The Crowd That Booed Jacob Frey Is On The Cusp Of Controlling The Democratic Party

The Democratic Party is navigating a crossroads in realtime. The left, more broadly, has chosen its path. Joe Biden is now an unlikely bulwark.

It all comes down to one viral video. The relevant clip documents Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a progressive Democrat, paying lip service to George Floyd protesters before being booed out of the crowd for meekly refusing demands to defund the police. Throw all the national polls and focus groups away—that constituency may soon be the only one that matters.

Democrats have lurched leftward for years, and their drift is certainly accelerating. That’s also true of the cultural left, which bypassed this crossroads sometime in the last decade, as evidenced by the media’s conduct last week, from the shameless double standard on pandemic protests to the New York Times’s institutional meltdown over an innocuously reasonable op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

#DefundThePolice recalls #AbolishICE, a far left campaign that quickly caught steam on the cultural left, forcing the political left to appease activists. But there’s a key difference. Democrats had no immediate way to “abolish ICE” when the movement found momentum. While some far-left lawmakers were certainly serious, it was much easier for others to go along with the hashtag for the sake of political expediency when the threat was less immediate.