Against Sensibility: On Democratic Revolution And Why Socialists Must Refuse to Moderate

The air in America feels different now. The systems you trusted to keep you safe are no longer functioning.  Politics is no longer a debate happening on a screen. It’s the visceral fear of a mother watching her child suffer from a foodborne illness she thought was impossible in a modern nation. The recent record-breaking Cyclospora outbreak, sickening nearly 14,000 Americans and counting, is proof of the dismantling of the administrative state before our eyes.  

At the same time, the very ground beneath us is buckling. The energy bill that spikes while the grid fails in a heat wave. The subway that floods every time it rains. The apartment that can't be cooled in July or heated in January. The insurance premiums that climb until healthcare bankrupts you. The summers that keep getting hotter, the storms that keep getting worse, the infrastructure that buckles under every new extreme. In Nepal, a glacier collapse in late August sent a wall of water, ice and rock roaring through the Himalayas, a "tsunami of dirt" that killed more than 500 and left thousands more missing as rising temperatures destabilize the world's highest peaks.

Meanwhile, the administration wages a barbaric war on Iran that has made a mockery of international law. The disruption to the Strait of Hormuz has already pushed the world to the brink of a catastrophic food crisis, with 45 million more people projected to face acute hunger as energy and fertilizer costs skyrocket. And for anyone who dares to raise their voice against this barbaric regime—like the Prairieland activists, now serving up to 100-year prison terms for the crime of dissent—the message is terrifyingly clear: protest is now terrorism.

We are not living through a dark period that will pass. We are living through the end of the world. The old certainties—economic growth, political stability, the quiet functioning of our institutions—belong to a phase of human history that is closing. The world as you know it is finished. The question is no longer how to repair it. The question is what comes after, and who will build it.

And how is the Democratic Party—the supposed opposition to this fascist regime—responding? Not with protests. Not with investigations. Not with action. With a private meeting. Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the House Democrats, sat down with Jared Kushner. A man who helped orchestrate the genocide in Gaza, the very policies that paved the way for this nightmare, and the party's instinct is to search for common ground. As if the answer to a regime that detains professors without charge, starves millions through war and neglect, imprisons dissenters for life, is to extend a hand across the aisle and wait for bipartisanship.

There is this delusion that we can return to normal, to the comfortable fiction of reasonable governance, if only we are patient and civil enough. But normal is what got us here. Normal was the slow rot, the deference to process, the insistence on decorum while fascism tightened its grip. In the face of this, the Democratic Party can only repeat its usual zealous mantras: Be serious. Be realistic. The Democratic Party, hollowed out by decades of deference to finance and process, offers nothing but the administration of decline. It treats collapse as a messaging problem, rising fascism as an electoral challenge, civilizational rupture as a political cycle to be managed.

Look at their priorities. The same party that cannot muster a single subpoena for Trump’s cronies or a single sanction against the Israeli government has found endless energy to attack Hasan Piker, whose crime is speaking truth about Gaza. The Democratic Party has spent more time denouncing a Twitch streamer than they have spent opposing a genocide. This is a managed opposition that reserves its fiercest condemnations for those who refuse the boundaries of acceptable dissent, while treating the actual architects of fascism as negotiating partners.

Even our left-populist heroes are not immune to this zombie logic.  Recently, Zohran Mamdani reiterated his support for Hakeem Jeffries—the same Jeffries who sat down with Jared Kushner—as Speaker of the House.  This comes after he had, months earlier, urged DSA members to vote against a primary challenge to Jeffries from Chi Ossé, suggesting that he would need to work with the Democratic establishment to govern.

Mamdani is not a traitor. He is doing what any reasonable person would do. The logic is impeccable, and that is precisely the horror. Every calculation is correct within the existing order, and every correct calculation forecloses the possibility of transforming it.

The energy of the socialist and left populist movement gets channeled into a mayor's office and a set of deliverables. The enemy becomes a colleague with whom you “have disagreements.” And the movement isn't betrayed, exactly. It's just absorbed. Slowly. Comfortably. Until the radical position is reduced to hoping that Mayor Mamdani is a more competent manager than his predecessors.

