Democrats have a problem. The left wing of their party is pushing ‘Abolish ICE’ again. The problem with that is the last time their party opened the borders all the way, there was a major backlash that helped cost them the election in 2024.
So once again the party is split between the ‘establishment’ and the ‘crazies’.
The Left sees this as a vital part of their project for dismantling America. The Democrat establishment can muster no higher objections to that so long as it’s couched in terms like ‘decolonization’ or ‘the right side of history’, but it only objects to the electoral impact for the rest of their program. And that’s usually how the argument plays out which is why the Left wins the long game.
Still the Dems are usually aware enough to let the situation spin as far out of control as it did under Biden. Even Obama didn’t allow the degree of open borders that Biden did. But the difference was that Biden was profoundly out to lunch and sizable chunks of his policy apparatus had been outsourced to Sen. Elizabeth Warren allies, courtesy of Obama, which allowed the Left to do what it liked with a president who was out to lunch and a policymaking apparatus geared to allow leftist activists to run the show.
Dems are terrified of embracing ‘Abolish ICE’. They remember how unpopular ‘Defund the Police’ and ‘open borders’ were.
But they also have no way to escape it. The Dem establishment’s short lived effort at a post-election moderate turnaround was quickly hijacked by leftist anti-Trump ‘populism’. And the Dems themselves are busy fulminating at ICE and that plays directly into the hands of the Left. Instead of defining their own agenda, they’re taking cues from their radicals, and falling in line, only struggling to draw the line at a slogan like ‘Abolish ICE’. But they can’t stop helping the Left make its case for abolishing ICE anyway.
Even though they know it will lose elections.
But that’s the difference between the Left and the Dem establishment. The latter cares about the next election while the former wants to win the long game of destroying America.
