texas House. Here’s how Democratic politics works.
School Choice?
Teachers’ unions worked to make sure Democratic members who supported charter schools remained on the periphery of the party’s decision-making. They were also vigilant to ensure that no member broke ranks to support the governor’s school voucher program proposal.
So now you know why all Democrats vote in unison.
Social Issues?
On socially divisive issues such as abortion, immigration, gun control, and criminal justice, progressive groups expected unwavering opposition to Republican proposals.
And forget about voting for the preferences of your local voters.
Members were unable to vote in ways that reflected the diversity of viewpoints of their constituents. Their dependence on progressive groups also atrophied their ability to engage in independent thought and policymaking on less controversial issues, like fiscal policy and strengthening the state’s electric grid.
Doesn’t matter if you are a moderate. You support the progressive line. Period.
In Illinois, a coalition of progressive groups pushed lawmakers to pass the SAFE-T Act that eliminated cash bail statewide in 2021…
In California, a coalition of progressive groups has steadily pushed the state to expand eligibility of Medi-Cal, the state’s low-income health insurance program[.]
Like, I say, it’s obvious. Once you see it, you can’t “unsee” it.
Every Democrat, elected or appointed, better vote and speak in accordance with the line of each of The Groups. Period. Each Group has its Issue, whether it’s “Defund the Police” or “Abolish ICE.” And unless you vote for The Issue, you will never get elected in this town again.
Nieves ends her piece mourning that the Democrats cannot moderate until they deal with “progressive capture.”
But really, the Democrats cannot moderate until they have been reduced to a rump, until it is electoral suicide to align with The Groups.
Right now, in a 50-50 nation, forget about it. The progressives, everywhere from New York City to Seattle, think they are the wave of the future. And so they are.
Until they aren’t.
| perm | 02/18/26 11:12 pm ET | comments |
My Plan to End the Birth Dearth
I have been worrying, like everyone, about the Birth Dearth. How women just aren’t having children the way they did back in the bad old days of the Patriarchy.
But then I had a Brain Wave. Experts agree that used to happen to FDR’s Brain Trust back in the day. Pity it didn’t fix the Great Depression…
Back in the day it occurred to me, as a Sailer-approved Noticer, that a hundred years ago the rich were fat and the poor were thin. Today the opposite is true.
I once mentioned this little joke to a nice liberal lady, wife of the first communiity college president in Massachusetts, and she was not amused.
So it must be true.
I don’t know if you have Noticed that back in the day, poor women worked and rich women did not.
But today, poor women are on welfare and rich, educated women all have fabulous careers. Darling.
The poor women have all the babies they want, because welfare pays them all they need. But the rich educated women do not have many babies. They have more important things to do, like making universities “safe” and implementing DEI in corporations and reciting liberal anthems at mostly peaceful protests.
So My Plan is to end welfare as we know it and gently encourage poor women to get a job. This will prompt all the rich, educated women to decide that the better, evolved form of life is to bear children and raise them to perfection. Because working for wages and salaries is so déclassé, darling.
Do you think it would work?
All I can say is: nobody has come up with a Better Plan.
The thing is that women all go with the program. You could say, pejoratively, that they are slaves to Fashion. But I think it is deeper than that. Women go with the program — the “common knowledge” of the other women in the community — because that is the way, down the ages, to keep themselves alive and their children alive.
Right now the program for women in the educated class is careers. Don’t ask me how it got started, because I don’t know. But today all the women go to college and all the womenwant a career.
But high-status women could just as easily decide that careers are déclassé and start a movement back into the home. They might all get together and set up bespoke micro-schools for their children to attend. The whole point would be to differentiate their special micro-school from the ordinary middle-class-mom home-schooling culture. Needless to day, your kid would not be welcome at the custom micro-school.
I don’t know how to get this started because, even though I have studied women all my adult life I still don’t understand what makes them tick.
Whaddya think, Baldrick? Is this a Cunning Plan, or what?
| perm | 02/17/26 10:55 pm ET | comments |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
When people start to feel the heat, that is when they start to cheat.
A racist is absolutely anyone who’s pissed off a lefty — Glenn Reynolds
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Rene Girard and the Scapegoat
