Tea Party of the Left?

Democrats must first come to terms with Americans' strong distrust of government.

One of the great unsettled debates of the extended Trump era is whether Democrats need a “Tea Party” movement of their own. Those in favor share the view that the GOP’s brinkmanship and subterfuge need to be answered in kind. As demonstrated by the many Democrats who opposed the November deal eight Senate Democrats struck to end this fall’s government shutdown, party activists believe the days of congenial bipartisan compromise are long gone and that establishmentarian liberals expecting differently are digging their own grave.

Others who are sympathetic to party reform caution that Democrats need a considered approach vis-à-vis their leadership that is congruous with actually obtaining substantive “policy innovations.” Progressives by definition are supposed to be invested in making government work and proving the value of a more active state. For insurgents who have made it into office, the allure of attacking the system on the campaign trail has typically given way to the exigencies of preventing government from appearing more dysfunctional than it already seems—even when Republicans hold most of the cards. That very imperative to build trust in government when millions of Americans hold it in low esteem has mostly tempered any inclination on the democratic left to fully emulate MAGA’s “burn it all down” mentality.

The intermittent case for a Democratic Tea Party thus rests on the narrower goal of either replacing sedate incumbents or compelling the party’s leadership to adopt activist positions. Core constituencies tied to service worker and public sector unions and professional advocacy organizations have long thirsted for stronger representation in the party’s upper ranks and sought to elect political outsiders pursuing policy outcomes on behalf of a mix of new and old causes. To a considerable extent these progressives have succeeded relative to their limited power in 2010, when the right-wing Tea Party movement wiped out Barack Obama’s congressional majority and blocked whatever remained of his domestic agenda. Today, several party elites, newer members of Congress, and local leaders champion an unapologetic blend of economic and cultural progressivism. Largely unbowed by the backlash to “wokeness,” they are poised to further shape the Democratic agenda—despite failing to improve, and perhaps having worsened, the Democratic Party’s image among blue-collar workers attracted to Trump’s America First rhetoric. “For all its limitations,” as John B. Judis argues in a new Compact essay, “the Democrats’ left wing is now the principal source of the party’s energy and ideas.”

To be sure, the balance of power within the party is far from settled. Left-wing progressives are still an electoral minority and under pressure to disavow or at least mute the stances that have undermined their own advance as well as the viability of red-state Democrats. Yet even Democratic critics of woke dogma admit that progressives have been responsible for reinvigorating the party after the disappointments and setbacks of the Obama era. “It is abundantly clear,” conceded veteran New Democrat strategist James Carville last month in the New York Times, “that the Democratic Party must now run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression.” Carville, perspicacious though he is, would not have reached this conclusion without progressives constantly highlighting the mounting indignities of an increasingly monopolized app- and algorithm-driven economy.

What is less evident is how all this insurgent energy might actually be harnessed in 2026 and 2028 to solve the urgent regional problems first laid bare by that 2010 “shellacking.” Up close in the country’s bluest districts, the contest for party control may appear to progressive activists as no less than a battle for the “soul” of the Democratic Party. But from afar, where the party’s reach is weak or nonexistent and positive government itself has shriveled, it is probable such factional disputes strike many left-behind Americans as purely performative and distant from their concerns.

That disconnect crystallizes the core predicament facing today’s left flank. While they have gradually attained what might be called “cohabitation” with coastal powerbrokers, progressives have drifted from the original mission of those who hoped that an insurgency analogous to the Tea Party would (1) prioritize recovering seats and regions lost to the GOP and (2) do so by persuading Americans eager to take a sledgehammer to crony capitalism that liberal governance can be an engine of shared progress once more. These outcomes continue to elude Democrats, raising the possibility that to move forward they must first come to terms with why so many Americans distrust government and dare to convert “draining the swamp” into a signature cause of the left.

