When one of the last remaining moderate Democrats in America goes on CNN to warn his own party that it’s losing its mind, conservatives should sit back, pour a coffee, and enjoy the moment. Mind you, Pennsylvania’s Dem governor, Josh Shapiro, doesn’t deserve a medal, but watching the Democratic establishment finally reckon with the monster it created is something every sane American has been waiting years to see.
On CNN’s State of the Union this weekend, Shapiro was asked point blank about Darializa Avila Chevalier — the newly elected Democratic congressional nominee in New York who campaigned on abolishing prisons, open borders, ending deportations of violent criminals, and who showed up to a pro-Palestinian rally on October 8th, 2023. The day after Hamas butchered 1,200 people. A rally featuring antisemitic rhetoric so raw that even most Democrats would wince if forced to watch the footage.
Shapiro’s response was telling — not for what he said, but for what he couldn’t quite bring himself to say. He acknowledged having “profound differences” with Chevalier. He noted that he wouldn’t agree with her on “many things.” He allowed that the party needed a “battle over what we believe in.” And then he stopped. Right at the edge of the cliff. Looked over. And stepped back:
CNN: Abolishing prisons, opens borders, ending deportations of criminals…what does that say about the Democrat Party?
SHAPIRO: “What our party has to go through that will be very healthy…is to have a battle over what we believe in.” pic.twitter.com/lncogDmeXl
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 5, 2026
That’s the Shapiro problem in a nutshell. He sees exactly what is happening to his party. He knows the communist wing — and let’s call it what it is, because “democratic socialist” is just a press release — has moved from the fringe to the center of Democratic politics at a speed that should terrify anyone who remembers what the party used to be. He knows that abolishing prisons, opening the border, and refusing to deport violent criminals are not fringe positions in today’s Democratic Party. They are increasingly the mainstream positions. The ones that win primaries. The ones that get you elected to Congress.
And yet Shapiro, who is Jewish, who watched a newly elected member of his own party attend an antisemitic rally the day after the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust, still can’t bring himself to say the obvious: the Democratic Party has been captured by radical ideologues who have more in common with the faculty lounges of Columbia and the streets of Portland than with the working-class voters the party once claimed to represent.
He’s not wrong that the party needs a battle over its soul. He’s just too timid — or too politically calculating about 2028 — to actually fight it.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that Shapiro’s careful, hedged CNN appearance illustrated perfectly: there is no moderate cavalry coming to save the Democratic Party. Shapiro and Fetterman are not the vanguard of a centrist revival. They are the last two people standing in a room that has almost completely emptied out. The old guard didn’t hold the line — they retreated, capitulated, and in many cases actively embraced the positions they once rejected, because the activist base demanded it and primary threats made resistance too costly.
The result is what we’re watching in real time: a major American political party that now has elected members calling for prison abolition, open borders, and an end to deportations of violent criminals. A party whose rising stars attended antisemitic rallies and whose base is increasingly comfortable with rhetoric that would have been career-ending in any previous era of American politics. A party whose presidential hopefuls are measuring the drapes while the building burns down around them.
Shapiro quoted the right diagnosis: the party needs a battle over what it believes. What he won’t say out loud is that the battle is already over — and the socialists won it. The primary results are in. The congressional seats are being filled. The rhetoric has shifted so far left that a governor warning his party not to embrace prison abolition and open borders qualifies as a brave, controversial statement in 2026.
William Butler Yeats wrote that the center cannot hold, that the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. He was writing about something else entirely, but he might as well have been writing about today’s Democratic Party. The passionate intensity belongs to Mamdani and AOC and Chevalier and the DSA activists who are systematically taking over the party’s infrastructure one primary at a time. The best — if Shapiro qualifies — are offering carefully worded concern on Sunday morning talk shows and hoping someone else fights the battle.
Nobody is coming to fight it, Governor. That ship sailed a long time ago.
For conservatives watching all of this unfold, the lesson is simple and should be acted on immediately: do not let up, do not assume the Democrats will fix themselves, and do not make the mistake of thinking that a few moderate governors issuing polite warnings on CNN represents any kind of meaningful resistance to what is happening. The left is playing for keeps. They have been for years. And the only people standing between their vision of America and the one the rest of us actually want to live in are the voters who show up in November and the Republicans who have the spine to fight back.
Shapiro sees the problem clearly. He just doesn’t have the courage to do anything about it. That’s the Democrats’ problem. Make sure it stays that way.
