The New Republicrats: Snakes of the Democratic Party.

With all the skullduggery that abounds within the Republican Party, you might have missed some bullshit happening within the Democratic establishment. We know party ideologies exist along a spectrum, but what differentiates the elephants from the jackasses is that one is good at projecting moderation while always tacking to the extreme, while the other is so busy attacking its extreme that it gives the appearance of moderation.

Confused? No worries. I got you.

Ten sitting House Democrats and five candidates just signed a pledge promising America they’re not socialists. Not “not far-left.” Not “not extreme.” Socialist. As if that’s the fire they’re most worried about putting out in the summer of 2026.

Before we get started today dismantling these fatuous miscreants, let’s dispel something that should be obvious but sadly is not. There are no socialists in Congress. Not one. Bernie Sanders, not a socialist. AOC, not a socialist. Further down the chain even, you will not find any socialists in highly visible offices. Zohran Mamdani, not a socialist. The fact that these numbnuts can even proffer an anti-socialist pledge without anyone pushing back on the very premise is an example of our failed educational system.

But I digress.

Socialism is a social and economic system whereby control of the means of production and distribution is owned by the working class. It literally exists nowhere. It’s not a thing. It’s an aspirational vision of how society might someday be organized, but there are currently no models that represent it anywhere in the world. With that out of the way, let’s begin.

Empty Promises

While Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey is generally the face of anti-Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) opposition, it was Reps. Tom Suozzi of New York and Adam Gray of California who were the main signatories and the ones to unveil the “Promise to America.” Suozzi, full disclosure, is my congressman. I know him fairly well and will tell you this much. His family is wonderful and he’s fine company. Outside of that, his politics are completely devoid of ideology, as you’ll see in the pledge itself.

The timing of the pledge is not incidental. It dropped on the heels of DSA-aligned candidates posting real primary wins, demonstrating the power of both Zohran Mamdani’s endorsement and the affordability platform of the organization.

So the sequencing matters. The energy in the party’s base moves left. Days later, a group of members responds not by making a competing case for what they believe, but by drafting a pledge defined entirely by what they’re against—socialism, extremism, lawlessness, recklessness. It’s a pledge built in opposition to a mood, not in service of a program.

Who actually signed it: Suozzi and Gray as co-leaders, plus Josh Gottheimer, Susie Lee, Don Davis, Vicente Gonzalez, Laura Gillen, Janelle Bynum, Kristen McDonald Rivet, and Maggie Goodlander. Then there were also five non-incumbent candidates to round it out.

Here’s a Dem Venn diagram of these so-called Democrats who just can’t bear to be associated with socialism, which as we established, does not exist in the United States.

Sources: Blue Dog PAC, New Democrat Coalition, Problem Solvers Caucus

Conservative Democrats who are really elephants in donkey clothing belong to a caucus or groups that go by a few different names:

• The New Democrat Coalition, which is actually funny because there’s nothing new or Democratic about them.
• The Blue Dog Coalition, those are the ones that can’t get enough war.
• The Problem Solvers Caucus, also funny because, they don’t.

Whether it’s voting to censure their progressive colleagues for actually challenging Donald Trump for his many crimes, or voting to end the government shutdown in the only meaningful bit of leverage we had against the administration, or possessing the worst progressive voting records in Congress, these fuckers stick together in the pursuit of…actually…you know what, I’m not entirely sure. Best way to find out is to check that pledge I suppose.

And before you say, “but what about AIPAC,” 6/10 are recipients of AIPAC funding with three receiving substantial sums, but that’s not the story here. So stay with me.

There are six main planks to the pledge. Four are pretty banal, but there are two (highlighted below) that we’ll examine more closely.

1. Confident Patriotism and National Renewal: We are proud, not ashamed of America.

2. Free Speech, Respect, AND Common Purpose: We are mainstream, not extreme.

3. Fiscal Discipline: We are responsible, not reckless.

4. Government That Works: We believe government should solve problems, not create them.

5. Safety, Security, and Human Dignity: We want safety, not lawlessness.
   

6. Growth, Competition, and Broad Prosperity: We are capitalist, not socialist.

Notice the construction. Every single plank is defined by a negation. Not socialist. Not lawless. Not reckless. Not extreme. Not ashamed. This isn’t a platform, it’s a rebuttal—and a rebuttal to a caricature. Now notice what’s absent: No health care position, position on the cost of housing, or labor policy. No wealth tax, minimum wage, or answer to the affordability crisis that’s actually driving primary results.

Now let’s address these empty items specifically before we get to the real meat.

If the supposition here is that these are ideological and/or political belief statements that somehow run afoul of socialist principles, then I’m struggling a bit. Even if we take the most broad definition of socialism at face value, I can’t remember from any of my readings or education on Proudhon, Mills, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lenin, Goldman, Saint-Simon, Debs, La Follette, or anyone associated with the discipline expressly advocating against free speech, human dignity, safety, respect, common purpose, or a functioning government.

