Remember when establishment Democrats were saying with a straight face that they had been forced to adopt the grating, alienating brand of wokeness and identity politics that made them toxic to working-class voters? You should: it wasn’t even two years ago.

After handing the White House to Donald Trump a second time and scrambling to dump the blame on someone else, Democrats did what they usually do when they royally screw up: they blamed the Left, pretending that this deeply unpopular and cynical political style — whose hallmarks include shallow appeals to racial and gender identity, questionable insinuations of bigotry against their political opponents, and a fixation on bashing men, a demographic the party is desperate to win back — was something that had been forced on them by progressives and socialists.

As this magazine pointed out at the time, this was pretty rich. There are certainly forces on the progressive left, rooted in college campuses and nonprofit groups, that stoked and continue to stoke the worst of wokeness. But it was Bernie Sanders and the movement behind him that had been saying the way forward was a politics that put people’s bread-and-butter concerns front and center and divisive identity politics and finger-wagging to the side.

For their troubles, establishment Democrats lined up to declare them a bunch of racist, sexist “Bernie Bros,” even secret right-wingers who, being white guys, were out of touch with a voting public that wanted to only talk about race and gender, and that they should move out of the way entirely. (Why is the Democratic brand in the toilet with working-class men? We’ll never know.)

So the idea that Democratic elites had had this political style forced on them, and forced on them by the Left no less, is laughable. But what’s extra comical is that they couldn’t even keep this pretense up for two years before going back to doing the thing they claimed they had never wanted to do in the first place.

The insurgent left’s bid to win power in the Democratic Party is currently having another moment, thanks to a spate of recent socialist wins in New York, the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani as two of the party’s most popular figures, the surprisingly formidable Senate campaign of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and a burst of progressive, antiestablishment energy in Maine first channeled by Graham Platner’s Senate campaign there and now finding a place behind his replacement, Troy Jackson.

So naturally, feeling the heat, party centrists have had a sudden re-awokening.

Michigan’s centrist Democrats have lobbed a series of thin accusations against El-Sayed that he has a problem with women, the substance of which seems to boil down to the fact that he’s a man and said some scathing things about his primary opponents, who are women.

There was “a uniquely sexist bent to the things that he has said about women,” Rep. Hillary Scholten — seen here in multiple beaming selfies with accused sexual predator Bill Clinton — charged about El-Sayed’s comments about how his opponent was being propped up by a $30 million money bomb from the pro-Israel lobby, among other big money outside spending.

The latest manufactured controversy in this vein is that a leaked comment about putting “one ogre on a pike” is also a sexist attack — even though read in its full context, El-Sayed was clearly talking about Sen. John Fetterman.

These attacks are so obviously scurrilous, the local Detroit Free Press had said that an earlier ad blitz charging El-Sayed with “a long history of disrespecting women” — a blitz funded by the pro-Israel lobby, by the way — “stretches its facts,” and that El-Sayed had “made criticisms within ordinary bounds as a commentator or candidate.”

Then there’s the intraparty tussle over the Democratic primary calendar for 2028, long used by the party establishment to try to tip the scales toward their preferred candidates and to hold back a progressive insurgent. In their public-facing rhetoric, centrists have framed their push to make the solidly red South Carolina the very first primary around the exact identity politics they were saying in November 2024 needed to go.

“If Nevada gets elevated over South Carolina, it would be because of their Latino vote. So you would then be telling black voters that you matter less than brown voters,” the Democrats’ South Carolina party chair, Christale Spain, complained.

“At a time when black voting power is under attack, Democrats should be amplifying that voice, not diminishing it,” said former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Jamie Harrison.

This argument doesn’t make any sense. Not only is South Carolina significantly whiter than Nevada and, especially, the purple Georgia — both of which, unlike the Palmetto State, Democrats have actually won in the last fifty years — but its white population has actually been growing at the fastest rate in the country, largely because of an influx of retirees, leading to a rapidly aging population too. In other words, putting the state first is not a sop to black voters but to old, white, conservative voters.

And the thing is, when they’re behind closed doors, Democrats are open about this. As DNC members told Puck News last week about the first-in-the-nation tug of war, their push for South Carolina over Nevada was explicitly due to their fear that a socialist insurgent like Ocasio-Cortez could end up winning in the latter state. “Uh, hello? That’s exactly what’s going to happen,” someone the outlet described as a “Bernie hater” said.

Meanwhile, in Maine, after the sudden exit of left-wing insurgent Graham Platner over allegations of gender-based violence, the state’s Democrats instantly turned to shanking his likely progressive replacement with flimsy innuendo implying he’s a misogynist.

Platner faced serious and credible allegations of both domestic violence and sexual assault, the charge that ultimately led him to drop out. Jackson, by contrast, was hit with more nebulous (and almost entirely anonymously sourced) claims at the eleventh hour that he has a “history of conflicts with women,” as the Washington Post put it, claims that rest on a grand total of two stories. One is that he threw a water bottle during a heated argument with one female lawmaker. The other is that he and a female colleague had a shouting match, then they later hugged it out, cried, and he apologized — an incident the former lawmaker herself, who is backing Jackson now, says wasn’t a big deal and is just “what you do in politics.” That’s it.

Nevertheless, taking a cue from Democratic centrists, Jackson’s opponent, Republican incumbent Susan Collins, has wasted no time in taking up the tactic of cynical wokeness, now calling Jackson a “Bernie Bro.”

It doesn’t mean that this kind of thing is going to be particularly effective. The last-minute attempt to derail Jackson didn’t work, and he officially sewed up the nomination over the weekend. The sexism allegations against El-Sayed are less significant than the insane and unprecedented sum of money the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and others are spending to boost his centrist opponent, as well a late-in-the-game flood of endorsements from the establishment.

What’s more significant is that, in their desperation to stop the Left, the Democratic establishment is engaging in the exact tactics they already admitted had hurt their chances against Trump long term, by sending the message to voters that it was still dominated by overeducated elitists who lived by social mores alien to them. As a bonus, this move also serves the same purpose it’s always served: to give establishment politicians something to point to prove their supposed progressive bona fides without causing any distress to their corporate donors — and without any need to break from a powerful lobby advocating for a foreign state actively carrying out mass murder and ethnic cleansing in the Arab world.

Clearly, continuing to bleed working-class voters annoyed at identity politics is a cost establishment Democrats have decided is worth paying in order to stop what they see as their true threat: a left within the party hostile to big money and corporate interests. And so, despite everything they’ve gone out of their way to say since losing in 2024, they just can’t help themselves.