News Media Coddles Centrists While Progressives Fight for Democracy
It’s Not the Progressive Left That’s Killing the Democrats—It’s the Cowardly Center
“I don’t think we can’t work together on pronoun politics. This election did not teach you how damaging that is. I don’t think there’s anything that I can tell you,” Democratic strategist James Carville in an April 2025 interview. Carville called for Democrats to have an “amicable split” from progressives in the party who he blames for the 2024 loses. During the same week, Carville threatened to sue the “contemptible little twerp” David Hogg, Parkland shooting survivor and Democratic National Committee vice chair, for daring to suggest the battle between progressives and centrists in the party should be decided by primary voters, not party leaders.
Carville’s bemoaning of progressives stands in stark contrast to his argument a week after the 2024 election that “There are things [Bernie] Sanders favored that we could have put more front and center.” At the time, it seemed as if even hardened party operatives were starting to realize the obvious: that abandoning working-class policies while courting corporate donors had led the Democratic Party to disaster.
Carville, of course, had spent years helping the media marginalize Sanders—the most prominent progressive in American politics and who is not even a Democrat. In 2020, Carville called Sanders a “communist” and warned that nominating him would be the “end of days.” But after Trump’s return in 2024, even Carville briefly flirted with honesty—until he snapped back to his usual routine, penning an op-ed urging Democrats to stop fighting and just wait for Trump to implode. It’s the centrist Democrat playbook: skip the popular policies, let Republicans implode, win by default as the “lesser evil,” then govern from the center—reminding working-class voters why they turned to Republicans in the first place.
The brief moment of post-2024 election soul-searching by establishment Democrats such as Carville quickly dissolved into amnesia. By mid-2025, party-aligned media had returned to their centrist comfort zone—fetishizing centrism and blaming progressives for centrist failures.
United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Left) & James Carville, American political consultant and author (right)
Since the 1990s, Democrats have steadily traded their working-class roots for the approval of college-educated voters. Data confirms a degree now often predicts party affiliation with college-educated voters solidly in the Democratic Party. Progressives like Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) continue pushing for populist economic reform, but the party establishment has pivoted toward culture-war posturing. Their argument? That a progressive agenda scares off the mythical centrist or soft Republican they fetishize.
That logic explains why former Vice-President Kamala Harris spent 2024 flaunting an endorsement from former Republican Vice-President Dick Cheney (who left office with a 13% approval rating) and globe-trotting with his daughter and former Republican congressperson Lynne Cheney. This strategy proved disastrous as Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
Meanwhile, rather than inform the public about centrist Democrats’ political malpractice, party-loyal media continue to scold the left. As Fair and Accuracy in Reporting noted, MSNBC, a longtime bastion of Democratic Party talking points, purged its progressive hosts in 2025, dropping Joy Reid, demoting Alex Wagner and Ayman Mohyeldin, and earning headlines like “Shake-up for Trump era gives liberal MSNBC a whiter, more centrist look”. The New York Times ran pieces like “Even if the Democrats Can Move to the Center, It May Not Help”, where they cast billionaires who bankroll party leaders as victims of a progressive agenda, even though progressives have not had serious political influence in the U.S. in at least 50 years.
The centrist tantrum crescendoed when it was revealed that Democrats held a retreat to produce a five-page manifesto blaming “identity politics” (read: progressives) for their 2024 defeat. California Governor Gavin Newsom made the message crystal clear when he invited far-right commentator Charlie Kirk onto his show to denounce trans athletes—who represent a fraction of a percent of the trans community but an outsized amount of right-wing media coverage. In response, CNN argued that “Gavin Newsom spent years fighting for progressive positions he now bashes on his new podcast.”
Blaming progressives for invoking identity politics and costing Democrats the election misses an important point: it was not progressives that invented identity politics as a wedge—it was centrists. During the 2016 Democratic Party primary, Hillary Clinton represented the party establishment against Sanders’ insurgent candidacy. When Sanders proposed breaking up the big banks to improve the economy for working people, Clinton snapped, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow… would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” The crowd dutifully shouted “No!”—a cheer for neoliberal inertia disguised as moral clarity. This exchange summed up the “demographics are destiny” theory the party elite still cling to. As long as marginalized communities grow in number, Democrats assume they’ll win—no need for a working-class agenda. Carville bought into this fantasy back in 2009, predicting Democrats would rule for 40 years because “the country is getting less white.” You fell a little short, James. Furthermore, the identitarians ignore the fact that the working class is disproportionately comprised of women and people of color, not white men as Carville and others insinuate.
