There is a bird called the starling that moves in what naturalists call a murmuration. Thousands of them fold and wheel across the evening sky as a single organism, every wing beating on the same unspoken cue, every hairpin turn executed in perfect unison without a word passed between them. The starling is also a mimic. It does not so much sing as repeat, throwing back whatever sound it most recently absorbed. And it is, on top of everything else, an invasive species: a bird that settles into a nest it did not build, crowds out whatever native lived there, and calls the theft a homecoming.
I can think of no cleaner emblem for what the Democratic Party has become in the last two weeks.
Since the New York primaries of June 23, when three candidates blessed by Zohran Mamdani swept aside the party's own establishment, the Democratic flock has banked hard to the left and begun chanting a single phrase in flawless unison. “Big Tent". Cory Booker says it. Chris Murphy says it. Raphael Warnock says it. Colorado's Phil Weiser announces that he is "a big tent person who believes in diversity of viewpoints." They all say the same thing, on the same cue, and they say it as though a diversity of viewpoints were the question on the table.
It is not the question. A diversity of viewpoints is an argument about the marginal tax rate or the pace of a housing permit. What actually swept New York is something else entirely. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who unseated a five-term incumbent and former chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, wants to abolish the police, empty the prisons, erase the borders, and she has described the country she now proposes to legislate for as a disgrace in language no editor will print.
That is the newest face of the tent, and the men nominally in charge of the party cannot bring themselves to say she does not belong in it.
The tent now shelters people who will tell you, out loud and on camera, that Israel had October 7 coming and that America had September 11 coming. It shelters the open demand to seize the means of production, to abolish private ownership of land, to disband the police departments that keep a city from devouring itself and to unlock the cells of the men those departments arrested. It shelters the ambition to pack the Supreme Court and to manufacture two new states for the sole purpose of manufacturing four new senators to ensure perennial Democrat rule.
Confronted with all of it, the leadership can produce exactly two syllables. Big tent.
Only a very particular breed of coward welcomes into any tent the people who have already announced their intention to burn the tent down. It takes a specific, postmodern cast of mind, the kind that has spent a generation teaching that every structure is a prison and every boundary an act of violence, to watch an arsonist stroll in with a can of gasoline and describe it as a contest of ideas that makes us stronger. Weiser and Murphy and Booker are not brave. They are performing bravery the way a starling performs a song, repeating the last brave-sounding phrase they heard because the flock has already turned and they would sooner die than be the one bird flying the other way.
And they know precisely where the flames go first. They go to the Jews. They always go to the Jews. The honest people in the party know it too. James Carville, who has spent forty years as a Democrat, looked at the sweep and started using the word schism, saying there are simply some forms of company he cannot share a tent with, including anyone who denies Israel's right to exist. Josh Gottheimer called the movement a cancer the party cannot allow to spread. Even Letitia James, no one's idea of a moderate, said that abolishing the police and releasing every prisoner is not progressive, it is nuts.
They can see the fire. What they cannot do is get the venal and mealy-mouthed shape-shifters at the top to admit there is one.
Watch Hakeem Jeffries and the whole performance comes into focus. When the Mamdani crowd celebrated its victories, it turned on Jeffries to his face and chanted "You're next." His response was not to draw a line. It was to congratulate the party's newest members, praise their work, and promise to crush far-right extremism, as though the threat in the room were somewhere to his right. Asked point-blank whether a candidate who wants to abolish the police belongs in his caucus, he managed only that her views were not his views, and then he did the one thing the murmurating party can always be relied upon to do. He pivoted to Trump.
That is the tell, and it is the most revealing thing about the modern Democratic Party. A socialist insurgency is openly hunting the careers of Jeffries and Schumer and every member deemed insufficiently radical, and the leadership's explanation for the discontent fueling that insurgency is, of course, Donald Trump. The revolt is eating them alive, like Saturn devouring his children or a revolution devouring its own, yet somehow it's the president's fault.
A party facing a burning mirror has decided the man outside the reflection is the problem.
So the tent gets bigger, and the flock wheels, and every starling in it chants the same two syllables while the ones with matches file in through the open flap. I cannot wait to see what climbs out of the clown car next. I only know that whatever it is, it will be antisemitic, it will want your land and your police force and your Supreme Court, it will call all of that strength through diversity, and when the whole thing finally comes down around them, they will find a way to blame Trump for the fire they invited in.
Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage therapist, trainer of therapists, lecturer and author. He volunteers in the IDF reserves, as an MDA medic, in Zaka, and in the Israel Police Search and Rescue Team. His articles have appeared in Jewish News Syndicate, Israel National News, The Jerusalem Post, Breitbart and elsewhere.