James Carville v. David Hogg? Yes, Please! – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

If you haven’t seen the delicious, burgeoning feud between the ancient James Carville and the infantile David Hogg, then boy, do I have a story for you.

Over the last few days, this has turned into one of the most fun manifestations of the crackup of the Democrat Party we’ll ever see. And it’s worth discussing for reasons beyond the pure entertainment of watching these two loudmouthed beta males tongue-lash each other. (RELATED: The Democratic Party Is Collapsing)

If you’re not familiar with the kerfuffle, we’ll start at the beginning. Namely that Hogg, the left-wing agitator who managed to ride enrollment in Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida at the time the school was hit by a mass shooting into a position of prominence as a Democrat social media influencer for anti-Second Amendment and other radical causes and is now a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is going after elected Democrats. (RELATED: The Democrats Are Hogging the Wilderness)

Yes, you read that correctly.

Democratic National Committee vice chair David Hogg’s plan to spend $20 million to primary older Democratic incumbents in Congress has sparked intense anger from some lawmakers…

State of play: Hogg told the New York Times that his outside group, Leaders We Deserve, will spend $20 million to elect younger primary challengers to older incumbents in safely Democratic districts.

• The 25-year-old gun control activist described a “culture of seniority politics” that has made the Democratic Party less effective.
• He also attempted to front-run some of the criticism he said he expected to face, predicting “a smear campaign against me” that would aim to “destroy my reputation and try to force me to stop doing this.”
• Axios did not receive a response to a request for comment to Leaders We Deserve.

What we’re hearing: Democrats’ anger boiled over in private this week, with several venting that Hogg is putting his own interests above those of the party.

• “I think this is a mistake,” said a second House Democrat who spoke anonymously. “Now, are people pissed? … I don’t know a single person who is happy about it.”
• A third told Axios it “seems inappropriate for a DNC vice chair to threaten sitting Dems.”
• A fourth said they are “totally dumbfounded” that “instead of focusing on [winning], we’re focusing inward in a circular firing squad.”

Yes, but: Some lawmakers, particularly progressives, are defending his plan, arguing that the party needs an effective core in order to appeal to voters.

• “He makes some good points. We do have some ranking members who should step aside,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.),
• McGovern, the ranking member of the House Rules Committee, added that Democrats also “have some long term members who are terrific.”
• A fifth House Democrat who spoke anonymously said Democrats “should have the most effective members right now. Competition is not a bad thing,” though they argued age shouldn’t be the only criteria.

Among the “wins” that Leaders We Deserve claimed in the 2024 cycle was this brilliant new political star…

Congressman Sarah McBride, who is a man, says Republicans are weird for refusing to acknowledge him as a woman. pic.twitter.com/IQdRrTJjTb

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 13, 2025

Essentially, this is about getting rid of a bunch of old liberals still hanging around on Capitol Hill so as to replace them with radical neocommunists who’ll focus nonstop on destroying what little social consensus is left in America.

Hogg is of the faction inside the Democrat Party who believes they didn’t win in 2024 because they weren’t “principled” enough. Listen to him talk, and you might as well be hearing Tim Walz complain that there isn’t quite enough trans ideology and DEI in the party’s message. (RELATED: Democrats’ ‘Trans’ Intransigence)

And that faction is ascendant. So much so that Hogg is apparently able to raise $20 million to take out those old liberals in places where Republicans aren’t able to pull upsets.

You can judge for yourself whether Wednesday’s announcement by Illinois’s octogenarian senator Dick Durbin that he won’t seek re-election next year has any relationship to Hogg’s jacobin campaign. But Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and someone whose voting record couldn’t possibly be unsatisfactory to anyone on the Hard Left, is nevertheless seen as passé and weak by the Hoggles in the party.

So is Chuck Schumer, as I’m sure you’re aware.

Yes, this development is certainly juicy enough. But I have so much more for you. Because a few days later, in the nearly-unwatchable podcast that he does with the fossilized Al Hunt, Carville decided he would weigh in on Hogg in terms which illuminate just how nasty the old bulls can be when their power is threatened…

There’s a lot of meat on that bone, as you can see, but a couple of things stand out.

First is Carville’s suggestion that somebody ought to sue Hogg for raising money from Democrat donors to challenge elected Democrats in party primaries while he’s an officer of the party’s central committee. Whether there is any legal case to be had there or not, it’s not a terrible point from an ethical standpoint — be a revolutionary in your party if you want, but you can’t really do that as the vice-chair. Ethically, and probably politically, Hogg ought to step down and make himself an outsider.

But of course, nobody in that party gives a damn about ethics. Carville certainly doesn’t; when he was closer to Hogg’s age decades ago and Bill Clinton made him a figure of importance, he spent his time on character assassinations of women Clinton had sexually abused when he wasn’t poring through the FBI files of prominent Republicans looking for dirt he could use to discredit them.

Nevertheless, Carville also brings up something utterly delicious, which is that he wants a schism inside the Democrat Party.

Which is a case of saying the quiet part out loud.