But we don’t need better managers.  The apocalyptic moment we live in demands nothing short of the resumption of America’s Democratic Revolution: a rupture as dramatic as Reconstruction or the New Deal, a reordering of American life from its foundations. Not just an affordability agenda. A new era of American history. The reconstruction of the public sphere. The denazification of America and the final abolition of the oligarchy's grip on American life.

They will call this unreasonable. They are right. We are unreasonable. We are impractical. We refuse to be sensible. The world has become so monstrous that sensibility is no longer a virtue. Sensibility is a form of denial. The reasonable ones are not responding to reality, but rather a memory of reality, of a world of functioning institutions and normal politics that no longer exists.

The reasonable ones are waiting for a revitalization of a world that no longer exists. We are here to build the one that comes after.

The demand to be "sensible" always reaches its highest pitch when social movements are at their weakest. Nowhere is this clearer than in the retrospective on "woke 1." We are told, with the confidence of people who believe they are merely sensibly describing reality, that the George Floyd uprising and the demands it produced–such as defunding the police, abolishing the carceral state, and confronting the racism embedded in every American institution–were simply too much. Too radical. Too alienating to "normal people," A political mistake that cost the Democrats the center and handed the right its opening.

What this confesses is not that the movement went too far, but that the Democratic Party had no intention of ever giving it institutional form. What this confesses is that, when attacked by the enemy, we are too ‘sensible’ to defend ourselves. Contrary to what we are told today, the demands were not defeated by their own “excess”.

They were abandoned by the people who claimed to represent them, they failed because they did not go far enough–their demands did not turn into law, into a contest for state power, did not turn into a political pole.

The fixation on "excess" is itself a nefarious trick—a way to delegitimize a movement without engaging its substance. We are told the movement was too "scolding," too moralistic, too alienating. The rhetoric was too sharp. The demands were too maximalist. Prison abolition? Defund the police? Who could possibly vote for that?

But this critique misunderstands the nature of mass movements. A movement is not a focus group or policy memo.  It is the raw, unmediated expression of millions of people who have reached the end of their patience. It is messy, emotional, and sometimes uncomfortable. But that is the very fabric of mass politics breaking through the crust of normalcy. You cannot ask the practice of millions of people to shave off its "excesses" to make itself more palatable. The movement is not a product to be workshopped. Parties engage in excesses, people engage in mass politics.

The sensible ones will lament the scolding or moralizing tone of the movement, but the truth is that shame works. People can be shamed into changing their beliefs. That is how racism became taboo. That is how segregation became untenable. The Civil Rights Movement did not politely ask for integration—it made it shameful to oppose it. It forced the country to confront its own barbarism. The scolding, the moral clarity, the refusal to compromise on fundamental questions of justice were all the substance of transformation.

The task of a political party is not to chastise the movement's “excesses.” It is to listen to the demands, absorb the mood, and translate the radical demands into a directional program that moves toward the horizon those demands point to. The movement puts forward a moral compass. The party supplies the translation—the "how" in the near term, without ever losing sight of the destination. The task of the party is making the impossible legible, showing that the horizon is not a fantasy but the directional purpose of our political work.

When Zohran Mamdani proposed transferring many functions of the NYPD to a proposed Department of Community Safety staffed by social workers, he offered a vision of abolition in the immediate term, a concrete step toward a world where armed police are no longer the first response to mental health crises, homelessness, or school disputes. It was the maximalist demand of abolition translated into a program that could be fought for, legislated, and built upon.  It’s not clear if Mamdani has made tangible progress in realizing this vision of a Department of Community Safety, but it was an example of a strong proposal that shows us what abolition as a directional purpose can look like right here and right now.

The Democrats did none of this after winning in 2020 off the backs of the George Floyd protests. Instead, they ran from the movement. They condemned its rhetoric. They distanced themselves from its demands. And in doing so, they allowed the right to define the terms. The movement's maximalism became its supposed undoing, when in truth it was the only thing that gave it power. The "excesses" were not the problem. The absence of any vehicle to translate them into a directional program—that was the problem. The moderatism that expended its energy fighting the mass democratic demands of the people was the problem.

