Mainstream Democrats use dozens of old catchphrases that suggest they’re out of step. “When they go low, we go high,” for example, sounded fine when Michelle Obama first said it in 2016, but it passed its sell-by date almost the next day. For quite some time, the Democratic Party, which is still closely aligned with banks and billionaires, has needed to go anywhere but high.
But it’s the meme of the “purity test” that should spike real worry that the Democratic Party is missing the moment right now. Party standard-bearers still use the phrase as a slur to trivialize legitimate questions from the left. It’s a petty and defensive move, and it comes across as a refusal to engage with the most obvious and urgent questions facing the party and the country.
A recent case in point involved New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. Booker is a tireless legislator who two weeks ago sponsored a promising bill to provide support for family caregivers, but he has sometimes been criticized for his coziness with Big Tech and Big Pharma. In October, the popular firebrand Jennifer Welch of the podcast I’ve Had It asked Booker why he and other Democrats had turned to “Neville Chamberlain–type appeasement” with President Trump. As just one example, Welch cited Booker’s confirmation of one of Trump’s shadiest ambassadors, Charlie Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law; a felon and a billionaire real-estate developer from Booker’s home state of New Jersey.
“What do you have to say about the capitulation that you participated in?”
Booker smiled. He tried to seem unflappable. He then waved away Welch as “holding up a purity test.”
“That’s such bullshit,” Welch shot back. “It’s not a purity test. It’s, Are we in this fight? Are we being beholden to corporations and corporate interests? Or, Are we really the party of the working class?”
Welch was right. “Purity test” is bullshit, and it’s a deflection Democrats must stop using. Challenges to politicians on major issues, including foreign policy, acceptance of corporate money, and failure to keep ICE out of cities—these are not puritanical attacks on their lifestyles. They are credible allegations that the party must acknowledge and address: that Democrats are allies of Republican hawks like Liz Cheney, valets for private equity, and hopeless incrementalists on social justice.
(“Never forget that slavery lasted over 200 years,” said the comedian Christina Brown, playing a generic Democrat, in an extremely popular video sketch. “Because progress takes time.” Another “Democrat” in the sketch, this one played by Prance, added, “We’re going to stand up for Black people. Blackrock. Blackwater mercenaries. Blackstone. Black sites. Black ops.”)
To dismiss the concerns of progressives is to deepen the demoralization that many of them have felt since 2015, when, as they see it, Democrats put Trump in office by keeping Senator Bernie Sanders and his then-insurgent socialism off the ticket.
Right or wrong, the Democrats’ failure to nominate Sanders in 2016 is the origin story of the modern left, and they’re sticking to it. That cursed election is not available for relitigation. So now it’s up to older Democrats, who came up believing that unfettered capitalism was the country’s one true path, to stop trying to censor this generation of liberals, and start learning from them.
And if the Democratic leadership doesn’t want to watch satire on TikTok to understand their own party, they can at least look at the polls. According to Gallup in September, fully 66 percent of Democrats view socialism, by that name, favorably. Bullishness on socialism is up a whopping 16 points since 2010, Obama’s heyday.
At the same time, per the Gallup poll, only 17 percent of Democrats view big business favorably, while—and this is especially surprising—a mere 36 percent of independents do. Anti-monopoly views are clearly no longer the province only of sullen Occupy alumni. Look at those numbers. The vast majority of the gettable electorate can now be spooked by even a hint that the Democratic Party is ignoring the people in favor of rich or ideological donors, corporate interests, Black Rock, Blackstone, and billionaire PACs.
The purity-test dodge seems to have started during the presidential primary of 2019, when Barack Obama told a room of Bay Area donors that Democrats running for president should not be “woke” or engage in “cancel culture.” (Why did that daft formulation waylay so many minds, institutions, and opinion pages?) Nor, Obama said, should Democrats run on positions that could turn off the center and the center-right. What those positions were exactly he didn’t say, but good guesses include taxing the rich and downscaling the police.
“I am always suspicious of purity tests during elections,” he told the Silicon Valley crowd. “Because, you know what, the country is complicated.”
Complicated? Was that 2019-speak for something like “hopping with billionaires who must not be taxed”? If by “complicated” Obama had meant the country was increasingly socialist, he would have come closer to the mark. But in those days “complexity” was all about trying to seduce Republicans and the rich.
A few months after Obama’s fundraising event, Pete Buttigieg, then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, reprised the purity-test dodge on the debate stage. Senator Elizabeth Warren, also a candidate, pressed him on his ties to robber-baron donors, and he responded that this wasn’t fair game. To mention the opulence of his donor parties, he said, was nothing but a “purity test.”
Five years later, sounding out politicians for their connections to billionaires doesn’t seem so persnickety. With their massively successful “Fight Oligarchy” national tour, which has drawn 261,100 attendees so far, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and good old Bernie have skillfully energized the party’s progressive grassroots and quietly reoriented the whole Democratic enterprise. Progressive Democrats no longer just oppose the bottomlessly corrupt billionaire in the White House. They oppose all billionaires, of every party, as they are all bottomlessly corrupt—and have long rigged politics and the economy to consolidate power, exploit workers, pursue white nationalism, and wage war.
If Democrats, when asked, can’t commit to opposing oligarchy, they’re not failing purity tests. They’re hiding a dangerous and right-wing worldview, and Americans deserve to know about it. Socialism may have been sidelined in 2015, and again in 2019, but it’s on all the tickets now.