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It is unlikely that the grassroots left of the early 2010s, hopeful that Barack Obama’s 2008 landslide might one day be replicated by a more assertive reformer, imagined their vision of a Tea Party-style revolt would be isolated to the bluest enclaves. When Trump first won the presidency, many supporters of Bernie Sanders pointed to Hillary Clinton’s terrible ground game in the Rust Belt as proof the Democratic elite had become too insular and disconnected from the working class. The answer was to realign the party in a more social democratic, confrontational, and populist direction. On top of being less accommodating toward corporate lobbyists and high-profile donors, that meant purging the neoliberal mandarins who had impeded ambitious New Deal-style reform, much as the 2010 Tea Party insurgency and its MAGA successor had ostensibly ejected from the GOP “big government” conservatives responsible for hyperglobalism, massive bank bailouts, and endless wars.

The subsequent blue wave in the 2018 midterms, which included many relative moderates, briefly dampened this debate. Sustaining the “Resistance” required a big tent that welcomed affluent suburbanites and culturally moderate Republicans who recoiled from Trump’s character and agenda. Primarying every “corporate” or “establishment” Democrat, the new fetish of the progressive left, was neither feasible nor particularly advantageous despite the need for fresh blood in key districts, as these internecine contests had almost no bearing on the Democratic deficit looming beyond the coasts and the “blue dots” of the Sunbelt. The 2020 Democratic primary, followed by the turbulent summer of Covid and Black Lives Matter, then revived the effort to push the party to match the temperament and outlook of a dissatisfied, youthful base demanding more from its elected representatives. And yet in this same period the Democratic coalition largely accepted the theory that Joe Biden, a quintessential institutionalist whom many hoped would restore the Blue Wall in the Midwest, would be an LBJ-like orchestrator of reform once he entered the White House.

Under Biden’s leadership the party’s dividing lines became murkier. Victory amid a public health emergency that had amplified Trump’s flaws seemed to confer a legislative mandate open to progressives’ input. Democrats keen to bracket the more anarchic episodes of the George Floyd protests were also inclined to discount the prevalence of anti-system sentiment, depicting it as mostly isolated to “ultra-MAGA” Republicans. In the aftermath of January 6, Democrats, certain they were rescuing the country, consciously shunned anti-establishment rhetoric that was in any way redolent of the “insurrectionists”; what Democrats needed was not a “Tea Party” that threatened disunity at a perilous moment in the nation’s history but to prove they were a steady hand that would clean up Trump’s mess. Democrats thus fashioned themselves as the custodians of norms, procedures, and institutions, including the administrative state Trump’s team had been largely thwarted from dismembering.

Democrats were right about needing to prove government could be efficacious, accountable, and an instrument of inclusive development. But Democrats were also under pressure to imbue their governance and political messaging with the critique of “systemic injustice” promulgated by the academic “woke” left. The mission to realign the party as sketched in 2015-2016 and regenerate grassroots support in the smaller cities and towns that had once buttressed the Democratic coalition had transformed in the intervening years. Strident identity politics, which some blame Clinton’s camp for inflaming, infected the entire party, further depressing Democratic competitiveness in Trump-leaning districts. Its predominance compounded the impression among parts of the electorate that Democratic elites, when they weren’t chasing celebrity endorsements, had come to personify every dreaded administrative busybody from a university, nonprofit, or soulless conglomerate. Fair or not, this reputation was incompatible with the task set by the original Sanders movement: to transform working-class perceptions of what public policy can achieve on behalf of ordinary people.

Meanwhile, the usual pressures of party loyalty, along with deepening fear of a Trump comeback, muzzled discussion of why Democratic governance was failing to yield the dramatic changes that had been promised. Having been treated graciously enough by the White House, Biden’s progressive “junior partners” were reluctant to critique “Bidenism” and scrutinize the disconnect between rhetoric and reality (which would inevitably unearth more bureaucratic inefficiencies likely to hurt Democrats, “the party of government,” more than Republicans, at least in the near term). Economic progressives, including Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal (then-head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus), finally had a seat at the table and hoped—naively, as it turned out—that Biden’s signature policies would start to depolarize the electorate by distributing or catalyzing investments in left-behind regions. They also believed the public was only beginning to understand how a reinvigorated Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and National Labor Relations Board could benefit ordinary consumers and workers. Accordingly, they hesitated to abandon the senescent president before he ended his reelection bid in July 2024, fearful they would trade away their bargaining power for an uncertain relationship with Vice President Kamala Harris or another Biden surrogate uncommitted to a new vision of political economy.