The George Floyd uprising could have been the Civil Rights Movement of our time. The mass scale was there. The moral clarity was there. The demands around defunding the police and abolishing or at least reforming prisons were the direct descendants of the demands that built the Civil Rights Movement. They deserved their own culmination. Their own reordering of American life. Their own shift in what the country understood as normal, as just, as possible.

They got none of it. They got painted streets and black squares and a "racial reckoning" that amounted to nothing. The energy was enormous, but its translation to state power amounted to nothing.

The Civil Rights Movement resulted in landmark legislation being passed, but the movement’s legacy was much more than that. It transformed common sense. It changed what millions of Americans could imagine as acceptable. It made segregation untenable and equal rights a formal baseline. Legislation was instrumental, but the transformation was deeper, because it reorganized the terms of political reality itself.

The Black Lives Matter movement, on the other hand, was denied this. Not just legislation, which we didn’t get either, but the chance to make bloated, militarized police budgets, the carceral state, and racist police shootings as indefensible as Jim Crow. The chance to make winding down the outsized role of the police as ordinary as civil rights. The chance to change what the country could imagine. The movement was left without that future. The demands were orphaned. The right adopted them as the perfect enemy, and the Democrats ran from them.  This is what the "sensible" retrospective refuses to tell. It blames the movement for asking too much, when the real failure was that no one had the conviction to give the movement what it was owed.

But the defeat was not because of “excesses” or that the movement asked for too much.  The problem was that the movement had no vehicle to turn its demands into a new common sense. In 2020, the mass movements were strong, but the left populist electoral project was weak, with socialists and progressives being marginal within the Democratic Party.  This left us with the establishment Democratic Party, which absorbed the energy of the movement into electoral victory in 2020, while spurning the movement’s demands.

Millions were in the streets, but there was no political force capable of crystallizing that energy into state power or into cultural transformation. The left did not have the power to do so, and the establishment was actively disinterested in such a task. The movement dissipated, and the backlash began.

Now the situation is inverted. The electoral project is strong. Socialists hold office. DSA runs campaigns that win. The left has real leverage in city councils, state legislatures, and Congress. And yet the social movements are weak. The streets are quiet. The energy that filled them in 2020 has seemingly gone elsewhere, into exhaustion, into cynicism, into the slow burn of daily survival.

This inversion should be the opportunity to complete what 2020 could not. The electoral strength should be funneled into rebuilding mass movements. The power should be used to prepare for the next eruption—to build the organizational infrastructure, the institutional footholds, the cultural presence that can translate the next uprising into a governing vision and a new common sense.

Instead, the electoral strength is being funneled into deliverism, a social democratic variant of the mainstream Democratic Party’s managerialism. The left in office delivers rent freezes and fills potholes, and treats these deliveries as the sum total of its political task. It governs. It administers. It manages. And in doing so, it reproduces the logic of the very order it claims to oppose.

The elected left has internalized this myopic vision of deliverism as strategy. Zohran Mamdani, who marched with the Black Lives Matter movement and called out the white supremacy of the NYPD in 2020, has since been attacked by the establishment and legacy media, and was coerced into apologizing to the NYPD for those statements. Francesca Hong, who narrowly lost her primary to be the governor of Wisconsin, has faced the same treatment for her comments during the uprising. The pattern is always the same: the Democrats dredge up the 2020 statements, frame them as electoral liabilities, and force the candidates into a defensive crouch.

The candidates, understandably, moderate. They clarify. They emphasize their commitment to "keeping people safe." They sound more sensible. And with each concession, the frontier blurs a little more. The maximal demand that gave the movement its direction is quietly filed away as youthful excess. The radical is replaced by the reasonable.

The Democratic Party has made clear that there is no room for bold radicalism in its primaries. You can be a socialist, but only a sensible one. You can support the movement, but only if you distance yourself from its most radical demands. The result is a left that is permanently on the defensive, negotiating the terms of its own acceptability.

But moderation didn't save anyone. The establishment still attacks. The right still calls them radicals. The base, watching its elected representatives retreat from the demands that gave it life, learns the wrong lesson, that radical energy itself was the problem, not the failure to consolidate it. That the socialists, by their own admission, are not all that radical, not all that willing to change things, not really that different from the Democrats they run against.

