It’s the kind of no-nonsense language that the Democratic grassroots have been demanding in recent months. Polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Democratic voters have swung wildly against Israel, with younger Independents and Republicans also trending in the same direction. According to one poll, only Russia scored worse than Israel when it came to the negative views among young Democrats (even Iran outscored the Jewish state). 

It would seem, then, that Platner and likeminded progressive office-seekers around the country have hit upon a winning issue. But it’s one thing to adopt more Israel-critical policies in response to popular opinion — and quite another to transform the party into a singularly Israel-obsessed vehicle: one in which opposition to the Jewish state functions as the main priority, a source of factionalism, and an ideological purity test. 

That way lies marginalization, a fate not unlike that of ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Your Party in Britain. This, just when Democrats are poised to re-emerge from the political wilderness amid President Trump’s historic unpopularity and a faltering GOP majority in Congress.

The danger for Democrats doesn’t lie in the shift itself — a recalibration in America’s relationship with Israel is overdue, as voters across the spectrum are emphatically telling pollsters. The real threat, rather, is in the way an intensified focus on a single foreign-policy issue risks pulling the party off course, leaving it vulnerable to a vocal activist subset that doesn’t necessarily reflect broader public opinion on other questions. 

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Graham Platner, gentry liberal

By James Billot

Corbyn offers an instructive cautionary tale. After being expelled from Labour in 2024, the 76-year-old socialist went on to co-found a Left-wing breakaway party the following year. Your Party — the name itself was a magnet for ridicule — promised to be everything that Labour wasn’t: an unapologetically socialist outfit that would tax the rich, nationalize utilities, defend the National Health Service against privatization, and, most importantly, take a strong stance against Israel. During its first week, the party attracted hundreds of thousands of voters disillusioned by the Starmer government, as well as a former Labour member of Parliament and four independent Muslim MPs who were elected on pro-Gaza platforms. 

Yet within days, problems emerged. Before it had even officially launched, a leadership fight between Corbyn and another MP resulted in a mini-schism. What was ostensibly a disagreement over the party’s internal structure quickly spilled into a chaotic membership drive, generating as many factions as it did representatives. The bigger problem, though, was the ideological division between its MPs. Unsurprisingly, Your Party’s socially conservative Muslim MPs took a very different view on issues such as gender identity and trans participation in women’s sports, which ultimately contributed to the departure of two MPs. 

The inherent tension in the “rainbow-and-crescent” alliance of progressive activists and Muslim social conservatives is a problem for Democrats, too. Over the last few years, clashes between Muslim-American parents and local Democratic leaders over school curricula have spilled into courtrooms and onto the streets, largely driven by Muslim opposition to LGBTQ content. For the most part, however, the alliance has been held together by a shared opposition to Israel.

Similarly in Britain, Israel was the centripetal force around which Your Party’s members revolved. Or so they thought. Instead, it turned out to be another source of division. Zara Sultana, Your Party’s erstwhile co-leader, came out as strongly as an anti-Zionist, whereas Corbyn refused to use the term. The result was an ironic dynamic in which Corbyn, long one of Britain’s most prominent critics of Israel, was denounced by elements of his own movement for insufficient purity on the issue. Now, the party can barely muster enough candidates to represent it in next month’s local elections.

The United States has a different party and electoral system than Britain’s, but the parallels are clear: Left-wingers’ competitive signaling on Israel incentivizes candidates to adopt maximalist positions, alienating supporters and cannibalizing other issues in the process. In San Francisco’s House race, for example, Scott Wiener, a liberal Zionist, has faced sustained criticism from activists for refusing to describe Israel as an apartheid state or characterize its military campaign as genocide. Several debates were interrupted by pro-Palestine hecklers, which ultimately led to Wiener resigning as co-chairman of the state’s Jewish Caucus before leaving it altogether.

It made little difference. Wiener’s progressive rival, Saikat Chakrabarti — who has embraced the term “genocide” and called for a ban on both defensive and offensive weapons transfers to Israel — is within striking distance of him in the polls. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul al-Sayed, who has shared a stage with Hasan Piker and talked openly about how Israel is “just as evil as Hamas,” is now tied for first in the polls to secure the party nomination. Similar dynamics have unfolded in Illinois’s and New Jersey’s special elections, too, which became as much a referendum on the Israel lobby as on any local issue.

