Shenker-Osorio says the left’s enemy isn’t the right, it’s cynicism. The problem isn’t that authoritarians want to erase the division between church and state, or take away our right to control our bodies. The problem is that this minority can get away with these unpopular proposals because the people who disagree with them think nothing can be done to stop them.
For Shenker-Osorio, the tonic for this is to switch from the negative framing (“abolish ICE”) to positive ones: “respect all families.” Rather than saying “end the climate emergency,” she wants us to call for “ensuring clean, safe air to breathe and water to drink.”
When the right says they want to cut taxes to improve the economy, we counter with, “we’ll raise wages and increase consumption, which is better for the economy.”
Shenker-Osorio proposes a three-step method for changing minds. First, identify a shared value (“people who work for living ought to earn a living”). Move on to a problem (“our divisions distract us while rich people pick our pockets and hand the spoils to their corporate cronies”). And then, the solution: “rewrite the rules so that the wealthiest few pay what they owe and all of us have what we need for generations to come.”
-Pizzaburgers: “Everybody hates this idea, so it must be great”
Do they want to help their party win, or do they want to whine about the left?
Paul Waldman at Public Notice (08.04.2026):
By the middle of next week, insurgent progressive Democrats may have defeated establishment candidates in two vital primaries, for a Senate seat in Michigan and the governorship of Wisconsin.
If and when that happens, the elite news media will overflow with “Dems in Disarray!” stories, and the the centrist Democrats who have been issuing dark warnings about their party’s left turn will be in a full-blown panic.
Those centrists need to take a deep breath, settle down, and understand that they have an interest in seeing all Democrats succeed — even those who are too progressive for their taste. The primaries are almost over, and for the centrists’ own sake, they need a very different strategy than the one they’ve been employing so far.
Some Democrats have been watching the polls on those two races with horror.
In Michigan, where the primary is today, the national party’s choice, Rep. Haley Stevens, has been trailing Abdul El-Sayed by a growing margin. In Wisconsin, where the primary is next week, state legislator Francesca Hong seems to have run away with the race; her closest competitor, former Lieutenant Gov. Mandela Barnes, dropped out last week. Hong is a member of her local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. El-Sayed isn’t a DSA member and says he is not a socialist, but he shares many of the same goals, such as Medicare for all.
These would only be the latest in a string of primary victories for leftists. Though a number of party-approved candidates have won Senate primaries and are in good shape for the general election — Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Mary Peltola in Alaska — there is no question that the energy among the party’s grassroots leans toward candidates who talk about challenging the status quo, fighting the oligarchy, and pursuing ambitious policy goals. Much of the time, that means the more progressive of the choices on offer.
That has the establishment centrists feeling put-upon — and lashing out.
It started in late June when a trio of candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won House primaries in New York, two of them unseating incumbent Democrats.
“If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” former DNC chair Jaime Harrison tweeted in response. James Carville, a pundit known for once working on a winning campaign in the early 1990s, said “I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the ‘s’ word: schism. I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no. We’re a coalition. We’re a big tent.’ And there’s just some shit I can’t be in the same tent with.”
It hasn’t stopped since. Centrist pundit Van Jones deployed the Republican strawman tactic of attacking an imaginary DSA candidate in a viral post on X, writing that “Supporting Hamas is not progressive. ‘No police, no prisons, no borders’ is not progressive.”
Which Democratic candidate for office supports Hamas or says they want to eradicate police, prisons, and borders? Jones didn’t say, because none of them do.
Likewise, Sen. John Fetterman said El-Sayed is “running to [be] head of our emerging pro-Hamas wing here in the party.”
[...]
Leftists will be governing partners for moderates
The good news for moderates is that the vast majority of leftist Democrats actually want to govern. This is where the easy analogy many are making to the Tea Party breaks down.
The Tea Partiers who got elected after Barack Obama took office did attack their party’s establishment in the same way the leftists are now, but once in office, they just wanted to wreak havoc — grind Congress to a halt, shut down the government, throw sand in every gear they could find.
Leftists, on the other hand, want government to do things. They need it to work. And recent experience shows that when they take office, while they may not moderate their basic views, most of them display a great deal of pragmatism as they try to make change.
