There’s good news and bad news in Democrat circles these days.

The good news is that there is growing agreement on what is needed to rebound from the disaster of the 2024 election. Namely, for the party’s various factions to come together on an agenda which appeals to more voters outside of big cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

It started last April, when Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s former chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, pitched the creation of a think tank called Searchlight for the specific purpose of rewording Democrat policies in ways that sound less woke. The party must reject “the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites [and especially anything] to do with race- and group-based identity politics,” he argued, and it must speak to people in everyday language.

Around that same time, the New York Times editorial board began chiding progressives for being “too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences — by race, gender, sexuality, and religion — rather than our shared values.” And for failing to learn from the fact that Democrats who won in places where Trump also won, such as Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, had “adopted a more moderate tone on [issues like] border security and law enforcement.”

Then just recently, a newly formed group of 30 Democrat politicians, which calls itself Majority Democrats, declared its intention to bring together the party’s moderates and progressives on an agenda that will appeal to all Americans, not only the far left.  “If we don’t build this big-tent party that can win majorities,” notes Rep. Angie Craig (D, MN), a leader of the initiative, “we’re on the path of being the party of the permanent minority from a national-election perspective.”

Progressive Dems Won’t Budge

The bad news for Rep. Craig and every other Democrat who understands the party’s need for a more attractive agenda is that their chances of getting progressives to help out are about the same as persuading a coven of vampires to join a church. As economist Stuart Chase, one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s most influential advisors, explained in his 1938 classic The Tyranny of Words, the language used by “any radical political faction is much more than some easily replaceable window dressing. It is the cognitive foundation of a rigidly prescriptive worldview which serves many financial and emotional, as well as political, needs.”

In the case of America’s progressives, their woke jargon gives them a way to defend the poor performance of the government bureaucracies and nonprofit organizations that have become their power base. For example, public schools with persistently low student test scores and graduation rates can claim to be doing something far more important: running assemblies and classroom diversity exercises aimed at ending white privilege and economic inequality.

Urban welfare agencies can be similarly excused from their failure to rehabilitate clients by a vocabulary which legitimates dysfunctional behavior and measures success by the availability of homeless shelters or free drug paraphernalia outlets. Such ideological shielding of institutional failure will only become more important to the far-left as exploding deficits force legislatures at all levels to become more accountable for their spending.

Not only does progressive language give poorly performing progressive strongholds a means of resisting reform, but in the case of many colleges and universities it has produced a remarkably profitable income stream. By sustaining an intellectual environment which guarantees that foreign students will remain both untainted and unrestrained by Western values, American campuses have succeeded in recruiting an estimated 1.13 million international students.

Some come from wealthy and powerful families who are willing to pay full freight for a prestigious degree, so long as they know their own country’s faults will never be seriously questioned. (China’s President Xi Jinping had no problem sending his own daughter to Harvard.)

Others come with the support of governments which see the progressive atmosphere as an opportunity for their students to engage in espionage, steal intellectual property, organize protests, and even promote antisemitism. But in all cases, their limited access to campus financial aid programs means that international students have become a major economic engine for U.S. colleges and universities.

And no one benefits more financially from progressivism’s radical rhetoric than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA), Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), and its other congressional performers. The average contribution ($21) their inflammatory speech shakes loose from sympathetic donors via fundraising platforms like Act Blue and The Squad Victory Fund may seem small. But the total greatly exceeds what a more moderate agenda could ever bring in. Indeed, the $15.4 million raised this year by Ocasio-Cortez alone is double the amount collected by the House of Representatives’ most powerful member, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).

Going from the financial to the psychological, progressive language also appears to play an important role in maintaining the emotional stability of far-left believers. This is because advocating collectivist policies like income redistribution, open borders, and gender equality creates significant pushback, not just from the larger society, but from something in the makeup of the activist’s own mind.

Studies from the Journal of Research in Personality, SSM-Mental Health, Pew Research, and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver have shown that progressives are disproportionally inclined to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders — and by significant percentages. An ideology which creates a sense of moral superiority and of belonging to a uniquely enlightened group is required compensation for these unpleasant emotions.

It is not a coincidence that the Democrats now pushing for a more attractive description of their party’s policies are almost exclusively moderates, most of whom tolerated progressivism when it promised to bring in more donations and campaign workers, but never really subscribed to it. The prospect of suddenly having to moderate their political agenda threatens neither their financial nor emotional security.

Progressives, on the other hand, take every opportunity they can, from the recent protests against President Trump’s deportation policy to Zohran Mamdani’s surprising New York City primary win, to emphatically restate their most extreme views, no matter how much this hurts Democrats overall. At the same time, they reject even the most basic efforts by people like Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin to keep the party open to a range of views.

In retrospect, none of this should be surprising. Progressives have spent decades imposing their politically correct language on friend and foe alike, terrifying both with cancellation for uttering just one “wrong” word. And having achieved the remarkable political feat of successfully muzzling a much larger number of moderates and liberals, they are not about to accept any compromise which makes it easier for less radical Democrats to break free of their verbal confinement.

As Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley recently noted, given a choice between helping the national party regain power or preserving their own worldview in a small number of far-left enclaves like New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, progressives do not hesitate to opt for the later.

All this is not to say that Democrats will never again be able to consolidate behind a widely popular agenda. But such a development seems much more likely to happen as the result of a merger of party moderates with independents and liberal Republicans on some presently unforeseen issue rather than a voluntary progressive moderation of their ideology.

In that event, the far-left would most likely reprise its traditional role within the Democrat Party: an on-again, off-again source of votes, depending on how well the progressives’ own minority candidate comes across. But no one will mistake the far-left’s views for those of the Democrat Party itself, nor will party leaders see any electoral advantage to working out a common program.

READ MORE from Lewis M. Andrews:

Democrats Must Adapt to Popular Republican Reforms

America’s Promise: Classically Educated Kids

Lewis M. Andrews is former executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy. His latest book is Living Spiritually in the Material World (Fidelis Books).