You might think that, after losing another election to Donald Trump in spectacular fashion, top Democrats would realize their party needs sweeping reforms. But apparently not. Instead, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has just responded in the most predictable way imaginable to David Hogg’s proposal to oust ineffective incumbents: by trying to shut it down. It’s a sign of how hidebound and resistant to change the party is. And the ironic thing is, Hogg’s reform agenda isn’t even that good.

Hogg, the 25-year-old gun control activist who was elected earlier this year to be a Vice Chair of the DNC, first co-launched the PAC Leaders We Deserve in 2023 as an effort to “elect young progressives to Congress and State Legislatures across the country.” But now, with Hogg elevated to national party leadership and the group announcing a $20 million push to “intervene in primaries in solidly Democratic districts,” the project has taken on a new level of prominence.

Some critics of the Democratic Party are optimistic about Hogg’s initiative because he’s pissing off the right people. Rahm Emanuel and James Carville, two symbols of the decay and stagnation within the party, have attacked his plan for all the wrong reasons. “My time is usually [spent] figuring out how to win elections where Democrats can beat Republicans,” Emanuel said in a recent interview. “You want to spend [...] your time [...] figuring out how Democrats can beat Democrats?” James Carville, never one to pass up an opportunity to punch left, went much further, calling Hogg a “contemptible little twerp,” suggesting the DNC should sue him, and dismissing his strategy as a dangerous “purity test.” (Carville’s own strategy for Democratic success? “Play dead” and hope Donald Trump self-destructs. Truly brilliant stuff.)

David Hogg is right about some things. He’s right to say that “asleep at the wheel” Democrats should be primaried. He’s right that competitive primaries can strengthen democracy. And if his effort succeeds in unseating a few long-serving incumbents who have overstayed their welcome, that may be cause for celebration. But there’s no indication that Hogg is offering a break from the Democratic establishment—he’s merely promoting a softer, younger version of it. His project acknowledges that voters are disillusioned and that the Democratic Party is more unpopular than ever, but he offers no structural analysis beyond blaming ineffective, elderly leadership. Even worse than that, his project offers little in the way of a substantive policy platform that could deliver real material benefits to ordinary people. In this way, Leaders We Deserve follows in a long tradition of liberal reformism that misidentifies surface dysfunction as the root of the crisis. 

Hogg’s desire to get young people elected into office is understandable. Much has been written about how America is a “gerontocracy,” a nation governed by old people. Some critics, like Business Insider’s John Haltiwanger, have even compared the U.S. to the declining Soviet Union, where the average age of a Politburo member was 69. It’s true that Congress as a whole skews older than the general population. As of 2025, the median age of a Democratic incumbent in Congress is 59.7 years old. For reference, the median age of the U.S. population is 38.9 years, according to the Census Bureau. There are currently only 34 Democrats in the House of Representatives who are Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and only one who is Gen-Z (Maxwell Frost, born in 1997). Across both parties, just eleven U.S. Senators are under the age of 50, and the median age is 64.7. Nearly 70 percent of Democratic voters say they want “elderly” leaders to retire. While the poll left the term “elderly” up to the interpretation of respondents, the results may reflect a broad frustration with entrenched leadership. 

But it’s important to understand that age alone isn’t the issue. There are plenty of good politicians who are old. At 83, Bernie Sanders has displayed unmatched stamina on his cross-country Fighting Oligarchy Tour. Other older lawmakers are also still sharp, principled, and effective. Al Green, 77, demonstrated remarkable moral clarity and courage when he interrupted Donald Trump during a joint session of Congress. And Chris Van Hollen, 66, acted with more courage than any of his peers when he traveled to El Salvador to advocate for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. (Internationally, the 75-year-old Jeremy Corbyn is also doing solid work.) But as people get older, health problems tend to come up, and while we need to be careful not to discriminate against people because they happen to have a medical issue, elected officials who show signs of serious impairment have a responsibility to be transparent about whether they’re able to handle the demands of public service. President Joe Biden, at a similar age to Bernie Sanders, showed obvious signs of cognitive and physical decline that his aides worked to conceal. Likewise, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s decline while in office became a humiliating nationwide spectacle. Five House Democrats have died in office just within the last year: Donald Payne Jr. (65), Sylvester Turner (70), Sheila Jackson Lee (74), Raúl Grijalva (77), and Bill Pascrell (87). All had serious medical issues of the kind that tend to impact people’s quality of life, which raises questions about the condition these leaders may have been in while they remained in office.