Consider Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
One of the first things AOC did after being elected in 2018 was join a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office to urge more action on climate change. But before long, she was earning a reputation for pragmatism, working closely with the Biden administration on its policy goals and finding ways to join with centrist Democrats and even the occasional Republican on legislation (to the chagrin of some on the left).
She wasn’t the only one.
“We have done a lot of backroom negotiating,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal told me in 2023 for an article I wrote on how Biden had approached the left through cooperation rather than confrontation.
Then chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Jayapal argued that taking principled positions wasn’t enough. Progressives needed “a very coordinated and disciplined inside-outside strategy” — and they were happy to take partial victories when they could.
Jayapal’s history is much like that of many of today’s DSA candidates: She was a left-wing grassroots activist, won a seat in the Washington state senate, then ran for Congress two years later. While she represents a deep-blue Seattle district and her beliefs are to the left of the average swing-district Democrat, she’s also known as a serious legislator willing to compromise when necessary.
The same can be said of the dean of the American left (and self-described democratic socialist), Bernie Sanders. He has advocated the same four or five things for his entire decades-long career, but has never sought to sabotage the party when something meaningful was on the line, and consistently supports compromise legislation (in contrast to centrists like Joe Manchin). Supporting single-payer health care didn’t stop him from also supporting the Affordable Care Act, along with every attempt to expand it. Like most leftists, he’ll take half a loaf if it moves the country in the direction he wants it to go.
This is important to remember when leftists are described as people who just want to make a lot of noise but not get things done. The truth is that centrists are just as likely to be poseurs, if not more so; just look at the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group of congressional moderates with an unbroken record of never solving any actual problems. On the other hand, even if progressives elect a bunch of new members to Congress this year, they’ll still be a minority of the party caucus — which means they’ll have to compromise.
Paul Waldman has an incisive column on how moderate Democrats should approach the 2026 midterms: drop the factional infighting and get Dems to their left over the line.
The job of a convincer is to persuade the pizza eaters to go for the burger. For this, Shenker-Osorio says we should borrow from the right, whose most visible avatars deliberately set out to alienate their unpersuadable opponents.
When far right figures say grotesque, unhinged things about “groomers” or “Jewish space lasers” or whatever, they’re trying to trick their opponents into repeating the statement: “Can you believe these bozos want to give teachers AR-15s?”
Getting your opponents to repeat your message increases the chance that it will be heard by someone who finds it persuasive and switches from burgers to pizza.
By this logic, the left increases its chances of taking power by saying bold things that trigger conservative Red Scare paranoiacs and religious maniacs. When they run around and say, “The left wants to take away your assault rifles, making housing and college free, and replace your 401(k) with a guaranteed pension,” they do our work for us.
-Pizzaburgers: “Everybody hates this idea, so it must be great”
At the center of Shenker-Osorio’s work is the notion of “persuadability.” For Shenker-Osorio, a “centrist” isn’t someone who wants a little bit of both; they’re someone who hasn’t made up their mind about which option they prefer.
To illustrate this point, Shenker-Osorio asks us to imagine a family trying to decide what to order for dinner. Some members of the family want pizza, others want burgers.
Could that family be satisfied with a pizzaburger?
The point is, the family is undecided . It’s not that they want to converge on a compromise solution that mixes the two options. That won’t please everyone — it pleases no one.
-Pizzaburgers: “Everybody hates this idea, so it must be great”
This whole thing is a wildly bad idea. First, it’s politically unhinged. The Democrats aren’t extreme leftists. The party’s main policy planks barely rise to the level of liberalism.
Anywhere else in the world, they’d be a center-right or just-plain-right party. The idea that “polarization” arises out of Democratic “extremism” doesn’t bear even the most cursory scrutiny.
The real problem is that the GOP has swung to the most extreme right, to the point where it is appointing militiamen in its caucus to powerful committee roles, from which perch they promote surreal fantasies about the supreme legal authority of sheriffs. The Republican party isn’t subtle about wanting to disenfranchise its opponents, or its mission to create a white, Christian nation.
The fact that the GOP manages to call the Democrats “socialists” for supporting any public services and the universal right to vote doesn’t make the Democrats into socialists. This is real “we have both kinds: country and western” politics.
-Pizzaburgers: “Everybody hates this idea, so it must be great”
