The Making of the Democratic Insurgency

Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, by Evan Barker (Threshold, 288 pp., $29.00)

Moderates in the Democratic Party increasingly worry that the far-left faction could undermine the party’s electoral competitiveness and eventually take control of the party itself. Yet the response from moderates so far has emphasized accommodation over confrontation. From their perspective, it may be better to welcome Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-aligned candidates into the fold and hope that the demands of governing temper their revolutionary fervor. This strategy of containment and assimilation rests on the assumption that the radical elements remain sufficiently distinct from the rest of the Democratic Party.

Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, a new memoir by former Democratic insider Evan Barker, challenges that premise. Barker spent more than 15 years rising through Democratic politics, raising money for establishment candidates before becoming a director at Left Rising, a fundraising firm dedicated to supporting insurgent left-wing candidates and causes that challenge the party establishment, including several members of  “the Squad” in Congress. But as Barker moved further left, she became increasingly disillusioned with the Democratic Party itself. In 2024, after attending the Democratic National Convention and leaving more alienated than when she arrived, Barker announced that she could not support Kamala Harris. She wound up voting, of all things, for Donald Trump.

Barker’s account of her career offers a firsthand look at the increasingly blurred line between the Democratic Party’s insurgent Left and the rest of the Democratic ecosystem. Rather than depicting two clearly separate political worlds, her story shows how closely connected they have become. The arc of her career, from volunteering on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign to her eventual consulting for progressive district attorney candidates, complicates the notion of an outside insurgency infiltrating the Democratic establishment. In Barker’s telling, one grew out of the other.

She entered politics through Obama’s campaign as a high school volunteer, at precisely the moment Democrats were pioneering a more personal and emotionally resonant electoral politics, which encouraged supporters to connect their own stories to a sense of shared purpose and political urgency. The approach was particularly powerful for a generation beginning to experience politics through social media.

A young Barker was perfectly suited to this kind of politics. Diagnosed with a rare genetic lung disease, she came to understand her access to health insurance through the political fight over Obamacare. Her illness and her experience growing up in a working-class family in the Midwest no longer felt merely personal. They belonged to a larger political story about what was wrong, who was responsible for fixing it, and what collective action could accomplish.

Experienced politicians understand the distinction between campaign rhetoric and the compromises required to govern. Sweeping promises and emotional appeals mobilize voters, but once in office, political and fiscal constraints inevitably emerge. Obama-era Democrats, however, were pursuing something more immersive—and, as they are learning nearly 20 years later, more institutionally volatile. Drawing on organizing traditions rooted in the left-wing movements of the 1960s, including Saul Alinsky’s model of community organizing and the public narrative-building framework later developed by Marshall Ganz, Obama’s first presidential campaign not only asked supporters for their votes but also trained them to tell their stories and to experience politics with the emotional intensity of a social movement. Barker recalls campaign offices beginning voter outreach with staff chanting “Fired up! Ready to go!” before picking up the phones.

In an earlier era, much of this intensity might have faded after Election Day. But emerging social media and a wave of “social justice and movement building” funding in the early 2010s kept the energy going even after campaigns were over.

Barker’s subsequent journey through Democratic politics highlights the frustrations experienced by many younger staff and volunteers when they began to experience the gap between political expectations and what could feasibly be achieved through policy. Then in her early twenties, she began as a fundraiser for moderate Democrats. But she quickly grew frustrated with candidates who spoke in sweeping moral terms while showing little interest in the policies that mattered most to her.

One congressional candidate whom Barker calls “Karen,” for example, centered her campaign on resisting Trump but showed little interest in the health-care concerns that had drawn Barker into politics. When donors asked about Medicare for All, Karen responded: “We can’t just give it all away.” To Barker, such candidates seemed more interested in holding office than using political power to transform people’s lives.

Her frustration with the Democratic establishment initially drove her further left. Barker concluded that establishment Democrats had not promised too much—they had believed too little. She sought out candidates who seemed more willing to act on their promises. In 2019, she joined Left Rising, placing herself firmly within the progressive movement just as its influence peaked. By then, the far Left had developed a sophisticated network of candidates, donors, advocacy groups, PACs, and campaign firms capable of converting movement demands into electoral power.

The protests following George Floyd’s death in 2020 dramatically narrowed the distance between the activist Left and mainstream Democratic politics. Ideas once confined to the margins—from abolishing cash bail to defunding the police—entered the national political conversation as Democrats and allied advocacy groups embraced the broader language of criminal-justice reform.

Barker helped carry that momentum into its next phase. Left Rising assigned her to Real Justice PAC, a group founded to elect progressive district attorneys nationwide. Barker helped its candidates find fundraising staff, organize donor contacts, and raise money. She worked with campaigns connected to prosecutors including Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Kim Gardner in St. Louis, and she describes a well-funded network of activists and donors intent on reducing prosecutions, eliminating cash bail, and remaking the criminal-justice system through local district-attorney races.

At first, she believed in the project. Even as crime and disorder grew more salient, she dismissed concerns about progressive prosecutors as right-wing propaganda. But observing movement rhetoric put into governing practice opened her eyes. The 2022 recall of San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin offered an early sign that even voters in one of America’s most progressive cities had limits. The issue became more immediate after Barker departed Left Rising, became a mother, and remained in San Francisco. “To be honest,” she writes, “I never understood just how bad the effects of the anti-policing movement were until I lived in San Francisco with a toddler.” Within a year, she says, her car was burglarized four times, her garage was broken into, and visible drug use and disorder became part of her daily experience.

Barker’s experience with crime illustrates a broader pattern in the book. Many of the ideas she embraced sounded compassionate and morally urgent. But then she saw their consequences colliding with her real life.

Nothing Left is more valuable as an insider account than as a work of political analysis. Barker can be self-indulgent, and the book lingers too long on personal slights and her self-declared status as a member of the working class. Nevertheless, her story offers a useful way of understanding the tensions now confronting Democrats.

Barker’s story suggests that the establishment may have helped create the left-wing insurgency now challenging it. The organizing techniques adopted by Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign helped mobilize voters by encouraging them to connect personal identity and moral urgency to politics. Barker was shaped by that approach, as were many other millennials who came of age politically during Obama’s presidency. What began as a campaign technique extended beyond the election cycle and became a more lasting way of understanding and practicing politics.

In Barker’s account, Democratic positions on economics, race, gender, immigration, crime, and language become a single moral package. A voter may agree with the Left on health care, labor, and corporate power yet find that dissent on policing, immigration, or transgenderism puts him outside the coalition altogether.

The challenge facing Democratic moderates is bigger than just containing a handful of DSA candidates. If Democrats are serious about addressing the insurgent Left, they must recognize the role their own political environment has played in producing it. A party cannot indefinitely separate the rhetoric it uses to mobilize people from the expectations that rhetoric creates. When every political dispute is presented as a moral emergency, compromise looks like cowardice and moderation like betrayal, particularly to younger voters. Nothing Left tells the story well.