Conversely, just because a politician is young doesn’t mean they are any more courageous or committed to progressive politics. Hogg himself acknowledges this, writing that “some Democratic challengers will come from the right, and we’ll risk replacing great older leaders with someone young and slick who talks well, but stands for even less.” Thirty-seven-year-old Representative Ritchie Torres is an example of this kind of young (mis)leader. Despite representing the poorest congressional district in the United States, Torres spends more time advocating for Israel and its war crimes than he does his own constituents.

The real issue is that age, tenure, and political sclerosis often go hand in hand. Longtime incumbents tend to ossify around the status quo and the positions of power or influence that they have obtained, growing more risk-averse, donor-friendly, and hostile to the demands of a younger, angrier, and more progressive base. What’s most objectionable about an aging leadership class is not simply their chronological age or their health conditions (which can affect anyone). It’s the fact that they serve a political order that is more interested in holding on to its power than in addressing escalating crises—many of which, like climate collapse, they won’t even be alive to endure.

The Democratic Party, as Hogg rightly points out, has “a culture of seniority politics that shuns and attempts to destroy anyone who dares challenge those who have served in the same position for decades.” That culture has led to some glaring unforced errors, most notably when an ailing and unpopular Joe Biden refused to step down as his party’s nominee, which undermined Kamala Harris’s campaign and contributed to her defeat. Following Harris’s disastrous 2024 electoral performance, the party faced intense pressure to show it understood the need for generational change and transparency. Instead, Democrats chose to appoint 74-year-old Gerry Connolly to chair the powerful House Oversight Committee, passing over the younger, more popular, and highly skilled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The return of Connolly’s esophageal cancer, which was publicly known when he was appointed, forced him to step down less than five months later. It wasn’t simply that Connolly had a serious medical condition. Democratic leadership once again prioritized insider status and seniority over effectiveness, making it clear they have learned nothing from Biden’s defeat.

It’s the Ideology, Stupid

Politics is about making real change in people’s lives. One of the reasons Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris was that people tend to get more excited by big, sweeping campaign promises than by small, milquetoast policy tweaks. Hogg clearly understands this, having recently tweeted the following: 

“We need people who are ready to push the boundaries of what’s possible to fix our broken healthcare system, rapidly bring down the costs of housing, and refuse to take corporate PAC money, because they understand that’s the vehicle the NRA, tech giants, insurance companies, Big Pharma, defense contractors, and all types of special interests use to protect their profits and block reforms that threaten their power, all at the expense of American people.”

Despite this rhetoric, Leaders We Deserve currently offers no policies on its website. There’s no mention of Medicare for All, no Green New Deal, no commitment to organized labor, no mention of campaign finance reform, and no stance on Gaza¹—just vague reformism and pop-up ads asking for money. “Sure, he has said he is for gun laws, healthcare for all, and free college,” Yasmin Nair writes of Hogg. “[B]ut there is scant evidence that he thinks all of this is tied to a political agenda: it’s all a cynical move to elect people into office.”

The problem with David Hogg’s approach is that it isn’t, in contrast to what James Carville said, a “purity test” at all. Speaking to the New York Times, Hogg makes it clear that, for him, the central issue in determining which Democratic incumbents should be primaried is “not ideological but rather how capable and active lawmakers were at pushing back on the Trump administration.” At the same time, in public remarks, Hogg insists that his standard isn’t about age but about one’s ability to effectively resist Trump. Right away we can see the problem with his approach. Resisting Trump does require ideology. You can’t fight right-wing pseudo-populism with empty platitudes or while embracing the rot that created Trump in the first place. You have to offer a political agenda that stands in clear contrast to Trumpism. In other words, left-wing populism—the very thing that establishment Democrats are allergic to. 

David Hogg talks a lot about fighting Trump, but then he turns around and promotes people who have not demonstrated an ability to effectively do so: namely, Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi. For example, Hogg has said that his top priority is “winning back the house and making Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker [of the House], which is an absolute imperative” and that “there are older members that are meeting this moment, like Congresswoman Pelosi, [who] has spent the past decade fighting back against Donald Trump. […] This is out with the ineffective and in with the effective.” But Jeffries and Pelosi are hardly “effective” oppositional leaders. In reality, they’re members of what Nathan J. Robinson has called the “feckless” opposition. Jeffries whined not too long ago about how his party has no “leverage,” and Pelosi’s biggest opposition to Trump 1.0 might have been when she ripped up a copy of his State of the Union speech in 2020. Yeah. Very serious opposition.

