In yet another dog-bites-man story, James Carville has been ranting. Mediate reports: ‘I’m Done, I’m Not in That F*cking Political Party’: James Carville Freaks Out After Progressives Win Big in Democratic Primaries.
On Wednesday’s Politicon podcast, Carville freaked out at the results. He noted that Avila Chevalier, who was born to Dominican immigrants, once said white people should not be in interracial marriages.
“Lady, I ain’t in the same party as you,” Carville said. “I’m sorry. I’m just not. And 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 sh*t I can’t be in the same tent with.”
Carville then insisted that despite winning their Democratic primaries, “these people are not Democrats.” He then suggested that establishment Democrats “negotiate the terms of a schism” with democratic socialists in the party.
“But I’m done,” he continued. “I’m not in that f*cking political party. I am totally comfortable in a political party that spends time questioning the policies of the government of Israel. In fact, I’m enthusiastic about that. I don’t want to be in a political party that denies the right of the state of Israel to exist. That’s just not– I just can’t do that.”
FWIW, Chevalier did tweet some objectionable things in the past. I am not interested, at the moment (and perhaps never), in litigating those items, because they are irrelevant to whether or not she is the Democratic nominee, and therefore, definitionally a Democrat.
So, two major points.
First, the United States contains within its broader politics the ingredients for more than two parties. It is simply not natural (and I use that word deliberately) for a large society to cleave into only two camps of collective interest. We have two parties for largely mechanical reasons. A different set of institutional parameters would allow, for example, people whose interests map better onto a progressive party to cohere into such a party. There are at least four obvious parties in the United States: a progressive party, a moderate-left party, a moderate-right party, and MAGA (the reactionary right).
Second, because our system (i.e., plurality elections in single-seat districts, the usage of primaries, and a number of other structures) funnels us into two parties, and because primaries open the door wide for anyone who wants to be one of the two collectives (providing that they win enough votes), this means both parties are coalitional in nature. Further, because of the porous nature of the nomination system and because centralized leadership of consequence does not exist in either party, it is nonsensical to say that a person who won a Democratic primary isn’t a Democrat.
Carville can symbolically quit the party, or he can change his voter registration in Louisiana to unaffiliated, but beyond that, what is he going to do? Vote for Republicans because a nominee for the Democratic Party in New York once tweeted some questionable things?
It is all just so much nonsense.
It all reminds me of a post I wrote almost sixteen years ago: All Republicans are RINOs (and all Democrats are DINOs). As I said at the time:
I want to take this opportunity to discuss the term “RINO” (i.e., Republican in Name Only) and suggest that it is actually a redundancy. Specifically, all Republicans (and Democrats and Libertarians, etc.) are only Republicans because they choose to use the label “Republican” to describe themselves.
Hence: Senator Richard Shelby is a Republican because he had a press conference saying that he was no longer a Democrat and likewise Arlen Specter is a Democrat and not a Republican because, well, he said so.
You can do the same with any number of figures over time, including, off the top of my head, Phil Gramm and Ben Nighthorse Campbell as well as former Alabama Governor Fob James. Other recent examples include Charlie Crist and Joe Lieberman.
On one level the label only tells us 1) what party nominated the candidate in the first place via the primary process, and 2) what party’s caucus the individual will affiliate with once in Congress, which matters in terms of voting for leadership as well as things such as determining the ratio of Republicans to Democrats on committees.
Certainly as a shorthand for voters as well as for an organizing principle for the internal structures of the legislature, party label is quite important—in many ways moreso for the latter than the former.
I know that this is one in my herd of hobby horses, but there is simply no mechanism to control who is a “Democrat” save the primaries, and there is simply no centralized way to determine what they believe. Carville can rant all he likes, but that’s the way it works. I would say that surely he knows this, but I hear enough people who should know better say enough ignorant things that I am to the point of just taking people at their word.
Meanwhile, the press desperately wants a simple frame for a set of progressives winning some (not all!) primaries.
- Via Axios: House Democrats brace for a “Freedom Caucus of the left”.
- Via Politico: Centrist Democrats are freaking out about progressives’ winning streak.
- Via CNN: House Democrats’ anxiety rises after wins by Mamdani-backed candidates: ‘Are we going to let them take over the party?’
However, when we turn to people with more formal training in these areas, like Jonathan Bernstein, we get responses like this:
I don’t expect the socialist-aligned candidates nominated by New York Democrats on Tuesday for House seats to cause a lot of trouble for Democratic leadership if that party does win a majority in 2026. For one thing, there are really only a handful of House Democrats who identify as socialists. For another the party dynamics are totally different. The radicals in the House Freedom Caucus owe a lot of their influence to the fact that most of the House Republican conference want to be considered hard-line conservatives. But most House Democrats will be perfectly happy to allow some perceived distance between themselves and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and her to-be DSA colleagues).
But the bigger reason that “Freedom Caucus of the Left” talk gets it wrong is because at least so far AOC and her allies in the House have been interested in winning policy battles and taking on Republicans. Yes, they are trying to shift the party in several policy areas; in fact, I think that’s far more true for them than for the radical Republicans. But AOC has demonstrated that one can be a policy outlier (or perhaps even a policy extremist) while also being a serious legislator. That can make her a formidable presence when trying to put together a bill – but as a tough bargainer, not an obstacle playing mostly to party-aligned media.
The emphases (all mine) note the following.
- The progressive wing is small.
- A main influence of the MAGA wing of the GOP is the degree to which even ostensibly “normal” Republicans feel the need to be perceived as MAGA (or have basically become MAGA, whether they are formally in the Freedom Caucus or not). I don’t predict that because a few more progressives won seats, that normie Democrats are going to be tripping over themselves to emulate AOC.
- AOC and her allies, unlike the Freedom Caucus, believe in using government to do things. This incentivizes negotiation and working together, not just blowing things up. The dynamic is almost certainly going to be different.
Bernstein further notes:
over time the types that have given Democratic leaders on the Hill the biggest headaches have been either idiosyncratic Senators (such as Kyrsten Sinema and John Fetterman) or the least liberal Democrats (such as Joe Manchin, Jared Golden, Henry Cuellar) or both (Holy Joe Lieberman, anyone?).
He goes on to point to another person with expertise in this arena, Jeff Lazarus, who asserted on BlueSky: “I can virtually guarantee that Jeffries (or whoever) will have an easier time with his caucus than Johnson and McCarthy before him have had with the GOP conference for the past 2 Congress.”
Look, I could end up being very wrong about this. Maybe the progressives come in and stomp their feet in some narrow Democratic majority and cause the same kinds of headaches the Freedom Caucus did for McCarthy, and I will write the appropriate mea culpa if that happens. But not only do I think that that is unlikely, it still won’t change the fact that the progressives in question are part of the Democratic Party unless they choose to declare it otherwise, because that’s how parties work in the United States.
