That is the fundamental problem with large political parties: they are built to assemble coalitions from as many different opinions as possible in order to win.
The Democratic Party has become the natural basin for the American woke left. It is not the majority of Americans, but it is a substantial and highly motivated minority, and Democrats need those voters to build winning coalitions.
Therein lies the trap.
The more extreme the woke left becomes, the more it alienates voters who are closer to the political centre. Yet the party cannot simply abandon the radicals because it needs their votes, their activism, their money and, increasingly, their organisational machinery.
For a long time, the political game was relatively straightforward.
Move left during the primaries to secure an attractive ticket for the party’s activist base. Then, once the general election arrived, move back towards the centre and appeal to the broader electorate.
That mechanism is breaking down.
The problem is that once a candidate has spent the primary campaign establishing his woke credentials, there is no guarantee that the radicals will follow him when he subsequently moves towards the centre. They may simply stay home.
And abstention is enough to lose an election.
So the candidate has an incentive to remain where the activist base wants him. The party consequently gets pulled further and further towards the ideological fringe—not necessarily because the fringe represents the majority, but because it is organised, motivated and capable of withholding the votes the party needs.
This creates a peculiar political ratchet.
The radicals have no incentive to moderate.
Why would they?
In their constituencies, extreme positions can be electorally successful. A politician who takes a harder line can defeat a moderate challenger in a primary, gain the loyalty of the activists and present himself as the authentic representative of the movement.
Once that happens repeatedly, moderation becomes politically dangerous.
And the demands are effectively endless.
The moment the party concedes one demand, the activists do not say, “Excellent. We have reached a reasonable compromise.”
They look at the next demand.
Another bite.
Then another.
The frontier moves continuously.
This is what makes ideological extremism so difficult to negotiate with. Negotiation assumes that both sides have somewhere they are prepared to stop. But if one side regards every compromise as merely the starting point for the next demand, there is no stable middle ground to occupy.
There is only retreat.
The political centre therefore becomes progressively smaller, while the party becomes progressively more dependent on the people pushing it away from that centre.
This is not unique to Democrats, nor is it unique to the woke left. Any political organisation can fall into the same trap when a highly motivated ideological faction acquires disproportionate influence over candidate selection.
The lesson is uncomfortable but simple.
You cannot permanently negotiate with political extremists.
Eventually, you have to decide where the boundary is.
You either tell them that this is where the party stops—or you allow them to determine where it goes next.
But there is a price for drawing that boundary.
For Democrats, breaking the dependency on the woke left could mean losing elections. Perhaps many of them. Perhaps for quite some time.
That may be precisely why they cannot bring themselves to do it.
Yet political parties occasionally need something more painful than another electoral strategy.
They need internal cleansing.
Not because every radical is evil, and not because every progressive idea is wrong, but because a party that cannot tell its most extreme faction “no” eventually ceases to be a broad political coalition.
It becomes the instrument of its loudest minority.
And that is where the Democrats appear to be heading.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/08/19/woke-1-0-is-still-alive-in-the-democrats-energy-agenda/