The Infinite Socialist Regress of the Left
Tuesday August 4 may or may not prove a turning point in American political history. If Michigan Democrats choose the moderate Haley Stevens, the party establishment will limp on, bruised but intact, toward 2028. If they choose Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the pro-Palestine radical who openly backs Medicare for All and the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), then something more consequential will have been confirmed. The hard Left is no longer the insurgent force inside the Democratic Party. It is becoming the party's centre of gravity. And like contagion, it will happen in Australia to the Labor Party.
This is not a sudden revolution. It is the latest stage in a process that has been running for decades: the continuous radicalisation of what was already radical. Each generation of the Left treats the previous generation's achievements as the new baseline of conservatism to be overthrown. The New Deal becomes insufficient. The Great Society becomes timid. The cultural victories of the 1960s and 1970s become the oppressive orthodoxy that must itself be dismantled in the name of still greater liberation. What was once the outer edge of acceptable opinion is reclassified as the moderate centre, and a new outer edge is drawn further Left.
This is the infinite regress of unending socialism. There is no final destination, only the permanent requirement to keep moving. Yesterday's radical demand: single-payer healthcare, open borders rhetoric, the defunding of police, the reframing of Israel/America/Australia as a settler-colonial project, becomes today's minimum entry ticket. Those who hesitate are no longer debated. They are purged, primary-challenged, or denounced as collaborators with the old order. The party of Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman and Bill Clinton is not merely being pressured from the Left. It is being hollowed out and reoccupied by people who regard those figures as obstacles rather than ancestors.
The dynamic is familiar because it is structural. Movements built on the promise of permanent transformation cannot declare victory without losing their reason for existence. Every concession becomes evidence that more is possible. Every institutional capture becomes a platform for the next advance. The result is a politics that treats moderation itself as a form of betrayal. In this environment, a candidate like El-Sayed is not an aberration. He is the logical next step.
What makes the process especially corrosive is the absence of any internal brake. The Right, for all its chaos, still contains factions that remember limits, constitutional, cultural, or simply practical. The contemporary Left increasingly defines itself against limits. Borders are violence. Policing is systemic oppression. Biological sex is a spectrum to be abolished. National interest is a mask for chauvinism. Once those premises are accepted, the only remaining question is how far and how fast the programme can be pushed.
The Michigan primary is therefore less about one seat than about the direction of travel. If the hard Left can take a Senate nomination in a major industrial state, the signal will be clear: the Democratic Party's centre of power has shifted again, and the previous centre has been reclassified as the Right wing of the Left. The regress continues. There is always a more radical position waiting to declare the current one inadequate.
This is not the triumph of idealism. It is the logic of a movement that has made permanent revolution its organising principle. The party that once claimed to represent the working class now finds its energy in the permanent expansion of the moral frontier. And as that frontier moves, what was radical yesterday becomes the establishment to be overthrown tomorrow. The only constant is the demand for more. Same point for the Australian Labor Party.
