Every child knows the fable of the scorpion who swears not to sting the frog who ferries him across a river — but unsheathes his poison at the end of the journey.
“I thought you promised not to sting me!” the incredulous frog exclaims as he perishes.
“Well, you knew I was a scorpion,” the other responds.
Sen. Chuck Schumer seems unaware of the tale — and its lesson.
Leftist revolutions tend to eat their own: The French Revolution’s Maximilien Robespierre met the Jacobins’ guillotine, and Josef Stalin murdered the onetime allies who tried to moderate his fervor.
Yet Schumer prostrated himself to the far left’s ill-conceived government shutdown this fall.
After resoundingly losing the White House, the House and the Senate in 2024, there is no world in which the Democrats could have won the shutdown battle and taken the reins in health-care policy.
It was dumb politics, a tantrum act of narcissism and unreality.
Do the leftists take responsibility? No.
Instead they want to send Schumer to the political guillotine. How Jacobian.
Rather than alter their failed “Oppose Trump at All Costs” strategy, the progressive socialists are doubling down.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) seeks to Mamdanify the US Senate by boosting far-left candidates’ primary challenges in Maine, Michigan, Minnesota and elsewhere.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bx-Queens) says the “Old Guard” must give way to the socialists and cultural revolutionaries.
And while a few liberal writers like Ezra Klein, worrying of a party-ending civil war, say the Democrats need to show some ideological tolerance, Schumer’s public flogging proves that’s a distant pipe dream.
Democratic moderates find themselves wilting on the vine.
They are meek. They have no clear agenda.
They lack charisma and influencer savvy, living in fear of the flying monkeys of the online leftist enforcers.
Yet ironically, the moderates’ way forward lies in copying some of the progressive socialists’ own tactics.
For decades, leftists have formed new parties as a means of pushing the Democrats toward their policy preferences.
Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party pulled the state Democratic Party far to the left in the mid-1900s — so much so that the two have now merged.
New York’s Working Families Party, formed in 1998, has used electoral fusion laws as leverage to win progressive health-care and criminal-justice battles.
Today’s Democratic Socialists of America essentially function as a political party, campaigning for members like Zohran Mamdani and AOC in Democratic primaries.
Centrists have occasionally attempted something similar.
In the 1990s, Will Marshall and Al From led the then-nascent Democratic Leadership Council’s attempts to shift the party’s policies away from the left — but the group never sufficiently scaled a grass-roots effort to elect moderate candidates.
That is what moderates must now do: organize their own party around the commonsense center where most voters reside.
Call it the Democratic Populists or the Democratic Builders’ Party.
Only 9% of voters classify themselves as progressive, according to Gallup.
By contrast, independents alone make up 43% of electorate — and if you couple them with Democratic moderates, the number grows higher.
An established centrist wing has far more potential electoral leverage than the progressive socialists do.
Such a party would lay out a platform that explicitly occupies the sensible middle lane.
It could champion a Marshall Plan to train American workers for the AI revolution, rather than relying on imported H1-B visa holders.
It would pledge to fix broken public schools and an ideologically imbalanced university system that’s a captive of foreign-funded anti-Western ideology.
It would attack the affordability crisis the only way possible: by rejecting the narcotic of government control and handouts while increasing productivity and the supply of goods and services.
It would embrace renewable energy along with fossil fuels and nuclear power to build an energy future for the AI revolution.
It would support equal opportunity, not equal outcomes, and would back democracy and pluralism in the Mideast rather than movements aiming to destroy those ideas.
It would embrace bipartisanship, seeking to work with the president — even a Republican president — when possible, to achieve its goals.
It would explicitly reject identity grievance and the cultural revolution of the progressive socialists.
Forming this new party offshoot would do Bill Clinton one better — it’s the ultimate Sister Souljah move, a challenge that could counter the admitted online smarts of the influencer left.
The Champagne Socialists have created a toxic image for the Democratic Party: 70% of the American electorate thinks we’re “out of touch” with their concerns.
Moderates can keep on swimming with a scorpion on their shoulders — or they can grow a spine and push him off their backs.
Julian Epstein is the former chief counsel for the House Judiciary Democrats and the former staff director of the House Oversight Committee.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
