Revealing the Democrats’ rot, from the inside

There’s a lot of money to be made by defecting to the other side. Hopping across the aisle comes with fame, fawning New York Times profiles (that is, if the move is from Right to Left), and endless cable news hits. Just ask Liz Cheney or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But in a world of narcissistic headline-seekers, there are people who, faced with the harsh realities that belie their original ideals, have genuine changes of heart. Evan Barker appears to be one of them. The successful progressive fundraiser left the 2024 Democratic National Convention fed up. She had watched as Democrats, meant to be the party of the working class, had given up on their appeals to street sweepers and Walmart greeters in favor of women-owned businesses and black, indigenous, and people of color or LGBT safe spaces.When Vice President Kamala Harris was crowned the Democrats’ presidential nominee that summer, Barker watched as the party frittered away its prospects by focusing on abortion and “joy” and nonbinary Muslim prayer rooms. Barker made a TikTok video about what she had seen, and she fell asleep thinking she had given her 60 followers some food for thought. Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative; By Evan Barker; Threshold Editions; 288 pp.; $29 Instead, her rant went absolutely viral, gaining millions of views and capturing the attention of everyone from Turning Point USA cofounder Charlie Kirk to conspiracy monger Alex Jones. Barker was a sensation, the new James Carville, a Democrat willing to criticize her own party’s obvious excesses in the hope that voters might be better off. If only the Democrats would listen. Barker details her political evolution and more in Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, which came out earlier this summer — just in time for even slow readers to take warning before the midterm elections. (Chuck Schumer, it’s not too late for you!) Happily, it’s an easy read, detailing Barker’s slow disillusionment with the Democratic Party and the political campaign process itself.Unlike the stereotypical Democratic activist, the one who got her start at high school climate protests and spent all of Mom and Dad’s money at an encampment at Cornell, Barker was drawn to politics because of a singular, pressing issue: healthcare. She worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign in high school, ecstatic that Obamacare could help her maintain stable health insurance to treat her debilitating respiratory condition. “The Affordable Care Act saved my life,” she writes. “I thought it would bind me to the Democratic Party forever.”What began as a high school internship quickly became a high-powered career. Barker first worked for an establishment Democratic candidate (a woman who, like many before her, made an identity out of her Trump #Resistance) until she determined that her candidate was “more interested in acquiring power than enacting policies that transformed people’s lives.” Soon she was backstage delivering Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) his unlabeled water bottles and working for a “progressive populist” congressional candidate. Progressivism appealed to Barker because it offered answers to the difficulties that marked her childhood in Kansas and Missouri: lack of stability and opportunity in healthcare, employment, and housing. “In many ways, my family is representative of the downward mobility that many American families have experienced over the last several decades,” she writes. Barker was the first in her family to go to college, and she always felt like the odd one out in the room, even in progressive circles.When Barker met Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in 2018, the bartender-turned-politician had just won her primary and had galvanized progressives nationwide by proving that the establishment didn’t always win. Later, in AOC’s office, Barker noticed “a bunch of crumpled-up American flag stickers at the bottom of a trash can,” which she scooped out in memory of her stepbrother, who died while serving in the U.S. Navy.Evan Barker’s post-DNC digital confessional. (via TikTok) Over the years, Barker worked with various progressive campaigns and organizations to fundraise for candidates. She, unlike her Tory Burch-wearing counterparts, had no trouble asking for money. Her bluntness and black-and-white view of things was an asset — until it wasn’t. Around the time of AOC’s victory, Democrats went all-in on the culture wars. The Green New Deal was everywhere. Consultant groups were chastised for not hiring enough “people of color.” Sanders became problematic because his base was full of white men. Republicans were all racist. Progressive district attorneys were ending cash bail and saving the country by putting criminals back on the streets. Everything, everywhere, was about race.“The public did not realize how there was a systematic push to discriminate against white people from within the party from the highest levels,” she writes. “The Left has been run, almost entirely, by brown and black millennial girl bosses.” Barker, who tended to think of things not in terms of racial grievance but of helping the working class, tried nonetheless to make enough comments about the unfortunate color of her skin to keep her safe. Of course, it wasn’t enough. During one interaction with another consultant who had done little to prepare for a campaign’s launch, Barker stepped in with a plan. For this, the consultant sent Barker’s boss an email calling her “an entitled white woman.” When Barker tried to talk to her about it, she emailed Barker’s boss again, this time claiming that it’s common for white women to “play victim especially when it comes to working with woman [sic] of color.” She ended by suggesting they both take DEI training.That was in 2021, but Barker’s real break from Democratic politics came not for professional reasons but personal ones. After the birth of her son, she quit her grueling job to spend time with him. And as anyone who’s had a child (and isn’t afraid of speaking the truth) is likely to tell you, it makes you more conservative. “Time spent with my son gave me more clarity about what is truly important in life,” Barker writes. Suddenly, she was paying attention to the content of children’s books and nervously sidestepping drug addicts in the streets of San Francisco. When she saw the Democrats at the DNC wrapped up in ideas that would have no benefit for her grandmother in her mobile home or her son (a dreaded white male), she walked out. Months later, she voted for President Donald Trump. ‘ANIMAL FARM’ IS TOO BORING TO DESERVE ALL THIS CONTROVERSY In the end, Barker suggests that her evolution won’t satisfy readers on either side. Democrats will be sad to hear she doesn’t regret throwing a protest vote for Trump in 2024. Republicans will be disappointed that she doesn’t now identify with them. Instead of aligning with a particular side, Barker suggests the way forward for any U.S. political party is populism: “It is clear to me that the future, right or left, regardless of who is in power, will be populist.”No doubt she’s right, as the cult followings of Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani show. But Barker is an expert at winning elections, not at governance. No one wants Medicaid cuts. But reform must come someday. And more free-market-minded members of the Republican Party ought to take her conclusion as a warning. Whether or not it works, no one wants to hear about “trickle-down economics.” Republicans must appeal to the working class. And if they can’t, they’ll be as out of touch as the pronoun-obsessed progressives.Madeline Fry Schultz (@madelineefry) is a writer and editor based in the Washington, D.C., area.