None of this is to suggest that Democrats should maintain the status quo on Israel. Under Netanyahu, the Jewish state has become more aggressive and unrestrained in its conduct across the Middle East, not bothering with the pretense of a two-state solution. The Jewish state has rarely stopped to weigh even the costs of wielding the power of life and death — in perpetuity — over some seven million Palestinians. 

But, again, there is a difference between treating Israel as one foreign question among many, on one hand, and turning it into an ideological litmus test that supersedes everything else, on the other. This has created a purity spiral in which Democratic candidates across the country are jumping over each other to prove their pro-Palestine credentials — or at least, to ward off any hint that they are “soft” on the issue. Even Gavin Newsom, ever the tumbleweed in shifting winds of public opinion, went so far as to compare Israel to an apartheid state (a remark he later walked back). 

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Bibi’s ‘existential’ obsession

By Amir Tibon

One major reason for this drastic shift is the rise of independent media. As the influence of traditionally pro-Israel legacy outlets has waned, a new ecosystem of progressive streamers and online platforms has filled the space. These outlets will approvingly repost clips of, for example, Graham Platner calling the US’s relationship with Israel “shameful,” while castigating moderate Democrats for equivocating on the issue. 

For influencers and outlets like Zeteo, the Young Turks, Majority Support, and Hasan Piker, Israel is a near daily fixation (to say nothing of Tucker Carlson and other podcasters on the Right), which creates what Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran call an “availability cascade”: a self-reinforcing feedback loop, in which constant mention of an issue makes it seem more important, urgent, or widespread, thereby further increasing its visibility.

Today, the question of whether Israel is committing genocide has the same political potency (and clippability) as “what is a woman?” for progressives and “did Trump win the 2020 election?” for Republicans. In just the last week, it has been asked of former President Barack Obama all the way down to Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg in the New York 12th district contest. And every podcast, speech, and special election primary in which a candidate’s position on Israel determines their standing only reinforces that dynamic at the national level. As a preview of what’s to come, earlier this month, the Democratic National Committee weighed a proposal at its spring conference to condemn the “growing influence” of money in primary elections, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee singled out in the debate; the resolution was ultimately rejected. Without any kind of counterweight in the party, expect more resolutions like these to emerge.

In Britain, Your Party’s launch was meant to signal a new moment of unity for Left-wing dissidents from the Labour mainstream. Instead, it exposed how little consensus there was beneath the surface. Democrats should be wary of repeating the same pattern. Primary season is already drifting into an anti-Israel spectacle; if that dynamic accelerates, Democrats risk a Corbyn-style implosion that hands Republicans an unforced advantage in 2028.

But we keep getting a very different type of would-be assassin: not the antifa militant from central casting, nor even the Proud Boy thug — but the deranged centrist.   

Thomas Crooks, the Butler, Pa., shooter, was a registered Republican who once gave $15 to the Democratic Party through ActBlue. Ryan Routh, who aimed at Trump with a rifle on a Florida golf course in late 2024, was a pro-Ukraine obsessive who had previously supported Trump. Cole Tomas Allen, the suspect in the White House Correspondents Dinner attack, if the resurfaced online footprint is correct, is less Che Guevara than a #Resistance liberal with an online diet of posts from the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse.

Oops. The deranged centrist is a much more mundane and annoying figure. Noting the connection, the Lefty British commentator Owen Jones suggested that “centrists appear to be behind all three of the main assassination attempts on Donald Trump,” and that perhaps it was time to start talking about “centrist terrorism.” The term is absurd, which is why it works. Nobody imagines a militant cell emerging from the Abundance book club. There is no armed wing of the Brookings Institution. Chuck Schumer is not slipping coded instructions into someone’s “Melt the ICE” beanie at a No Kings rally.