But if George Floyd happened tomorrow, we would be back in the same place in six months. The conditions haven't changed. The carceral state is still there. Police violence is still there. The rage is still there. Another video, another death, another city in flames, and the same movement would rise, and the same establishment would abandon it, and the same defeat would follow. Because nothing has been built in the meantime. The electoral strength hasn't been used to prepare for the movement's return. It's been used to manage the present, to co-manage decline with the moderate wing of the party.

What the Civil Rights Movement had that the George Floyd uprising did not was a Democratic Party that, however imperfectly, could be forced to institutionalize its demands. It had a web of political formations and civil organizations that fought for the movement’s demands, not against them. Because of this, the movement culminated in landmark legislation. The Civil Rights Act passed. The Voting Rights Act passed. The demands were translated into law, and the values of the movement became common sense.

The Democratic Party has, in this sense, become moribund and incapable of continuing its role in America’s Democratic Revolution. It is steadfast in its commitment to neoliberalism and managing the status quo. The party has become a machine for absorbing energy and neutralizing it. It cannot institutionalize the demands of a George Floyd uprising. It is structurally opposed to the very transformations that would be necessary.

The left-populist electoral insurgency is therefore necessary for a rupture.  It cannot substitute for mass movements, but it provides the institutional foothold that movements need to translate energy into state power. Deliverism is a persistent trap, and can easily become the ceiling, the sum total of political ambition. The electoral left must constantly resist this gravitational pull. But this trap does not negate its necessity at this moment. Because the Democratic Party refuses to institutionalize movement demands, a new Modern Prince must. And without a rupture in the Democratic Party and the rise of a new kind of political leadership, the movements are left orphaned and defeated again.

They will call this unreasonable.  They may even call us crazy. Good. Let them.

Reason, which is really referring to the old notion of the experts’ bludgeon, no longer exists. The world that produced it is obsolete. The paradigms that guided us—the faith in the technicians, the deference to process, the assumption that institutions could be trusted to steer the ship—these belonged to a world that is just about finished. The old world is dying, and a new world demands a new ruling class with new ruling ideas. The intellectual framework of the sensible cannot comprehend the scale of the rupture happening before us.

The left-populist insurgency, which draws its support from its lines of antagonism between the people and the oligarchy, carries within it the seeds of a new ruling class—one that would inherit the wreckage of the old order and have the audacity to build something new from it. But it also carries the continuity of the old Democratic Party. This is unavoidable. A new Prince does not fall out of a coconut tree. It emerges from the contradictions of the old, shaped by its structures, haunted by its habits. The gravitational pull toward deliverism, toward governance as management rather than transformation, is an inheritance we must constantly remain vigilant of.

The tendency toward deliverism is not a betrayal to be purged, but it must be subordinated to a transformative political logic. The mass line, predicated on the relationship between the movement and the state as well as between the masses and the party, is the model we can look towards. Against deliverism, the administration of policies for its own sake, governing can be transformative when it is predicated on a revolutionary upheaval of ruling classes and ruling ideas. The question is not whether to deliver, but whether the delivery serves a larger purpose: the building of new institutions, the creation of a new hegemonic order.

This is what it means to be unreasonable.  It is to refuse to be content with incremental reforms while the world burns down.  The reasonable ones will say this is impossible. They will say the institutions are too strong, the constraints too binding, the electorate too moderate. They will say we must be patient. They will say we must be realistic.

But they said the same thing to the abolitionists. They said the same thing to the suffragettes. They said the same thing to the civil rights marchers. And they were wrong every time. The world did not end because the unreasonable won. The world was remade. The moderates were never right. In every instance, what they believed was wrong. In every instance, they were forced to abandon their position and accept the radical demands of the people.

We are the unreasonable ones now. We refuse to accept that the administration of decline is the only future available. We see the horizon and refuse to look away. The world as you know it is finished. The old certainties are gone. The only question left is whether we will have the courage to face the tasks ahead, to forego the certainties of the old world, and to build the new one from its noblest traditions.