OIL AND WATER
The Democratic Coalition Has a Problem It Can No Longer Hide
OIL AND WATER
The Democratic Coalition Has a Problem It Can No Longer Hide
By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com
August 10, 2026
Editor’s Note
The phrase that triggered this essay was simple:
“We are a big-tent party.”
At first, that sounds reasonable. Political parties contain factions. They argue. They compromise. They tolerate differences.
But then I noticed something else.
Whenever Democrats were pressed on the growing ideological distance inside their coalition, the same phrase kept appearing. Different politicians. Different constituencies. Same answer.
Big tent.
That is when I began to wonder whether the phrase was describing the coalition—or protecting it from closer inspection.
So I looked closer.
I placed the Democratic Socialists of America’s own stated program beside the public positions of prominent Democrats on Israel, immigration, the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution itself.
And the problem became difficult to dismiss.
These are not always disagreements over tactics, timing, tone, or emphasis. In several major areas, they point toward incompatible political end-states.
That distinction matters.
A genuine big tent can contain people who disagree about how to reach roughly the same destination.
But what happens when the people inside the tent disagree about the destination itself?
One faction wants to reform existing institutions.
Another openly seeks to abolish, replace, or fundamentally reconstruct them.
One faction operates within the present constitutional order.
Another envisions a different one.
At that point, “big tent” is no longer an explanation. It is a way of avoiding the question.
That is the thread this essay pulls.
Because once the competing end-states are placed side by side, the usual coalition language—“healthy debate,” “differences of degree,” “room for everyone”—has to carry far more weight than it was designed to bear.
“Big tent” may describe who is standing together today.
It does not explain where they intend to go tomorrow.
And when the destinations are fundamentally different, “big tent” stops being an explanation.
It becomes camouflage.
Political parties are marriages of convenience.
They contain people who disagree about taxes, spending, wars, immigration, abortion, regulation, guns, schools, and nearly everything else worth arguing about.
Usually, they survive by splitting the difference.
One side wants $100 billion. The other wants $50 billion. They settle on $75 billion and hold a press conference.
But some differences don’t split.
Maintain ICE. Abolish ICE.
Aid Israel. End all aid.
Sanction Iran. End the sanctions.
Preserve the United States Senate. Abolish the United States Senate.
Where exactly is the compromise?
At some point, arithmetic gives way to chemistry.
Oil and water can occupy the same bottle.
They cannot become the same substance.
And that brings us to a peculiar experiment now underway inside the Democratic Party.
Take twelve prominent Jewish Democrats:
Chuck Schumer. Bernie Sanders. Adam Schiff. Jamie Raskin. Josh Gottheimer. Brad Schneider. Jacky Rosen. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Elissa Slotkin. Jon Ossoff. Becca Balint. Brad Sherman.
They don’t remotely agree with one another.
Good.
That’s why they’re useful.
Sanders is a democratic socialist. Balint has moved dramatically left on Gaza. Gottheimer and Schneider are outspoken Zionists. Slotkin and Ossoff occupy increasingly complicated territory in between.
Jewish identity doesn’t tell us what these people believe.
Their records do.
And Jewish Democrats make an unusually revealing test case. They have played a major role in Democratic political life for generations. Many have long public records on Israel, Iran, national security and the liberal constitutional order.
Now we have something equally useful on the other side: an unusually explicit 2026 program from the Democratic Socialists of America.
No psychoanalysis.
No ethnic assumptions.
No Republican translation.
They all left receipts.
Let’s read them.
Let DSA Testify
The DSA isn’t coy about where it wants to go.
Its current program describes capitalism as a system to be replaced and says complete victory requires “building a new society from the ground up.” It calls for a new constitution and a “democratic socialist republic.”
Then come the details.
DSA proposes:
Israel: End all U.S. military and economic aid to Israel.
Palestine: Recognize a free Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital and a Palestinian right of return.
Iran: End American economic warfare and sanctions.
American military power: Defund what it calls the U.S. “war machine” and close overseas military bases.
Immigration: Abolish ICE, end detention and deportations, legalize migration, grant broad amnesty, and eliminate visa caps and quotas.
Police and prisons: Move toward abolition of the police and prison system.
The economy: Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.
The Electoral College: Abolish it.
The Senate: Abolish it.
The presidency and Supreme Court: Replace them with institutions chosen by and subordinate to Congress.
The Constitution: Write a new one establishing a democratic socialist republic.
This isn’t Medicare for All with a little extra seasoning.
It’s a proposed redesign of the American political and economic system.
We didn’t write the program.
They did.
Now put that list beside the records of the Democrats who would have to live with it.