There’s a persistent dynamic that hits when a party suffers an electoral defeat, such as the Democrats just suffered. Usually, the defeat is actually worse than what happened to them in 2024; after all, they’re within five seats of having a majority in the House.

Of course, that’s a function of the last round of redistricting, in which a great deal more safe Democrat seats were drawn and fewer swing seats were available for them to lose.

It’s also a function of mail-in ballots being counted despite being received after Election Day in some quite corrupt jurisdictions, but we’ll let that topic slide for another column to address.

Anyway, it’s always the swing-seat politicians who lose in a bad election cycle. The safe-seaters win no matter how bad the cycle is.

As a result, in the post-election confabs in which the party attempts to forge a path out of the wilderness, there is always a call by the just-deposed swing-seaters to move to the center. (RELATED: Democrats Have No Roadmap for Their Journey Through the Wilderness … and James Carville Knows It)

The response to that by the safe-seaters is, invariably, “Why? We’re the ones who won. Our stuff works. You should be more like us and not so squishy.”

The push and pull generated by that debate can often be highly constructive and lead to a path out of the wilderness — especially where there are issues the party in power does poorly with and which the public is receptive to more aggressive changes, and those issues can become the focus while other, less hot-button items can be de-emphasized and perhaps a move to the middle can be acceptable.

But you don’t really have that here, because for one thing, the Democrats don’t have anything that works. They don’t have anything they can hold on to that unites them and gives them a positive message point.

In fact, the only thing they agree on is how much they despise Donald Trump.

And regardless of these media polls, which purport to show that his popularity is waning, Trump is still head and shoulders above anyone the Democrats have in terms of popularity. Furthermore, Trump isn’t going to be on the ballot again — so building a message around how much you hate him is a bit like trying to fight the last war.

Y’know, the one you lost?

And without that unifying factor, you do have that schism. You have the corrupt old liberals, the ones who care solely about power and the swag that it yields to those who wield it and who have pretended to be onboard with the new woke politics in order to monetize it every way they can, who are attempting not to be eaten by the radical anti-Americans of the AOC-Jasmine Crockett-Sarah McBride-Matthew Frost-David Hogg faction.

It’s entertaining that Hogg’s generation is rapidly turning into the most conservative contingent within the American electorate, and yet he’s screeching that his party must lurch leftward. Good luck with that.

What’s also entertaining was Hogg’s response to Carville’s suggestion that somebody sue him…

Matt Margolis over at PJ Media had this perfectly correct…

Hogg didn’t learn much at Harvard, did he? Is Hogg trying to help the Republican Party win in 2026? His actions certainly suggest so. Maybe we should thank him.

Naturally, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) had other plans.

“I’m gonna really focus on trying to defeat Republican incumbents so we can take back control of the House of Representatives and begin the process of ending this national nightmare that’s being visited upon us by far-right extremism,” he told Jonathan Karl on ABC’s This Week.

Donna Brazile, who used to chair the DNC, even warned that Hogg’s crusade could wipe out minority and women leaders.

“My position is many of these so-called safe blue seats — and I can get in trouble — many of them are seats that women and minorities finally had an opportunity to come and sit in because there were no seats at the table for us,” she said. “So before you start wiping clean the menu and the plates and the seats, be very careful.”

When you elevate someone as politically tone-deaf as David Hogg to a leadership role, you’re practically begging for disaster. Hogg doesn’t just lack experience; he lacks the most basic grasp of political strategy. Instead of building consensus or advancing his party’s goals, he’s busy undermining them from within. But then again, strategic discipline has never been the left’s strong suit. Hogg’s cluelessness isn’t just embarrassing — it’s corrosive.

Have you ever met someone young and experienced who was convinced that they were the smartest person in the room, the person who didn’t realize that all the education in the world is no substitute for real-world experience and had to learn the hard way that they don’t know squat? That’s David Hogg. When you’re butting heads with the House Minority Leader already, you’re in trouble.

His stint as DNC vice chair is quickly becoming a textbook example of how arrogance and ignorance don’t mix. I suspect that if he keeps running his mouth, he won’t just be a liability; he’ll be out of a job.

And in a debate with Reince Priebus, Hogg got his head handed to him…

David Hogg is out of his league leading DNC. Reince Priebus baits him into defending their mess. pic.twitter.com/617OhAnnSE

— Big Fish (@BigFish3000) April 22, 2025

It goes without saying that the Democrats have needed to move on from the James Carvilles of the world. Hogg wasn’t wrong when he said in that Scripps interview that Carville hasn’t won a race since before he was born. He also wasn’t wrong in saying the current Powers That Be — remember, this is the Obama machine we’re talking about, and to David Hogg, those guys are insufficiently leftist — in the Democrat party had $2 billion to run a hand-picked choice for president and still couldn’t win.

But what’s starting to become obvious is that the alternative to the played-out Clinton-Obama machine is David Hogg-style twerpism; it’s going to be awfully difficult to execute such an evolution.

So for now, by all means, let’s have much more of this. Old, young, liberal, leftist, let the bodies hit the floor for the next several years.

If nothing else, it’ll do wonders for popcorn sales.

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