As the Clinton and Carville comments reveal, when centrists fail, they feign victimhood and blame the progressives. The media reinforces this narrative with headlines like CNN’s “The revolt of the centrists” and Politico’s “Moderate Dems message to progressives: We’re not backing down.” Even when admitting the party is in denial, the New York Times editorial board hand-wrings not for progressives—but for conservatives, writing: “Even many conservatives and Republicans should be concerned about the Democratic denial. The country needs two healthy political parties.”
Indeed, the nation does need more than one healthy political party, but as of now, progressives seem like the only part of the party taking serious action to construct a viable alternative to Trump’s MAGA agenda. In response to Trump cutting government jobs, mismanaging foreign policy communications, disrupting the economy with a seemingly haphazard tariff policy, ignoring due process rights for legal residents and citizens alike, ignoring the courts, and giving power to unaccountable billionaires such as Elon Musk to wreak havoc on government employees and services has led many Democratic Party voters to look for lawmakers to fight Trump and his cabinet. In fact, a recent Harvard CAPS-Harris poll found that 72% of Democrats support leaders like Sanders and AOC who are willing to challenge Trump and the oligarchs propping him up—not those who want to “compromise.” AOC and Bernie Sanders are not just talking—they’re on a national “Fight Oligarchy” tour, drawing massive crowds, even in Trump strongholds at a time when Republicans avoid town halls and centrist Democrats like Senator Chuck Schumer have canceled public events.
AOC and Sanders are not alone, as there have been large demonstrations around the nation to demand resistance to Trump’s MAGA agenda. Instead of embracing the broad coalition that progressives are building and energizing, self-proclaimed centrist Democrats like Bill Maher are dismissing it. Maher recently downplayed the movement, saying, “Big crowds—again, these shiny objects that Democrats chase. It’s not about the big crowds.” However, some centrists can no longer deny that progressives have it right, such as Doug Sosnik, a longtime Democratic strategist best known for being a top adviser to Bill Clinton, recently said “I think that what Bernie Sanders and AOC have been saying — which is really a populist economic agenda — I think that is an important element for the Democratic Party going forward.” U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a U.S. citizen wrongly deported by the Trump administration—could signal meaningful centrist resistance. But if Abrego Garcia remains imprisoned, it risks being mere symbolic posturing.
Thus far, symbolic posturing seems to be all that centrist Democrats are willing to offer in Trump’s second term. The establishment wing of the Democratic Party shrugged off concerns that billionaire donors were influencing the party against working class interests by claiming that Democrats have “good billionaires.” In fact, the centrists’ idea of resistance has become a cringe parade of empty symbolism: mismatched outfits and sloppy signage at Trump’s address to the nation; TikTok videos of lawmakers LARPing as video game fighters; Senator Cory Booker’s 25-hour speech that accomplished nothing—followed by Booker voting to prevent Congress from blocking Trump’s weapons deal. Even when someone dares to call out Trump on the floor, like Rep. Al Green, ten Democrats vote to censure him. Their only solution to Trumpism appears to be one that finds the right 'message,' as if communication—not policy—is the party’s Achilles’ heel.
The Democratic Party is not losing because it’s too progressive. It’s losing because its leaders are sleepwalking through an oligarchic nightmare—and hitting the snooze button every time the alarm rings. Indeed, the greatest trick the Democratic Party ever pulled was convincing the media to blame progressives for its own cowardice. From MSNBC's quiet purge of left-leaning hosts to The New York Times wringing its hands over centrist pain, the party's media apparatus has been working overtime to repackage failure as maturity and spin capitulation as pragmatism. Instead of holding power to account, the press has become a mirror reflecting party leadership's delusions back to them — and to the electorate.
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Nolan Higdon is a political analyst, author, host of The Disinfo Detox Podcast, lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Project Censored National Judge. Higdon’s areas of concentration include critical AI literacy, podcasting, digital culture, news media history & propaganda, and critical media literacy. All of Higdon’s work is available at Substack (https://nolanhigdon.substack.com/). He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (2020); Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (2022); The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022); and Surveillance Education: Navigating the conspicuous absence of privacy in schools (Routledge). Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas. Higdon is a regular source of expertise for CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
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Good to see you on here
Good piece.