Be a Big Tent Absolutist

Ideological diversity is a feature of the Party, not a bug

What do James Carville and Abdul El-Sayed have in common?

More than you might think.

On a recent call with donors, El-Sayed said he was going to treat an opponent as an “ogre on a pike” to intimidate others into adopting his preferred positions. “Ideally you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different,” he said.

Meanwhile, James Carville sought to gatekeep from another corner of the party. “I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the S-word: schism,” Carville said, speaking of recent victories by DSA-backed candidates. They “have no place in the Democratic party,” he said, adding, “I’m not in that fucking political party.”

In their own way, Carville and El-Sayed each revealed a deep commitment to enforcing ideological purity. According to their strategy, Democrats can win more power by shrinking the tent.

They’re both wrong. Winning the broad-based power we need to defeat the rise of fascism and enact the sweeping change required to keep it at bay means building a big tent. Rather than enforcing purity from new angles, we should embrace big tent absolutism, an approach to politics where the only litmus test is that there are no litmus tests.

The point of politics is to enact policies that help people. Beneath all the posturing, everyone from El-Sayed and Claire Valdez to Jared Golden and Adam Gray is a vote for an agenda, and they will come together somewhere around 75 percent of the time. In a democracy, the question of whether their views are acceptable or out of bounds is for the voters of their states and districts to decide. For Democrats writ large, the strategic question that matters most is whether we will be able to enact big change or be forced to settle for tinkering at the margins. That comes down to how much power we can win, and building a big tent is the only way to win in more places.

The key to big tent absolutism is to embrace the best approach to winning in the states and districts we need to build lasting power. Just as a moderate couldn’t win a primary in New York City’s “Commie Corridor,” we know that candidates with a heterodox mix of policies are more likely to win the swing and red areas we need to expand the map. In those places, there is simply no getting around the mathematical reality that winning a general election means persuading large numbers of Trump voters to support a Democrat or an independent.

To see how ideologically diverse coalitions are necessary to enact generational change, look no further than the Democratic supermajorities that defined the 20th and early 21st centuries.

The Democratic supermajority that supported the New Deal included everyone from self-avowed white supremacists like Richard Russell to Vito Marcantonio, a known communist. In the 1960s, LBJ leaned on staunch segregationist Wilbur Mills to shepherd Medicare through the Ways and Means Committee. In the 2000s, the Affordable Care Act couldn’t spare a single 60-vote defection, which meant holding together a coalition that included Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich on one end of the spectrum, and senators like Ben Nelson, Max Baucus and Mary Landrieu on the other.

Putting the challenges we face today in historical perspective also reveals that the tradeoffs we are being asked to grapple with pale in comparison to those of past eras. Far from accommodating white supremacists, Democrats today are simply being asked to embrace compatriots who share the goal of, say, universal health care, but have different ideas of how to achieve it. There is nothing abnormal about seeing DSA members like Melat Kiros caucus alongside Josh Gottheimer this January. Rather, what’s unusual is that so many factional combatants on all sides seem to regard this as intolerable.

This brings me to another key tenet of big tent absolutism: everyone in the tent is allowed—indeed, encouraged—to say what they think about everyone else inside the tent, out loud and in public.

That means it’s entirely fair game for Democrats to express their vehement disagreement with the DSA, especially on extreme positions like prison abolition and defunding the police. This is healthy! It accurately signals to voters that the DSA represents a small minority of the party, and allows politicians in competitive races to define themselves on their own terms.

As I write in my upcoming book, Supermajority, one of the biggest mistakes Democrats made in 2020 was not being more vocal in their denouncement of the defund the police movement. President Biden took weeks to explicitly express his opposition during his presidential campaign, and even then he did not lean into the disagreement as a way to define himself to voters. Biden later admitted to knowing that it was bad politics for down-ballot Democrats who were trying to win over swing voters. In a leaked recording after the election, he said the GOP used “defund the police” to “beat the hell out of us.” The Left is certainly not afraid to communicate these kinds of disagreements, routinely calling their fellow Democrats everything from corrupt to genocide apologists.

For candidates who are concerned that the DSA will be the same down-ballot drag on Democrats as “defund the police,” the answer is simple: distance yourself, loudly and proudly. Those adjectives are important: don’t say what you think quietly and apologetically, say it with your full chest and embrace the constructive conflict it sparks. In a world where attention is hard to win, that kind of conflict reliably breaks through and signals to voters that you are the kind of politician who will think for themselves—a “different kind of Democrat.”

In the past few weeks, the most compelling articulation of big tent absolutism came not from a moderate, but from Mayor Zohran Mamdani: “If they are Democrats and they run as Democrats and they win as Democrats, then they should be a part of the Democratic Party. There are people with whom I have vehement disagreements with on any number of topics. But if we can find a place of agreement, that’s what I’m going to focus that relationship on.”

Another clear statement of the idea came from Congressman Pat Ryan, who represents a New York swing district. Ryan wants the Democratic Party to be a big tent, and is fine collaborating with anyone in the party: “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and I have done a bunch together… We don’t agree on every single thing, but we’re focusing on the things we agree on, and people have really responded to that.”

Ultimately, Democrats face a simple choice. They can wring their hands and complain about this or that faction, and preen about litmus tests. Or they can be big tent absolutists. In a country as ideologically diverse as the United States, narrow majorities will never be enough to enact durable change on the size and scale we all desire. We need a supermajority, and the only way to win one is to build a big tent.