Now that the 2020 election season is in the rearview mirror, the fragile truce between various factions within the Democratic Party appears to have reached its end. In fact, the dust had hardly even settled (you would be free to argue the dust is still swirling as of this writing, but that is a debate for another time) before progressive Representative/ Full-time Twitter Warrior Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was warning Democratic leadership to stack the Biden-Harris administration with progressive-minded activists or risk big losses in 2022 and beyond.
There is a profound rift emerging in the Democratic Party that closely mirrors the rise of the Tea Party faction of the GOP. The ideological engine of the party has been seized by progressive-minded ideological purists under the Justice Democrat banner, yet the party leadership clearly favors a more moderate approach. This places the party in a catch-22 in which the DNC is forced to straddle the line between two disparate ideologies in national races. It’s hard to believe that Ilhan Omar and Joe Manchin exists within the same party, yet this is the position Democrats find themselves in.
There is no more Donald Trump to hold together these strange bedfellows. The cracks are there, Nancy Pelosi has already announced this is likely her last rodeo as Speaker of the House, likely a tacit acknowledgement of the rising power of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and The Squad. The Squad is actively testing the limits of their influence right now with several members actively circulating a petition to block undesirables from key positions in the nascent Biden Administration, namely the selection to head the Office of Management and Budget, Bruce Reed.
It is hard to imagine that Bruce Reed is the second coming of Ron Paul, as the progressive corners of Twitter seem to assert, but the nuances of Mr. Reed’s fiscal philosophy are almost irrelevant. The Ideology Inquisition is in motion.
So what happens next? It all depends on how the Georgia Senate run-off races play out. Should the GOP win out and maintain control of the Senate then the House Democrats are free to pass and endless stream of progressive moon-shots, knowing full well they have McConnell to play off as the bad guy. The real fireworks would be Democratic control of the Senate. Schumer and Pelosi would then be in the unenviable position of passing actual legislation, which of course runs the risk of having said legislation actually pass into law. This leads to a difficult tightrope to walk, Democratic leadership would be forced to craft a bill that manages to appease the Justice Democrat wing while also not forcing Democrats in moderate seats into politically untenable votes.
Long story short, losing the Senate puts off outright intra-party war by 2 years at most. Just as the Tea Party forced the GOP into a spiral of increasingly extreme conservative positions, the Justice Democrats are already moving to aggressively challenge Democrat incumbents in primary challenges. It is a race to the left, with America left stranded in the middle.