Chuck Schumer: The Man at the Intersection
Start at the top.
Chuck Schumer isn’t merely a Jewish Democrat. He has been one of the most powerful Democrats in America.
His criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu has become increasingly sharp. But criticism of an Israeli government is not the same thing as adopting DSA’s endpoint.
DSA wants American military and economic aid to Israel ended.
Schumer has spent his career inside a fundamentally different conception of the U.S.-Israel relationship. He has called America’s commitment to Israel’s security and defense “ironclad.”
Iran makes the difference clearer.
DSA wants economic warfare against Iran ended.
Schumer calls Iran a leading state sponsor of terrorism and insists it must never obtain a nuclear weapon.
This year he joined Tim Kaine and Adam Schiff in demanding that Congress reassert its constitutional war powers over Iran. But their resolution specifically preserved America’s ability to defend itself or Israel from Iranian attack.
That’s not DSA foreign policy.
It’s traditional Democratic internationalism arguing over who gets to authorize American power.
Then comes the almost comic collision.
DSA:
Abolish the Senate.
Schumer:
Senate Democratic leader.
Which one is supposed to move?
Sometimes analysis really does write itself.
Brad Schneider: Four Words Will Do
Brad Schneider makes the Israel comparison easier.
In February 2025, while rejecting Donald Trump’s proposal for an American takeover of Gaza, Schneider opened his statement with four words:
“I am a Zionist.”
He described the U.S.-Israel bond as unshakable and pledged to continue supporting and protecting the Jewish state, while also recognizing Palestinian rights and arguing for Israelis and Arabs to live together in peace.
DSA wants all American military and economic aid to Israel ended and embraces a fundamentally different Palestinian program.
This isn’t an argument over Netanyahu.
It isn’t an argument over whether a particular bomb shipment should be delayed.
They are different political destinations.
Schneider says Zionism.
DSA says something else.
How much political distance can exist inside one coalition before “coalition” stops describing it?
Josh Gottheimer: Reform It or Kill It?
Now change subjects.
ICE.
DSA’s position fits nicely into two words:
Abolish ICE.
Not improve it.
Not restrain it.
Not retrain it.
Abolish it.
Josh Gottheimer has plenty of complaints about ICE.
So he proposed the ICE Standards Act.
Training. De-escalation standards. Constitutional search-and-seizure instruction. Body cameras. Dashboard cameras. Professional standards. Congressional oversight.
In other words:
Reform ICE.
Which requires one rather inconvenient thing.
ICE.
The rhetoric can move sharply left while the endpoint remains somewhere else entirely.
Condemning an institution’s abuses is not the same as believing the institution should cease to exist.
Reform assumes something is worth saving.
Abolition doesn’t.
Jamie Raskin: The Constitutional Time Bomb
Jamie Raskin is interesting for another reason.
You might expect the collision to be Israel.
It may not be.
Raskin has built much of his national reputation around constitutional government, congressional authority, the courts, elections and the defense of American democratic institutions.
Now return to DSA.
Abolish the Senate.
Abolish the Electoral College.
Replace the president and Supreme Court with institutions chosen by and subordinate to Congress.
Draft a new constitution.
And while we’re at it:
Create a democratic socialist republic.
That’s not an argument over nine Supreme Court justices versus thirteen.
It’s not a filibuster fight.
It’s a different constitutional architecture.
And this may be the sleeper issue in the entire comparison.
Most Americans who know anything about DSA probably know it’s far to the left on Israel.
How many know it wants to abolish the Senate?
How many know it wants to replace the presidency and Supreme Court?
The Israel argument gets the headlines.
The constitutional argument tells you how large the disagreement really is.
Slotkin and Ossoff: Welcome to the Middle
Elissa Slotkin and Jon Ossoff may be more revealing than the easy cases because both have already moved left on Israeli weapons.
Slotkin voted this April to block specific offensive weapons transfers to Israel.
Significant.
Then read the next part.
She explicitly said she would continue supporting defensive systems such as Iron Dome.
Offensive weapons: reconsider.
Defensive weapons: continue.
DSA doesn’t stop there.
It wants the assistance ended.
Ossoff has drawn similar distinctions, supporting restrictions on some Israeli weapons while preserving American support for Israeli defensive capability.
Again:
Not unconditional support.
Not zero support.
A line.
This distinction gets lost constantly in the political noise surrounding Gaza.
Moving left isn’t the same as arriving at DSA.
Adam Schiff demonstrates the same thing.
He has become sharply critical of Netanyahu, Israeli conduct in Gaza and unauthorized American military action against Iran.
