The Left's Rotating Loyalty Oath

The left's articles of faith keep expiring because they were never sincere in the first place.

The left has found itself a new litmus test. It always does. And unless you’re a seasoned political junkie (not that there’s anything wrong with being one!), you may have lost track of how many such tests the left has imposed in just the past twenty years.

In 2008, Barack Obama passed the test of his era. Back then, the American left was united in opposition to the Iraq War. If you were a progressive politician who wasn’t publicly angry about George W. Bush’s foreign policy, you didn’t stand a chance. The junior senator from Illinois deftly tapped into that anti-war sentiment, defeated his more moderate primary opponents, and made it to the White House. A few years into his administration – with Guantanamo Bay still open, and US troops still in Iraq and Afghanistan – progressives conveniently forgot all about that anti-war litmus test.

Squeezing the Saint

A decade later, there was a new article of faith to which all needed to swear allegiance. By 2018, if you wanted to get ahead in the Democratic Party, you needed to (loudly) demonstrate your commitment to addressing climate change. Barely a month into her freshman House term, media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal. Every progressive candidate with political ambitions signed on. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, having shrewdly taken the temperature of the young activists who occupied her office, shifted left on the environment, signaling other Democrats to fall in line. As the 2020 election drew closer, American progressives even convinced the climate movement’s pubescent saint, Greta Thunberg, to endorse Joe Biden, a man she had previously despised. “I never engage in party politics,” she wrote, before doing exactly that. From a climate perspective, she conceded on Twitter, Biden was “very far from enough.” Then: “But, I mean…you know…damn! Just get organized and get everyone to vote #Biden.”

The progressive Political Vise even works on sullen Swedish teenagers!

A little more than half a decade later, climate has nearly disappeared from the left’s top concerns. Last year, researchers at Yale asked American voters to rank twenty-five issues by how much they mattered to their midterm vote. Global warming came in twenty-fourth. Only 1% of respondents named it as their most important issue. In September 2025, the Searchlight Institute, a think tank aligned with Democratic priorities, advised progressive politicians to stop using the term “climate change” altogether. The weather hasn’t changed, nor has the left succeeded in its aim of getting everyone to turn vegan and ride public transit. What has happened is that the environment has ceased to be what animates those who turn the levers of the Political Vise.

Dirtier Than Blackwater

What’s the latest test? Israel. This year, from Maine to California, primary season has witnessed vicious Democratic infighting over American aid to the Middle East’s only democracy. And to that party’s most dedicated activists, one name has become dirtier than Blackwater or Big Oil: AIPAC.

I am not here to weigh in on foreign policy. The government of Israel may or may not be above reproach. What strikes me here is less Israel itself than the fact that until very recently, other issues commanded far more attention on the American left. Israel, like climate change and the Iraq War before it, has suddenly become the one political issue about which reasonable progressives (perhaps an oxymoron) are not allowed to disagree. And so for the left, this summer’s litmus test is denouncing AIPAC, a venerable organization devoted to drumming up support for our embattled ally.

Take Michigan, where on August 4, Democrats will pick their Senate nominee. Abdul El-Sayed, a fiery leftist backed by Bernie Sanders and AOC, constantly reminds voters that AIPAC has endorsed his more moderate opponent, Congresswoman Haley Stevens. On the stump, El-Sayed rages against a foreign policy that he claims enables genocide. That anger has won him a huge following among the state’s youngest and most radical voters – a constituency increasingly central to Democratic hopes. El-Sayed may be pandering, but he’s also reading the data: a recent Data for Progress poll found that 64% of Michigan Democratic primary voters were less likely to support a candidate who takes AIPAC money.

A slightly different dynamic is playing out in New York’s eighteenth House district, represented by Democrat Pat Ryan. A West Point graduate and decorated Iraq veteran, Ryan has taken more than $790,000 from AIPAC over the last four years. Until a very short time ago, that would not have been a problem. Now, it’s an existential threat to his reelection prospects.

Last week, Ryan voted for an amendment to halt military aid to Israel. He was one of 103 House Democrats to do so. (The amendment was proposed by maverick Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie – the only member of his party to vote aye.) The vote was not enough; the congressman also felt compelled to (again, loudly) explain why he had cast it. “I expect groups like AIPAC will not support me in my future elections and frankly, I don’t want their support,” he declared. Ryan promised he would return all AIPAC contributions. That’s an expensive repudiation of an old friend, but when you’re feeling the pressure that comes from being on the wrong side of the current litmus test, you’ll spend a lot (in this case, almost $800,000) to wriggle free.

Ryan was familiar with the need to wriggle. Back in February of this year, as anti-ICE fervor rose on the left, he’d been forced to give away donations he’d taken from Palantir after activists objected to the company’s immigration contracts. At the same time, a local Hudson Valley progressive outfit called For the Many (you have my permission to roll your eyes at that name) ran a social media campaign, condemning Ryan’s ties to AIPAC. Remember that one of the levers of the progressive Political Vise is turned by influencers, and in the social media age, even just a few media-savvy radicals can generate intense pressure. When Ryan made a great show of severing ties with AIPAC, it was the second time in five months that this heretofore moderate Democrat had coughed up cash to make the squeeze stop.

The Test

I believe politicians should be responsive to pressure, as that’s how our system was designed. Influencers and media are part of that design, and rightly so. In a healthy republic, they answer to broad swaths of the people, which is what keeps them honest. What has happened on the contemporary left is that a handful of self-appointed influencers have hijacked that apparatus. They answer to no one but themselves, and they force candidates into adopting ever-narrower and increasingly unrepresentative views. As I wrote in my book, anyone who opposes the leftist agenda is either crushed or cowed into compliance.

Twenty years ago, that outrage was over Iraq; five years ago, it was over climate. If policy were the real driver of pressure, the left would never have stopped shrieking about Guantanamo detainees or the Green New Deal. But policy isn’t what the progressive elites care about. They care about exercising raw power, and in the summer of 2026, manufacturing indignation over AIPAC is the latest way they can do just that.