The first year of Trump’s second term has seemingly brought the debate over whether Democrats need their own Tea Party full circle. The cry for a more aggressive, anti-establishment posture was to be expected; after another humiliating loss, many base Democrats, regardless of age, are apoplectic over the machinations of the party elite. Many feel they are at the mercy of a gerontocracy and its luckless lackeys, who are unable or unwilling to foil a much more ruthless and brazenly corrupt version of MAGA. The torpid duo of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, in particular, lacks the respect Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi commanded even in difficult times. While party loyalists are heartened that Democrats of different backgrounds now seem well-positioned to prevail in the midterms on the common theme of “affordability,” the structural critique of the party is likely to persist until the rank and file are forced to unite behind the 2028 presidential nominee.

And so, the allure of a Tea Party-style insurgency is once again waxing. As before, however, the obsession with making blue districts “more progressive” threatens to take precedence over the unequivocal need to flip Republican-held seats. This betrays the conceptual limits of what a progressive or left-wing Tea Party could amount to. Rebellion against the status quo is primarily understood as a project to topple moderate liberals who are perceived as more comfortable enjoying the trappings of power than wielding it and replace them with impassioned younger voices modeled on the Squad and Zohran Mamdani. The main exception is that some left-leaning strategists, embarrassed by the number of winnable races decent candidates lost in 2022 and 2024, are counseling the party to also back Rust Belt insurgents who either eschew woke rhetoric or project a warrior-like energy typically missing from Democrats’ stage-managed campaigns.

Yet the perennial hunger to realign the party is complicated by the legacies and entanglements of the Biden era. This time around the recriminations are aimed in every direction, given that none of the party’s main factions are blameless for its dismal standing with working-class voters in formerly competitive regions. In fact, the simple “left” vs. “establishment” dichotomy is unapt to elucidate, much less solve, the challenges before Democrats, who above all must persuade Americans without much economic agency that government can still be a source of enablement and community wealth-building, not just patchwork anti-poverty programs. Nor is that dichotomy conducive to exploring alternative lessons from the Tea Party, which, after all, tapped into legitimate anger over crony capitalism even as it reheated the usual conservative boilerplate about “free enterprise.” Democrats, primed to defend government from the right’s wrecking crew, still fail to see that a proper Tea Party of the left would indeed overhaul government bureaucracies, eliminate fraud and waste, and tame veto-wielding and rent-seeking interests in equal measure, precisely in order to make the state a nimble and credible agent of widening opportunity and national redevelopment.

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America, it is variously said, is stuck in a populist era. It might, however, be more accurate to say that a great swath of America has sunk into a radical neo-Jacksonian mood induced by an unmet Promethean-Hamiltonian appetite; put another way, Americans from different walks of life are hungry for the momentum and material progress that characterized the American Century, yet they are deeply skeptical of the authority required to facilitate similar leaps. Suspicious of bureaucracy in all its forms, disaffected Americans are torn between the possibility that state power can be wielded to revive a dying middle class and a fear that it has conspired with organized money and all manner of special interest rackets to uproot its last foundations.

This jaundiced perception that corruption pervades every aspect of American political life is hardly new. But it has become far more widespread and combustive in an extremely unequal and polarized age, with consequences that bedevil the reform-minded left more than right-populists or traditional “small government” conservatives. Inertia, after all, perpetuates the grievances that lead to more legislative gridlock and institutional decadence, thus stoking more nihilism and anti-system sentiment. As faith in public institutions wanes, this vicious cycle eventually engulfs quarters that normally believe government can and must be a force for good, leading more Americans to suspect great reforms are a thing of the distant past—and perhaps were never so impactful to begin with.

There are, unfortunately, no easy answers at hand for Democrats contemplating a way out of the dysfunction and distrust that has made American politics so sordid. But if Democrats are to convince the angry and dispossessed that elections are not, at root, a rank contest between two modes of kleptocracy, they will have to develop a politics that is unflinching, indeed radical, in its demand for competent and accountable government. Only from there will they be able to set their sights on projects that restore and expand our understanding of the common good.