It is an open secret that establishment Democrats loathe the left of their own party more than they oppose Republicans. You can see it in corporate Democrats trying to sabotage populist Democratic nominees and vilifying the Democratic Socialists of America. Less well understood is a related dynamic: Establishment Democrats’ foremost mission — the thing they equate with the ultimate form of toughness, courage, and morality — is using power to block the full set of policies the public actually wants.

To them, Democrats’ highest virtue is not their ability to enact big ideas, but instead their willingness to replace the GOP as the new party of no and be this era’s William Buckley — a bulwark that “stands athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

This vector isn’t much talked about in polite circles, but it is finally getting a rare moment in the sun, after a series of scream-the-quiet-part spectacles related to Medicare For All, which a new Yale study shows could save $1 trillion and 114,000 lives every year.

The first of those came from Majority Democrats, a billionaire front group aiming to become a new version of the old Democratic Leadership Council. Responding to polls showing a massive surge in voter support for Medicare For All, the group quickly resurrected the public health insurance option that its own corporate Democratic faction murdered a generation ago. The group cast that old initiative as the weapon Democrats must use to stop any single-payer healthcare proposal the public might crave.

Then came a declaration from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Democrats’ most famous medical ethicist and the brother of previous Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who helped ether the public option and marginalize Medicare For All during the debate over the Affordable Care Act. In a tweet responding to two-thirds of Americans now saying they want Medicare For All, Emanuel acknowledged that “Americans are fed up with rising health care costs” but then lamented that “no one is offering up a more realistic, more effective alternative.”

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“You can't beat something with nothing, and right now Medicare for All is close to the only something on the table,” he continued. “Health policy experts need to offer something else. What are your best ideas?”

Emanuel has previously asserted that “the biggest problem with single-payer is its failure to cohere with core American values.”

In his and fellow Democratic elites’ telling, the emergency is not the predatory healthcare system fueling the affordability crisis. To them, the real crisis is that the public wants Medicare For All and that nobody has offered up a counter-initiative to “beat” the idea back. Emanuel’s call to action was the giveaway here: he’s begging the Democratic establishment to once again pursue its real mission of denying the public’s demands before it is too late.

All of this was capped off by Democratic strategist James Carville. Less than two years after he demanded that Democrats “roll over and play dead” after President Donald Trump’s 2024 win, Carville this week expressed his hope that Republicans retain control of the U.S. House if it’s a choice between that outcome and Democrats winning the chamber by a narrow margin.

“I would rather the Republicans keep the House by five than the Democrats win by five because if that happens, they're hostage to the DSA," Carville said to Bill Kristol on The Bulwark Takes . “Hakeem [Jeffries] cannot move. There's no place for him to go.”

Carville’s wishcasting comes only a few weeks after Jeffries — the likely House Speaker if Democrats win — used a national television interview to state his opposition to Medicare For All, and to refuse to commit to allowing the initiative to be voted on in Congress.

From Carville’s perspective, the doomsday scenario isn’t Americans continuing to be immiserated by the current healthcare system — it is Democratic lawmakers having enough leverage to force their leaders to try to deliver the healthcare policy the public is demanding. Indeed, if the election cannot guarantee his party a way to continue doing that, then Carville says he’d prefer Republicans win the midterms and deny Democrats subpoena power, committee chairmanships, and every other check on Trump’s power that would come with a congressional majority.

Taken together, this trio of specific spectacles is a microcosmic reflection of how the Democratic establishment generally perceives itself and the public.

In Democrats’ story of politics, the public is the “bewildered herd” of Walter Lippman’s imagination — a greedy, misguided mob whose desires aren’t well considered or logical, but instead animalistic and apocalyptic.

In their tale, the herd’s impulses must be curtailed by more responsible Democratic leaders and their entourages of strategists, experts, and other assorted lanyards. These Very Serious People™ derive their credentials, reputations, and prestige not from their savvy in translating public will into policy, but from the opposite: their willingness to stand in front of the stampeding herd and erect a fence.

This is why Hillary Clinton ran for president proudly insisting that Medicare For All will “never, ever come to pass.” It is why when polls showed Americans opposed cuts to Social Security, Barack Obama’s initial instinct was to propose such cuts, and why he only belatedly reversed himself after being shamed into signing onto a popular push to expand the program. It is why Joe Biden kicked off his presidential campaign promising that “nothing would fundamentally change.” It is why there is rarely any significant Democratic effort to overcome manufactured obstacles like the filibuster or the parliamentarian in order to enact popularist policy. And it is why Sista Souljah-ing the Democratic base remains such a fetish among politicos and pundits.

This impulse is also why so many Democratic policies that do advance are so cartoonishly parsed, nuanced, means-tested , complex, and shaved down. It is why we get the Affordable Care Act instead of single-payer healthcare, Dodd-Frank’s half-measures instead of a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, targeted tax credits instead of a full-employment jobs program, corporate subsidies instead of industrial policy, and student loans instead of free universal higher education.

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To Democratic wonks, if a policy is too simple, straightforward, or far-reaching, that must mean it is unduly succumbing to the herd’s bestial demands. So instead, Democratic policy typically looks as thin as the Goodfellas garlic that liquefies in the pan .

At minimum, this paternalistic worldview wrongly infantilizes the electorate. A less charitable interpretation is that this elitist culture is the tell of a corporate party that may claim during campaigns to represent the public, but that never has any genuine intention of delivering for anyone other than its paymasters.

As a strategy to solicit funds from oligarchs, Democrats constantly preventing the public from fully getting what it wants has been a boon to party coffers. But as a political strategy, it has been a disaster, leading not only to the public being denied stuff like universal healthcare, but also to the kind of mass disillusionment that helped birth not one but two Trump terms.

Yes, Democrats and their thin-slice incrementalism can still win the occasional national election after Republican rampages. But as a long-term strategy, being the party that constantly and annoyingly scoffs at the public’s demands does not seem like a way to build a durable majority.

It seems like a formula to guarantee a future Trump — but worse.