If anyone has the pedigree to diagnose the fractures inside the Democratic Party, it’s James Carville — the “Ragin’ Cajun” and longtime strategist behind Bill Clinton’s White House victory in 1992. But these days, Carville sounds less like a party loyalist and more like a family therapist on the brink of recommending divorce. And this week, he made it clear: maybe it’s time the Democrats split up.
Speaking on Politicon’s Politics War Room, Carville didn’t hold back. “Maybe we need to have a schism,” he said, pointing directly at the party’s increasingly vocal and uncompromising far-left wing. He’s not calling for backroom negotiations or a fresh messaging strategy. He’s calling for the progressive wing — the “identity left,” as he puts it — to branch off entirely.
“The only thing I’d ask is just don’t use the word ‘Democratic’ in any title that you have,” he said. “Most Democrats that I know that are running for office don’t want your name, don’t want you to be part of the deal.”
Ouch.
Carville’s frustration isn’t new, but it’s grown more acute since 2020, when Democrats began hemorrhaging working-class voters — particularly white and Latino men — to the GOP. The messaging, he says, has become insular, elitist, and downright preachy.
Carville has been warning about the consequences of what he calls “pronoun politics” for years. This time, he made it personal:
“I don’t think we can work together on pronoun politics. If this election did not teach you how damaging that is, I don’t think there’s anything that I can tell you.”
He’s talking about more than policy — he’s talking about tone. The problem, he argues, is the rise of a cultural puritanism that’s more about scolding than persuading. Last year, he made headlines for suggesting that the Democratic Party had become too feminine in tone, too obsessed with what working-class Americans shouldn’t be doing. Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat burgers. In Carville’s words, it’s a nanny-state mindset: “You’ve got to eat your peas.”
To working-class voters — especially men — that message lands like a cold lecture. The result? A blue-collar realignment that’s still unfolding, with battleground states like Wisconsin and Ohio increasingly slipping from the Democrats’ grasp.
Interestingly, Carville isn’t proposing a civil war — he’s proposing a structured split, akin to Europe’s coalition politics. Let the progressive wing become the Socialist Party, or the Working Families Party. Let them run their candidates, stake their claims, and after elections, return to the table for negotiation.
“You just sit down, and you say, ‘OK, we want to be part of a governing majority,’” Carville said. “We figure out a way that we can live with different parties and different titles but under the same general philosophical roof.”
It’s a startling idea for a man who’s spent decades working to unify the Democratic coalition. But Carville says he still agrees with about 85% of what progressives want — he just believes their rhetoric is politically toxic.