Patriotism is the one area where there might be some discussion, since most noted socialists were expressly cynical of nationalism and sought to build consciousness among workers across borders. So there’s that. But on balance, I’m pretty sure that 4/6 points that they presumably put a lot of thought into are kind of table stakes.

Which brings us to the two that really matter here.

• Fiscal Discipline
• Growth, Competition and Broad Prosperity

Again, the headlines are banal but the subheadings are what really matter.

Let’s start with the latter: Growth, Competition and Broad Prosperity.

“We believe in a growing, fair, and competitive economy that rewards hard work, innovation, entrepreneurship, and ownership. Full-time work should make it possible to own a home, raise a family, afford healthcare, and retire with dignity. Economic, permitting, and tax policy should expand opportunity and lower costs for workers, families, entrepreneurs, and those striving to join the middle class, not disproportionately favor those already at the top.”

This is the old New Democrat playbook to the letter. In fact, let’s rewind to 1992.

After 12 years of Reagan/Bush Republican rule that absolutely gutted the middle class and kicked off the neoliberal era of maximum inequality and unfettered capital gains at the top of the economic ladder, the Democratic Party was faced with a choice. Lean into working-class, multiracial coalition politics epitomized by Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition, or a version of “if you can’t beat ‘em, might as well join ‘em.” Not only did it choose the latter, it leaned into it so hard that even Republicans had a hard time keeping up.

Thus the establishment of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The DLC becomes the New Democrat movement. The New Democrat movement becomes Bill Clinton and Al Gore. I’ve made this argument at length before—our three-part series on the Clinton years walks through exactly how this played out: the convention fight between Jackson and Dukakis, the DLC’s rise, and the sheer scale of what “New Democrat” governance actually cost the party’s working-class base over the following three decades.

Welfare reform. The 1994 crime bill. Deregulation. Deficit hawkery dressed up as fiscal seriousness. All of it sold as the pragmatic, electable alternative to “extremism.” All of it, over time, hollowing out the party’s relationship with rural America, the heartland, and Rust Belt towns that used to be reliably Democratic—territory the Republican Party spent the next 30 years quietly harvesting.

One of the pillars of the New Democrats at the time was that we should prioritize entrepreneurship and ownership over work. Labor was completely muted in this movement as though we were going to build a nation of 300 million business owners and their kids.

Back to the Pledge

It pays lip service to a vague tax policy that doesn’t disproportionately favor the upper class, and somehow helps lift workers into the middle class. But this isn’t the problem. More than half of the population technically doesn’t pay income tax, so I’m not sure what tax policy they’re talking about. It’s the entire superstructure of capitalism that suppresses the working class, not income tax. If you want to introduce a progressive tax like we had after World War Two to level the playing field and prevent the creation of obscenely wealthy people who buy and sell politicians, one where the top marginal tax rate is 90%, then I’m down with that. But this bullshit is a placebo, not a prescription.

Now, onto the item that I have an enormous problem with because its banality and pragmatic sheen that means one of two things: Either the brain trust behind it is profoundly, unfathomably stupid. or they are equally as much sinister. And the reason there can be no middle ground here is because they are professionals. This is their job. This concept is so utterly flawed as to be catastrophic if you have even the slightest bit of training in the dismal science. Fiscal Discipline.

“A generation has passed since our party balanced the budget. We will prioritize tackling the national debt honestly.”

On this matter I could go on for hours. But here are some fundamental truths about the balanced budget proposition, a notion shared only by these ten members and those who seek to deliver the goods on Project 2025.

It is true that the Clinton administration managed to put forward a balanced budget, though there are budgetary nuances to this stipulation. Taking it at face value, however, we can agree for the purpose of this debate. To agree to this then, you must also acknowledge that it led to a technical recession and the further dislocation of the working class. You cannot be both a devoted capitalist who strictly adheres to monetarist theory of floating fiat currency—as they purport to do in their other pledge—and withdraw the totality of excess currency from the system. These two things are irreconcilable, particularly if you allow for an imbalance of capital that gathers in the upper echelons of society.

Again, this is the modern American version of capitalism and we are the center of gravity in the global system of our own design. The proverbial horse has not simply just left the barn, but has stampeded across the country and taken big giant horse shits on every stop along the way. The global economy depends on one thing and one thing alone: the U.S. dollar. The exorbitant privilege afforded us after Bretton Woods and cocaine defibrillator shock Nixon gave to the dollar meant that the whole world got hooked on our shit. There’s no coming back from this now, there’s only riding it to its logical and devastating conclusion.

Let’s continue with their idea by asking the next question: How would you do it?

Source: The Peter G. Peterson Foundation

The biggest chunks of the budget are fixed: Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare. The three most popular programs that are literally the last great accomplishments of the party these asshats claim to belong to. Assuming those are off the table, which I’m not sure is the case mind you, then we’re looking at 13% mandatory spending and 14% interest. Since it’s that 14% interest they’re trying to eliminate, then that means we have the 13% military budget and 14% for literally everything else the federal government does.

