Democrats have an extremism problem, and it’s not clear how they can solve it.

After yet another gunman allegedly tried to assassinate President Donald Trump at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, liberals nobly renewed their commitment to moderation. “We need LESS violence in America, not MORE violence in America,” wrote CNN’s Van Jones.

Quite right. But the American left has not exactly put itself in a good position to calm down its radicals.

You can court bloodthirsty Marxists, or you can build a wide-ranging coalition of the sensible, but it’s hard to do both at once.

Consider: In April, the New York Times hosted superstar streamer Hasan Piker for a podcast with writer Jia Tolentino. Piker has fantasized on camera about murdering landlords and once told his viewers, “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill [Florida Republican Sen.] Rick Scott.”

He joked with Tolentino about “micro-looting” — that is, shoplifting — and equivocated about whether UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson deserved to die at the hands of his alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione.

Thompson “was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder,” said Piker, citing Friedrich Engels to suggest that the killing was retribution for “systematized forms of violence” in the health care system.

Piker is just one online celebrity, but the problem is that he represents a significant portion of the base that Democrats must now cater to. One survey found that 41% of young voters, and 22% of Democrats, considered Mangione’s actions “acceptable.”

This will make it hard for mainstream politicians to tack toward the center without alienating their most youthful, energetic supporters — especially since many Democrats have been enthusiastically courting those supporters since 2020.

That June, following the death of George Floyd, then-California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris solicited donations to cover bail for rioters and looters in Minnesota. Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), and other congressional Democrats donned Ghanaian Kente-cloth stoles and knelt in a display of solidarity with protesters as they proposed unworkable and dangerous police reform.

For a good long while, it was not only encouraged but almost compulsory on the left to side with criminals in the name of social justice. None of this was a secret; all of it was put proudly on record.

Not only that, but to dissent from the maximalist position in these matters, even slightly, was portrayed as a ghastly betrayal that could only be motivated by rank prejudice. “All this anti-woke stuff is just anti-black. Period. Full stop,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) just last year.

If that’s the case, then it’s hard to see how 2028 presidential hopefuls like Newsom can moderate in any meaningful way without falling into the jaws of their own logic: Either you’re woke, or you’re a cretin. That is not the sort of stance one can gracefully adjust or walk back without considerable awkwardness.

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And so, as William Voegeli observed in the Claremont Review of Books, “Even when moderates do emerge from the Democrats’ process of selecting nominees, a correlation of forces within the party combines with shrewd politicians’ flexibility of conviction to accelerate the leftward shift.”

The Hasan-ization of the party, in other words, may be hard to resist. Try as they might to avoid it, Democrats might be forced to swallow the Piker Pill.

For instance, last November, Ezra Klein of the New York Times was lamenting that “the Democratic Party has made room on its left and closed down on its right,” suggesting a more balanced approach would be effective against the polarizing force of Trumpism.

But by April of this year, Klein was making qualified excuses for Piker in a column initially headlined “Hasan Piker is not the enemy.” The Tolentino podcast followed shortly thereafter.

You can court bloodthirsty Marxists, or you can build a wide-ranging coalition of the sensible, but it’s hard to do both at once.

Democrats might like to recast themselves as the cool-headed alternatives to Trump’s reckless villainy. But all the momentum and media clout are with Piker — and with young celebrity politicians who feel comfortable making high-profile public appearances alongside him, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D).

Regrettably, this could be what peak Democrat performance looks like from now on: callow, clickable, and aggressively extreme on social and economic issues.

That’s not obviously a winning brand. But it could be the only viable one going. If so, then Democrats don’t actually get to choose whether to court the far left or recast themselves as sensible centrists. They already chose back in 2020, and they chose peak woke.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.