Charlie Sykes Is Playing The Eagles Again (fast follow-up)
The man who lost his own party to a game show host would like to warn you about hostile takeovers.
The Dude has had his White Russian. He has read the newsletter. He has thoughts.
So Charlie Sykes, man.
Look, I don’t hold grudges. The Dude is not a grudge-holder. I believe in the free flow of opinion, the marketplace of ideas, the whole thing. If a guy wants to write a Substack, he should write a Substack. That’s America. That’s fine.
But Charlie Sykes published a piece today called “Misunderstanding the DSA,” and I have read it, and I have a few notes, and the main note is: Charlie, man. You’re playing The Eagles again. I can hear it from out here.
The piece has a move in it. It’s a good move, actually — I’ll give him that. The DSA co-chair apparently said, out loud, with his whole chest, that the DSA is “using the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle, not because we share its goals” and sees the Democratic establishment as “an obstacle, not a home.” That is, as the lawyers say, a statement against interest. It’s real. It’s the entryism argument and it lands.
And then Sykes does what Sykes does.
The Platform Trick
Having established that the DSA is running a conscious infiltration strategy — which, again, fair — Sykes pulls out a Third Way memo listing the DSA’s most extreme national platform positions. Abolish the Senate. Nationalize all real estate. Close all prisons. Open all borders. Withdraw from NATO. A second constitutional convention to found a socialist democracy.
These are real DSA positions, man. They’re in the platform. I’m not disputing that.
Here is what I am disputing: Brad Lander ran on housing affordability and ending the Gaza war. Darializa Avila Chevalier did not campaign on abolishing the Senate. Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City on a platform of fixing the subway and making rent less insane, not nationalizing the insurance industry. The voters who pulled those levers were not voting to close all prisons. They were voting against a guy with an AIPAC endorsement who marched in the Israel Day parade while their district was telling him something different.
Conflating the DSA’s theoretical maximalism with the actual governing agenda of candidates who ran on kitchen-table issues is a move. It’s a move Republicans ran on every Democrat for thirty years. Sykes watched them do it. He’s now doing it. The rug, man. Somebody pissed on it and he’s asking us not to notice the smell.
Walter Would Like To Say Something About Hostile Takeovers
Walter. Barely containing himself. He has been waiting for this specific moment.
“You want to talk about a hostile takeover, Charlie? You want to have that conversation? Because I was there. I watched your party get taken over by a game show host who questioned a war hero’s capture and mocked a gold star family and paid hush money to a porn star and got convicted of fraud and STILL won the nomination TWICE. And you wrote books about it, Charlie. Very good books. Very well-reviewed books. And then the thing you wrote the books about happened anyway. And you’re going to sit there and tell Democrats how to stop a hostile takeover?”
Walter, man.
He’s not wrong though. The Tea Party ran exactly the entryism play Sykes is describing. They used the Republican ballot line as a vehicle. They called the Republican establishment an obstacle, not a home. They primaryied incumbents. They built infrastructure at the state level. They took over.
Sykes watched it happen from the inside and has a Substack to show for it. His credibility on “here’s how to stop this” is, to put it gently, not his strongest asset.
The Footnote
Here is the part that got the Dude’s attention, man. Buried in a footnote — an actual footnote, at the bottom, where things go when you want to say them but not really say them — is a quote from Will Rahn observing that Goldman and Espaillat lost “because they aren’t anti-Israel enough” and drawing a line to Pat Buchanan’s old “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory” bit.
That’s in a footnote.
The central animating issue of the Tuesday primary — the one that explains why a fifty-point polling lead for Lander over Goldman was fifty points and not fifteen — is in a footnote. The thing that explains why a guy who prosecuted Trump’s impeachment got obliterated in a district that presumably dislikes Trump is in a footnote.
The Never Trumpers are more upset about the Israel shift than anything else in this wave. That’s what the footnote tells you, man. Everything else — the prison stuff, the platform stuff, the entryism framing — that’s the music they’re playing in the cab. The Israel question is why they need to be in the cab in the first place.
Donny Has A Question
Donny has been reading along. He has arrived, as always, slightly late.
“Hey, wait,” says Donny. “Didn’t a guy from the Never Trump thing also run in one of these primaries? And lose? Like, badly?”
Yes, Donny. George Conway, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, lifelong Republican turned Democratic candidate for Congress, ran in the open seat in Manhattan on a platform of being very publicly furious about Donald Trump, and received approximately six percent of the vote in an eight-person field. In Manhattan. Where people are, statistically, the most furious about Donald Trump of anywhere on earth.
“So the Never Trump thing,” Donny continues, slowly, “didn’t work either?”
“Donny,” Walter says.
“No but I’m saying—”
“Donny. You’re out of your element.”
But here is the thing, man. Donny’s question is the one Sykes doesn’t answer. The piece runs nearly two thousand words about how the DSA model is going to destroy the Democratic Party in swing states, and it does not mention — not once, not in a footnote, not anywhere — that the alternative model, the Never Trump aesthetic-as-politics model, just got six percent in the friendliest possible district for that exact pitch.
If the DSA candidates are a problem because they can’t win outside deep blue urban cores, what exactly is the theory of the case for a former Republican whose entire platform is “I am on television a lot being mad”? What does that win? Where does that win it?
The Eagles are playing, man. I can hear them from out here.
The Dude’s Takeaway
Look. There’s a real argument in the Sykes piece. The entryism framing is accurate as a structural description. Some of Avila Chevalier’s social media history is genuinely going to be a problem and nobody should pretend otherwise. The Wisconsin question — whether any of this travels to a purple state — is real and unresolved.
But Sykes is not making that argument in good faith and the tells are everywhere: the platform cherry-pick, the Tea Party amnesia, the footnoted Israel burial, the total silence on Conway’s six percent. He’s using a real concern to launder a fundamentally self-interested conclusion, which is that the Democratic Party should look enough like the pre-Trump Republican Party that Charlie Sykes can feel comfortable in it.
That’s the rug he wants back, man. The one that tied his room together. The one that had reasonable center-right professionals running a reasonable center-right party where everybody agreed on the basic parameters and nobody was getting primaried by a 32-year-old democratic socialist.
That rug is gone. Somebody pissed on it in 2015 and his name wasn’t Zohran Mamdani.
The Dude abides. But he’s not getting back in that cab.
Yeah, well. That’s just, like, your opinion, Charlie.