He also describes Iran as a malicious state sponsor of terrorism, says it must never possess a nuclear weapon, supports Israel’s right to defend itself against imminent Iranian threats and continues to affirm Israel’s right to exist in peace as a Jewish state.
That’s not confusion.
Schiff is moving on means while retaining much of the old Democratic conception of ends.
DSA is challenging the ends.
At what point does accommodation become abandonment?
Sanders and Balint: The Control Group
If this were really an argument about Jewish identity, Bernie Sanders would blow it up immediately.
Good.
That’s why he’s here.
Sanders has repeatedly tried to block Israeli weapons sales. This April, 40 Democratic senators joined him against one sale and 36 against another.
When he began these efforts, he had 11.
That’s movement.
Serious movement.
Sanders himself has called for ending U.S. military aid to Netanyahu’s government.
Becca Balint has traveled a remarkable distance as well.
In September 2025, she became the first Jewish member of Congress to publicly describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza as genocide.
So now our twelve begin to separate.
Not by religion. Not neatly by age or office. And certainly not as a Jewish bloc. They separate according to which old political commitments they are willing to surrender—and which ones they aren’t.
Some Jewish Democrats are moving toward positions once confined much closer to the socialist flank.
Others aren’t.
Some are moving on Gaza while holding their ground on Iran.
Some oppose particular weapons while preserving defensive aid.
Some want ICE restrained while insisting immigration enforcement continue.
Some remain openly Zionist.
That variation isn’t a problem with the thesis.
It is the thesis.
Jewish identity doesn’t determine the answer.
Political commitments do.
And we’re watching those commitments collide.
The Rest of the Board
The pattern doesn’t disappear when we widen the sample.
Jacky Rosen says her support for Israel having what it needs to defend itself from Iran and its proxies remains “ironclad.” She has backed integrated missile-defense cooperation among the United States, Israel and regional partners.
Brad Sherman called Israel’s 2025 attack on Iranian nuclear facilities “understandable and justified,” arguing that Israel could not wait until Iran possessed nuclear weapons ready for launch.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz has described Iran as a malignant actor supporting terrorism and pursuing nuclear weapons.
They can oppose particular wars. They can criticize Netanyahu. They can condition weapons. They can insist that Congress—not the president alone—decide when America goes to war.
But they still begin from a premise DSA increasingly rejects:
America has allies.
America has enemies.
America has security interests.
America sometimes has legitimate uses for military power.
DSA questions much more than how that power should be used.
It questions the architecture itself.
Three Collisions
Put the records together and we don’t find one disagreement.
We find three.
First: Israel.
Traditional Democrats can criticize Netanyahu, condition weapons and press for Palestinian statehood while still treating Israel’s survival and security as an American interest.
DSA’s endpoint is different.
End the aid.
That’s not another setting on the same dial.
Second: American power.
Schumer, Schiff, Rosen, Sherman, Slotkin and others argue over wars, authorization and limits while continuing to believe America has allies to defend, adversaries to deter and legitimate interests abroad.
DSA wants the American “war machine” defunded and overseas bases closed.
Different destination.
Third: the American system itself.
This may ultimately be the biggest collision.
The Democrats we’re examining have spent their careers operating within—and often claiming to defend—the Senate, presidency, judiciary, constitutional separation of powers and a predominantly private economy.
DSA proposes replacing major portions of that structure.
At that point, we’re no longer asking whether Democrats should move a little further left.
We’re asking what remains when they arrive.
Oil and Water
Something is already moving.
Bernie Sanders once stood much closer to the edge of his caucus on Israeli weapons.
This April, 40 Democratic senators joined him on one restriction.
Balint has moved.
Slotkin has moved.
Ossoff has moved.
Schiff has moved.
But movement is not destination.
For Schneider, the boundary may be Zionism.
For Rosen, the American-Israeli security relationship.
For Gottheimer, the continued legitimacy of immigration enforcement.
For Raskin, the constitutional order itself.
For Slotkin and Ossoff, the question may be how long the distinction between offensive and defensive aid remains politically sustainable.
And Sanders and Balint pose the question from the opposite direction:
How close to the socialist endpoint are they actually prepared to go?
For decades, these differences could coexist because nobody required a final answer.
What happens when somebody does?
We don’t have to answer that yet.
For now, we’ve established something simpler.
The positions are real.
The differences are real.
And increasingly, those differences concern not how far to travel—
but where the road ends.
Oil and water have traveled inside the same Democratic bottle for years.
They can coexist.
They can move together.
Shake the bottle hard enough and, for a while, they can even look like one substance.
But they aren’t.
And sooner or later, somebody is going to insist that they mix.
That’s where Part II begins.