Commentary by Rob Urie
It is difficult to imagine what Americans would consider to be a political emergency if not the present? The US is in the process of losing two wars of choice entered into by representatives of both political parties. The US is four decades into all of its economic gains going to the oligarchs. In the last ten years inflation has cut the purchasing power of American savings by 30%. The last two presidents have been amongst the most reviled in history. The US Congress has a 15% approval rate and a 79% disapproval rate. And the only reason to vote is to prevent whichever party is in power from doing something life-threateningly stupid.
In this context, the self-styled ‘centrists’ who have gutted the Democratic Party (graph below) are claiming that they will bring down the nascent ‘left’ in order to protect the interests of financial oligarchs. The leaderships of both parties support the wars that the US is currently losing. The dice have been rolled and AI will either be the future of the American economy or nothing will. And despite the moronic, fascistic, chaos of Trump, it is unclear at present if the Democrats can even manage to take the House in the midterms.
Should Trump retain control of both houses of Congress through the midterms, expect more war, more ICE murders, mass arrests of Americans for alleged political crimes and for what little hasn’t been looted to date to find its way into Trump’s pocket. That self-described centrists in the Democratic party see a few primary victories by the DSA as the problem in need of a solution demonstrates everything that I’ve written about them over the last fifteen years. Why ‘the left’ ever saw Democrats as fellow travelers is a mystery.
The current move by centrists to force imagined lefties out of the Democratic party follows its successful removal of Bernie Sanders as the voter’s choice to represent the Democrats in the contest for the presidency in both 2016 and 2020. Regarding the 2020 election, I explained why ‘the electable candidate’ (Biden) would be the end of the Democrats in multiple missives leading up to the 2020 election. And the Democrats would be far ahead today if Bernie had burned the party to the ground following the 2020 effort that removed him.
Given the centrists’ record of eviscerating the Democratic party (graphs above, below), one would imagine that they represent the fringe views of a few dozen tech and financial oligarchs. And they do. The only thing that centrists are the center of is the far right of the party. Should this read as descriptively inaccurate, ‘electable centrist’ Joe Biden co-launched an ethnic genocide in Gaza as he undermined his own policy proposals out of worry that they would exacerbate the Federal budget deficit. Austerity to fund genocide equals fascism.
The point is that Democratic party centrists aren’t the ideological center of anything. They are a fringe element representing the views of a few percent of Democratic voters. That they are treated as the voice of the Party means that they represent the views of the oligarchs as filtered through the news media, not those of the party rank-and-file. While my suggestion for the last year has been to split the government by electing Democrats to Congress in the midterms, I am fine voting for a presidential candidate who will lose in 2028 rather than centrists whose politics I do not support.
That centrists still have a voice after having elected Donald Trump to the White House twice is remarkable. What does this mean? Well, why are so many voters fleeing the Democratic (and Republican) party? Wouldn’t actual centrists be drawing voters into the party because it represents majority views? In fact, the self-described centrists are actively driving voters away (graph above). While I couldn’t care less about the future of either of these parties, mine apparently isn’t a fringe view. Affiliation with the duopoly parties is crashing while registered Independents are absorbing the losses. This is the definition of being a fringe party.
While I regard the efforts of a few of the newer leftie Democrats quite highly, winning primary elections points to where the counter-forces will concentrate their efforts in November. To the point made by Krystal Ball, even the eventual winners will enter Congress as junior members. Their ability to govern will depend on their ability to garner campaign contributions from people who expect political favors in return. Like the LAPD and racist cops, the system is set up to produce outcomes that few mere mortals can overcome.
This is why I don’t take the view that an accumulation of socialists makes socialism. In this regard, Zohran Mamdani’s policy proposals need to be carefully watched. As one who lived in New York for decades, landlords have been out of control since the early 1980s. I have acquaintances who have paid their rent but who haven’t had heat in the winter for fifteen years. And wholesale grocery pricing favors large chains while punishing the mom-and-pop stores that serve much of the city. City-owned stores could get bulk pricing while serving underserved corners of the city.
The thing about Mamdani is that well-considered policies that solve social problems take on a life of their own. The contest isn’t right versus left or Democrat versus Republican. It is over how to make life better for Americans and the people of the world. But this isn’t how the American political system is set up. The American political system is set up to bleed us, to set us up as marks for commercial interests as self-interested politicians in the pockets of the oligarchs compel our acquiescence. America in 2026 is everything that we were warned could go wrong when we were younger.
It isn’t clear yet that Mamdani can get and keep the policies in place that will make a positive difference. His Pied-a-Terre tax for unoccupied second homes of the rich is meant to free up housing while raising revenue for the city. City owned grocery stores can raise the quality of food while lowering prices in the least served neighborhoods. And the very idea that government can solve problems rather than causing them is why the American right hated FDR and the New Deal for most of the last century.
That self-described centrists see Mamdani, rather than rule by capital, as the problem that sent the US off of the rails would be a mystery if it were a mystery. ‘Prince’ Andrew Cuomo was supposed to be anointed Mayor of New York. Lo and behold, his support all came from oligarchs. When the rank-and-file had a say, that say was ‘hell no!’ The same was true with the centrist candidates in the 2024 election. They aren’t the center of anything. They are fringe representatives of the oligarchs.
If I lived in an area with an Abdul El-Sayed or Zohran Mamdani running for office, I would support them. These are the centrist candidates. They support the policies that people favor. The oligarch loving hacks who have driven the Democratic party nearly to extinction support the policies that Trump is enacting. All of the Democratic centrists planning a run for the presidency in 2028 support everything about the Trump agenda except for Trump. They oppose his vulgarity, not his policies.
The choice is socialism or barbarism, not Pete Buttigieg or JD Vance.
Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack.
Source: roburie.substack.com, August 13, 2026