A Disillusioned Democrat Burns Her Bridges, Seeking To Light the Way For the Left

‘Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative’By Evan BarkerThreshold Editions, 288 pagesIn 2024, just before the election, progressive operative Evan Barker made a video about why she was abandoning the Democrats and Kamala Harris. It went viral, making her a sort of auxiliary MAGA star, podcasting with Lara Trump, voting for her host’s father-in-law to return to power. Two years later, Ms. Barker has written the long-form version: Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative.Engaging, well-paced, the book makes provocative points about Democrats’ drift to ultra-progressive positions on gender and race, alienating working class Americans who have never seen the need to change their pronouns or assume historical guilt. Borne out by electoral results in 2024, and indeed in 2026 by low approval ratings even as Democrats expect midterm wins against a GOP led by an even more unpopular president, it’s a provocative but familiar tale.Most Democrats know their party went wrong. As prominent a progressive as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has disowned “woke one,” the era of campaigns and cancellations, senators kneeling in kente cloth, and slogans like “Defund the Police” which many now find “problematic” in turn. Maybe such retreats are cynical calculations but in politics, cynical calculations are the coin of the realm. Ms. Barker depicts AOC reluctant to endorse a white male progressive over a moderate woman of color. Evan Barker shouts her own beliefs loud and proud. Raised blue-collar in Kansas and Missouri, turning 18 before election day 2008, she volunteered that year. “Like most of my generation,” she writes, “I was angry at the Bush administration and looked at Obama as a new hope.” “One issue” made Ms. Barker “willing to crawl over glass for Barack Obama: healthcare.” She suffered “constant breathing problems… a new lung infection every few weeks… unexplained hearing loss, sinus issues that required surgeries, and bouts of severe pneumonia.” Ultimately, she was found to have primary ciliary dyskinesia, a life-threatening condition. Unfortunately, she had spells uninsured, her parents struggling to pay for her care. She “spent high school terrified of the day I would turn 18,” and require insurance of her own. Like millions of Americans, Ms. Barker needed help. (AOC’s definition of democratic socialism comes to mind: not boys in girls’ sports and unlimited immigration — sorry, JD — but guaranteeing “basic levels of dignity so that no person in America is too poor to live.”) Help came. Mr. Obama passed the Affordable Care Act, a market-based program based on a model championed by Mitt Romney. Professional success helped too, gainful employment bringing insurance, promotions, ultimately a move to New York. Large parts of “Nothing Left” depict the soulless grind of that work: endless fundraising, candidates enduring “call time”, making ask after ask of donors, treadmilled by relentless aides. There are idealistic passages too. The Obama campaign, Ms. Barker writes, was where she “first realized that if I became a workaholic, completely immersing myself in a mission, I could channel my suffering into something good.”To Ms. Barker, Obama 2008 is a lost Eden. In 2017 Donald Trump tried to repeal the ACA. It stood. In 2020, Covid struck. On the streets, it was the summer of George Floyd. She writes movingly of Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin, which produced protests against police brutality and for racial justice. But for the author, in those boiling, frenzied months, her party went way too far, splitting on lines of race, gender and class, ultimately producing 2024 and farcical defeat.Ms. Barker’s horror at Harris-Walz, a campaign based on Oprah, “joy” and “brat summers,” whatever they are, in stark contrast to the first Obama campaign which “united people from so many different backgrounds… white men wearing trucker hats volunteer[ing] alongside middle-aged, churchgoing Black women. As a young white girl, I was welcomed with open arms in predominantly minority spaces, as were black kids who worked on the same teams.” She makes the case that her party then attacked itself, white men slighted for being white men (particularly “Bernie Bros,”) women of color prioritized for being women of color, leaders saying and doing ridiculous things.If this all seems very Free Press — eloquently written, built on resentment — well, Evan Barker writes for that site. She lives close to San Francisco and describes a comfortable family life, politely appalled by the progressives around her. Nellie Bowles, wife of the site’s founder, Bari Weiss, did the same.New York said that “whenever Democratic political operatives gather to drink these days, they talk about three things: their chances in the midterms, who will be the nominee in 2028, and if they have read – or are in – ‘the book.’” That might make “Nothing Left” sound like a Washington tell-all. It’s not. Those accused of particularly bad behavior are given a pseudonym or not named. Inevitably, an entitled New Jersey resistance mom candidate is called “Karen.” The pol who asked Ms. Barker to arrange dates but said white men “repulsed” her remains anonymous.On big names, the dish is weak. AOC acts like, who knew, a politician. Bernie wants the labels taken off his water bottles and a bathroom close to his stage. (The man’s in his 80s. Surely dissing him on this is just… taking the piss.) Of the 2024 nominee, Ms. Barker writes, “Back when I worked in New Jersey, I was told to avoid Kamala Harris at all costs” as she “had already gained a reputation among leaders for being difficult to work with and emotionally abusive to staff.” She succeeded in avoiding her. On Joe Biden and his ejection from re-election, she describes a friend describing a lonely and angry old man having his hand held in the Oval Office. There is the disclosure that billionaire donor Tom Steyer’s wife can’t sing. Second-hand scuttlebutt doth not a burn book make.After 250 pages waiting for an explanation of why a working class progressive devoted to Obamacare would vote for Mr. Trump, the reader finds: “My vote for Trump made me a conscientious objector in the wars of our politics.” Eh? In fairness, Ms. Barker also writes that though “there were several issues I did not trust Republicans to manage – the biggest one being healthcare,” she “agreed with so much of what Trump said” about the forgotten masses. But now, “his administration has cut social safety net programs, defunded healthcare, and started new wars. Ultimately, Trump is not the answer I wanted.” (Note in margin: “No shit, Sherlock.”) Ms. Barker’s prime driver is class. She rightly resents Democrats’ abandonment of working class America, driven by coastal elites. Hence her work for Mr. Sanders, her hymns to Trump’s abused base. She credits AOC and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for talking about affordability “in a real way,” but says such progressives “have wildly unpopular ideas about policing, immigration, and other issues critical to working-class people” and will never reach far “outside deep blue cities.” Rightly, her answer “is not for Democrats to continue down the path of old guard establishment, milquetoast moderates either, if they want to win long-term again. The days of those kinds of politics are long gone. Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of the game.”Evan Barker thinks Democrats should “take the best parts of MAGA and the best parts of Bernie and marry them,” seeking “genuine economic populism, coupled with cultural moderation – the magic winning recipe.” Progressives, she says, “must realize… no economic populist Democrat has won in a red or swing district without culturally moderating, too.” That seems right. But there is something awry in the phrase “the best parts of MAGA,” such are the extremes to which Mr. Trump continues to gallop.

A Disillusioned Democrat Burns Her Bridges, Seeking To Light the Way For the Left

A Disillusioned Democrat Burns Her Bridges, Seeking To Light the Way For the Left

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