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Will Stancil’s Revenge of the Nerd

By Ryan Zickgraf

“Centrist terrorism” is, of course, not a serious analytical category. Yet neither, in these cases, is the bogeyman trumpeted on the Right as “radical leftist terrorism.” In September 2025, Trump signed an order designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. His administration is organizing an international summit this summer focused on countering what the State Department calls “the anarchists, Marxists, and violent extremists of antifa.” 

But where exactly have these antifa hard-liners been these days? They certainly weren’t battling ICE in Minneapolis in force; the top general playing 4D chess against ex-border patrol chief Greg Bovino was the dweeby center-Left pundit-cum-failed statehouse contender Will Stancil (who allegedly helped run an anti-ICE honeypot operation, in which local girls on Tinder would get inside information). Renee Good and Alex Pretti? A middle-aged mom and an intensive-care nurse, respectively.

Likewise, the men accused of trying to kill Trump didn’t emerge from among disciplined communist cadres. They aren’t Maoists arguing about whether Jacobin magazine is too Trotskyist. They look instead like loners from America’s vast political junk drawer: anti-Trump obsessives; Ukraine-war monomaniacs; disillusioned, lonely men marinated in online forums and animated by the belief that history requires their singular intervention.

This matters because the radical Left has become, in conservative discourse, a catch-all for everything the Right dislikes: Tim Walz, No Kings protesters, liberal prosecutors, suburban Biden voters, school administrators, Never Trump Republicans, trans activists, Justice Department lawyers, and anyone who has ever said “protecting our democracy from Trump” in a quivering voice — all treated as members of the same red-hued conspiracy. In reality, the anti-Trump universe isn’t one movement; it is a crowded room of mutually hostile tribes.

Just ask Trump’s would-be killers. Crooks produced a fog of clues but no coherent manifesto. His voter registration and tiny donation became ideological Rorschach tests. To the Right, the ActBlue donation proved he was a Left-wing assassin. To everyone else, the Republican registration complicated the picture. The more honest conclusion is that no faction could comfortably claim him, which didn’t stop everyone from trying to hang Crooks around the necks of their political enemies. Routh was stranger still. He supported Trump before turning against him. He tried to insert himself into a foreign war in defense of NATO and Ukraine. Calling him “the radical Left” would come as news to most Marxists, who aren’t usually known to be fans of the Western Alliance.

And then there is Luigi Mangione, who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 and was promptly adopted as a folk hero by parts of the left. Mangione’s actual politics were what observers variously described as “new-tech centrist” — a Silicon Valley-inflected hodgepodge of libertarian instincts. He called Tim Urban’s What’s Our Problem? — essentially a centrist manifesto against political tribalism — “the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century.”

As for Allen, some have tried to pin his attempt on the president’s life on the fiery rhetoric of Hasan Piker. But the inconvenient truth is that he was no fan of the controversial Left-wing streamer. Someone compiled a ranked list of the social-media accounts Allen had liked most. Topping the list were Stancil, Kruse, and progressive video-clip obsessive Aaron Rupar. Allen’s archived posts show him retweeting the argument that Palestine protesters are “functionally speaking, Republicans” and reposting Bill Kristol. Not exactly a Bernie Bro.

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Why the centre will not hold

By Yanis Varoufakis

Meanwhile, the actual radical Left is in New York City, smiling at Mets mascots and reading to kindergartners. I’m speaking of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist. The great scandal of his first months in office is that he has questionable tastes in housing czars and is annoyingly cheerful. No gulags have been planned for the Upper East Side.

This isn’t to say the Left is innocent of overheated rhetoric or hasn’t been guilty of violent acts — in the past or present. It’s to say, rather, that the troubled political mood in America is ambient; it gathers in the culture like black mold behind drywall.

But, just to be sure, we should start keeping a closer eye on people who go to all The Bulwark’s live podcast tapings. We need a list of all pundits who endorsed Elizabeth Warren for president in 2020. And if Trump insists on a counterterrorism summit this summer, for God’s sake, don’t forget to warn heads of state about everyone who smashed the like button on a Matt Yglesias post. The new Weather Underground isn’t underground at all; it’s all BlueSky ahead.