Considering our Dem Venn diagram that shows the crossover of these Dems with the Blue Dogs, and the fact that they vote in lockstep to approve the defense budget, I’m assuming the cuts will come from the 14% in discretionary funding.

Source: The Peter G. Peterson Foundation

Let’s make it really easy. If you cut it all—money for veterans, unemployment, education, transportation, the court system, health, the CDC, housing, community development, science, agriculture, energy—I mean truly everything—then you’re still not there. And in fact, you’d throw almost half of the country into abject poverty, which would also destroy the economy because consumerism would die.

If you hear anyone promoting the idea of a balanced budget, it’s nothing more than a Trojan Horse to cut Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. Because even eliminating the entire military budget doesn’t get you there either. This is the central project of the libertarian wing that wrote Project 2025. So, again, either these professionals—whose literal job is to understand the budget and fight for prioritization and allocation of funds that produce equitable outcomes for the most amount of people and protect the most vulnerable among us—are stupid, or plainly sinister.

We don’t have to wonder where their legislative priorities lie, mind you. There’s a site called Progressive Punch that analyzes each legislative session by determining whether bills are progressive or conservative. They tally how each member votes, giving them an absolute score and then grading the members based upon the composition of their respective districts. For example, my district is represented by Tom Suozzi now, but it was George Santos before that. So it’s a purple district, and this matters in varying degrees.

Let’s look at their profiles and I’ll explain why.

Source: Progressive Punch

Adam Gray is special. Even though he’s in a Republican-leaning district, his absolute rating is so low it’s almost hard to even call him a Democrat. There are Republicans with more progressive voting records than Adam Gray. So fuck that guy. That’s why he gets an F.

To me, the three most troubling are the ones in democratic leaning or strongly democratic districts. Gottheimer, Goodlander, and Bynum. F, D and C in order. Again, these are basically Republicans in blue districts.

This matters because progressives are always being told to shut up and “vote blue no matter who,” but this conviction doesn’t hold when it’s the other way around. The entire issue, according to their own words and the timing of this pledge, is that these Democrats think that the Democratic Socialist candidates should get their own party. I can give you chapter and verse on how the parties structurally foreclosed on third parties in federal elections, which is why so many of them win at the local level and have to run in Democratic primaries for federal races. But they don’t care about that. Nor do they appear to care about the will of the people.

It’s a pretty simple equation. Democratic socialists run on an affirmative, solutions-oriented platform that is largely appealing to Democrats. Medicare for All is an affirmative statement and a plan. Raising the minimum wage. Freezing the rent in rent stabilized housing. Building more affordable housing. Progressive taxation. Making transportation affordable or, gasp, free. Because as our extravagant deficits remind us, we have the money. And if we don’t have it, we can make it. It’s what we decide to do with it that matters. If you create an extra $12 trillion over the course of 15 years and distribute it to only one rung on the ladder near the top, you don’t have a deficit problem, you have a distribution problem.

All of these agenda items that help the poor and working class are planks that make up a platform. The fact that these planks are being taken up by DSA doesn’t mean they’re new and extreme, it means that they were abandoned by the Democrats in their never-ending quest to ride the fence. The only problem is the fence is built on a shifting ground so it keeps moving further and further to the right.

The DSA wouldn’t have to run on these things as an insurgent movement if Democrats just did their fucking jobs.

Every time the Democrats abandon one of these planks, they cede that territory completely, because the Republicans also don’t have anything to fill them in with. They don’t even offer platitudes. This is the choice that Democrats made after the ‘88 elections when they chose the New Democrat path over the Rainbow Coalition path. Removing the platform without removing the promises meant that every time a Democrat came to power with a hollowed out agenda that didn’t deliver, the electoral rebuke was increasingly brutal. Thus Clinton begets Bush. Bush tears it down, and Obama steps in with promises and no planks. Offering to lift boats with hope and change while forgetting to fill the bathtub. Thus Obama begets Trump and the cycle continues.

That’s why these voting records tell me everything I need to know. Because they’re voting in lockstep with the opposition party believing they need to pander to the purple and red in order to salvage a blue seat.

And that’s what they’ll tell you. They’ll say, “It’s all well and good to stand for these things in a safe blue district, but I need to make deals and cross the aisle and compromise.” Or, “What good is it if I vote progressive if I’m thrown out in the next cycle?”

It’s a compelling argument built on an entirely false narrative. The idea that anyone in a district, outside of a very narrow band of pure ideologues who are never coming your way, would genuinely oppose measures that work for the greater good is absurd. That’s why courage is so lacking in the establishment and why Zohran Mamdani is currently conducting a masterclass in retail governance. He flipped the Mario Cuomo script entirely. He campaigned in prose and is governing in poetry. And the reason the centrists cannot get with it is because it’s tearing apart this false premise.

And that’s why the only place that’s buying the bullshit these guys are selling is Fox News.