One of the more striking developments in American politics over the past three decades has been the transformation of the Democratic Party from a big-tent movement built around working-class Americans into an elite-driven institution obsessed with diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, Evan Barker, a former fundraiser for the party, offers readers a behind-the-scenes look at that evolution.
Barker has always been someone at home on the left side of the political spectrum. She suffers from primary ciliary dyskinesia, a rare and life-threatening genetic disorder that made healthcare an issue of paramount personal importance to her. Barker credits Obamacare—specifically, its extension of insurance coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions—with saving her life, and believed this “would bind [her] to the Democratic Party forever.” She was further heartened by the rise of hard left populists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), whose commitment to social democracy inspired her to work for the Democratic party as a fundraiser.
But as her career progressed, Barker was dismayed to see Democrats toss aside the old goal—improving its voters’ material circumstances—in favor of a new focus: identity politics.
One of the big villains of the book is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Barker cites an episode in early 2019, soon after her widely-covered election to Congress, as showing AOC’s true colors. Despite campaigning on not supporting Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) campaign to reclaim the House Speakership, that is precisely what AOC did, with Barker noting that “just five days after AOC met one-on-one with Pelosi,” her firebrand chief of staff and co-founder of the famed “Justice Democrats” movement Saikat Chakrabarti “resigned” while her equally anti-establishment communications director Corbin Trent “would be demoted.”
AOC, in Barker’s telling:
sold her soul to Nancy Pelosi in exchange for power, prestige, and good committee assignments…together AOC and Pelosi formed a partnership. AOC would follow Pelosi’s lead while Pelosi gently steered the Democratic Party toward progressives. AOC was co-opted, yes, but the Democratic Party was co-opted, too. Both wings captured each other’s worst impulses. AOC became a loyal lapdog for the establishment, while the establishment embraced the most divisive aspects of progressive rhetoric. This merger came at the expense of the populist vision expressed in Bernie’s 2016 campaign. All that economic populism had to be dropped. The party would have to focus on the culture war.
AOC had, in other words, signaled her allegiance to what she recently laughed off as “Woke 1.” And it was an allegiance she would act on.
Barker recounts how AOC had refused to endorse a progressive challenger to a corporate, establishment incumbent in a Democratic primary in Kansas. Her reasoning: the challenger, Brent Welder, was a white man, while his opponent, Sharice Davids, was a Native American woman. As AOC herself allegedly told Welder, it simply wouldn’t do for her to be seen “as someone who isn’t supporting another woman of color.”
And later, in the summer of 2020, Barker watched as “healthcare went from the primary issue to a secondary one” within the party.
While organizing for the 2021 U.S. Senate special election runoff race in Georgia, Barker got involved with the Be A Hero Fund, an organization founded by healthcare activist Ady Barkan who tragically passed away from ALS shortly after his first child was born yet was “consistent and true to his values, a rarity in politics.” But to campaign on Ady Barkan’s Medicare-for-All politics alone “wouldn’t get donors excited.” To advocate for the issue which first motivated her to embrace the Democratic Party, Barker would have to “frame the pitch as a push to reach ‘neglected’ minority communities” and use the language of “intersectionality,” which “had become ubiquitous in the wake of George Floyd,” writing that “even when we spoke about healthcare, we had to use the language of identity politics.”
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Though her book takes aim at Democrats, there are lessons in it for Republicans as well. Reflecting on the failures of the Kamala Harris campaign to inspire Democratic voters, Barker observes that their “single most egregious mistake,” was “ignoring the pain of the American people by telling them what they felt about the economy wasn’t real.” Indeed, after three years of inflation, MSNBC decided its strategy to woo voters disaffected by the economy under President Joe Biden was to simply tell those voters that they were hallucinating, trotting out Chris Hayes to convince his viewers not to believe their lying eyes. As the Iran War deepens that affordability crisis, the response of the GOP has likewise been to tell voters that the economy is normal, labeling the economy’s critics as ungrateful and spoiled “communists.”
Another factor in Kamala Harris’ 2024 defeat—one that was perhaps understated in the book—was the vice president’s association with the Gaza War. Barker is basically silent on Israel, but it appears clear in hindsight that this was an albatross for the party. A poll conducted by YouGov and published by IMEU asked voters who had voted Democrat in 2020 but not in 2024 why they had changed their minds. A plurality, nearly 29 percent, said the most important factor in their decision was ending Israel’s war in Gaza.
The path Barker charts for the Democratic Party—ditch woke and return to improving people’s lives—should be uncontroversial. Even conservatives should welcome this, as it’s far better for the country for the opposition party to be more sane and responsible. And in fact, there may be opportunities for some fruitful cross-pollination: to appeal to the working class once again, Barker writes that Democrats should “take the best parts of MAGA and the best parts of Bernie and marry them.” Sounds to this reviewer like the right prescription for America.
