Former Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel said that he doesn’t view socialists as part of the Democratic Party, a rare pushback against attempts to establish a big-tent party that includes its left flank. In an appearance on Fox News Sunday…
Page A6From§Eachthe evening edition — 30 August 2026
Democratic Party tells socialists to leave, keeps compromising to hold power.
As it ran on the front
Watch what a party does with its two hands at the same time, because the hands tell you more than the speeches. One hand is Rahm Emanuel, telling the socialist wing of the Democratic coalition to go run as their own party if they don't like the tent — his words, 'run as a separate party,' which is a nice way of saying the door's over there. The other hand is Chuck Schumer, racking up what's politely called a long list of compromises to hang onto the majority leader's gavel.
Put those next to each other and you get the actual shape of the modern Democratic Party: infinite flexibility going one direction, zero tolerance going the other. You can compromise your way through a shutdown fight, a spending bill, a nominee you said you'd never confirm, and that's just called legislating, called being a grown-up in the room. But if you're the wing of the party asking for things like a higher minimum wage or a public option, the message is: separate party, please, the tent's full.…
…(cont) None of this is new, exactly, but it's rarely said out loud by the people doing it. Rahm's not shy about it, and that's almost refreshing, in the way it's refreshing when the landlord stops pretending the rent increase is about the roof. The socialists get told to leave because they cost the party something in a primary somewhere. The compromises get made because they cost the leadership nothing — except, eventually, the ability to say the party stands for anything you couldn't already get from the other one.
Here's the part that should bother you even if you've never voted for a socialist in your life: a party that treats its own left flank as a liability to be managed and its own dealmaking as an unlimited resource to be spent has already decided where the floor is. It's not principle keeping the tent shape stable. It's who has leverage and who doesn't, and right now the people with the least leverage are the ones being handed a map to the door.
“Watch what a party does with both hands at once. One hand is Rahm Emanuel telling the socialist wing to go run as their own party if they don't like the tent; the other hand is Schumer racking up compromise after compromise to keep the gavel — infinite flexibility one direction, zero tolerance the other.”
“Rahm's just being a pragmatist — you want to win elections, you run to the middle, that's Politics 101. Schumer's compromises? Those are called legislating, that's how the process works — well, some of them were pretty bad, sure, but that's not really the point I was making.”
The receipts
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spent decades telling Jewish audiences that his name meant something important. In a 2010 interview with Jewish radio host Nachum Segal, Schumer said it “comes from the word shomer, guardian…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.