Pelosi and Jeffries don’t just passively maintain the status quo, they sometimes even oppose transformative policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal (which Pelosi has dismissively called the “green dream or whatever”) while taking money from groups like MetLife and Kaiser Permanente. While Hogg claims to oppose the influence of corporate PAC money and special interests, it’s hard to square that with his insistence that making Hakeem Jeffries Speaker is an “absolute imperative” considering Jeffries’ top donors include AIPAC, BlackRock, and Lockheed Martin. In the past year, Jeffries has also been “locked in an electoral battle” to “stop DSA from increasing its foothold” in the New York State Assembly and has explicitly opposed the election of activists like Eon Huntley to the legislature. Together, he and Pelosi represent everything wrong with Democratic leadership: no vision to make substantive change, no urgency, and no willingness to confront power. 

Ironically, Hogg also cites Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a positive example of a young progressive who took on the establishment and won, but his defense of Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi suggests that he’d also be promoting Joe Crowley if Ocasio-Cortez had emerged today rather than in 2017.

You can’t call for a revolution in party politics while propping up the same gatekeepers who’ve spent decades taking money from the special interests whose influence ensures that nothing ever changes. These politicians don’t lack energy or youth; they lack the will to confront special interests because they are embedded within them. By saying that his mission is “not ideological,” Hogg is embracing the hollow, donor-friendly centrism that has led Democrats to constant failure and record low approval ratings.

Compare Hogg’s approach to an organization like Justice Democrats. Founded by Saikat Chakrabarti, Zack Exley, Cenk Uygur, and Kyle Kulinski in 2017, the organization went on to elect a number of progressive representatives including Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Marie Newman, Greg Casar, and Summer Lee. What made Justice Democrats electorally successful was that it was explicitly ideological. In 2017, Uygur and Kulinski published a list of foundational principles for candidates who want to earn the endorsement of Justice Democrats, including support for banning corporate PACs, enacting Medicare for All, raising the minimum wage and tying it to inflation, ending unnecessary wars and the war on drugs, implementing a Green New Deal–style infrastructure program, and rejecting billionaire and corporate donations outright. Every candidate endorsed by Justice Democrats was required to make a commitment to refuse donations from corporate lobbyists and PACs, and was “expected to be aligned with Justice Democrats’ platform, which includes abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, advocating free public colleges and trade schools, and ending the death penalty,” according to the New York Times. Indeed, this was something like an explicit litmus test, whereas David Hogg seems to believe that vibes, youth, and “effectiveness” matter more than actual policy commitments.

Justice Democrats also revealed the limits of this approach. Without a mechanism for accountability, even the most principled pledge can dissolve under pressure. The group succeeded in getting candidates elected but failed to ensure that the representatives fought as an adversarial bloc to advance their agenda. For the left, the challenge isn’t just getting new people into office, it’s making them deliver. If Hogg were serious about party reform, he’d demand enforceable standards and create leverage through grassroots mobilization and constituency building. He’d organize groups that can actually hold elected leaders accountable when they don’t deliver and encourage Democrats to not only make bigger promises but also to keep them.

When liberals abandon working-class politics, they leave a vacuum that the right fills with its own pseudo-populist narratives of culture war scapegoats and anti-immigrant fearmongering. However disingenuously employed this rhetoric may be, it does manage to convince frustrated and economically disempowered voters that their actual needs will be addressed. Make no mistake: the Democratic Party doesn’t lack ideology, it upholds one—neoliberalism—that serves donors, corporations, and political insiders. Instead of a departure from the politics that gave us Harris’s catastrophic campaign, Hogg is offering a cosmetic rebrand. 

‘You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train’

In response to David Hogg’s project, DNC Chair Ken Martin penned an op-ed for Time arguing that the party leadership must remain “neutral in all Democratic primaries” and warning against the perception of favoritism. “Our role is to serve as stewards of a fair, open, and trusted process,” Martin wrote, “not to tilt the scales.” Boy, is this rich. Which DNC is Martin talking about? The one that rigged the primary in 2016 against Bernie Sanders and in favor of Hillary Clinton? Is he talking about the party establishment that intervened in the 2020 primary as well? Recall that when Bernie Sanders surged in 2020, influential Rep. Jim Clyburn endorsed Joe Biden, setting off a domino effect as the rest of the establishment lined up behind him. Barack Obama did his part to quietly work the phones to “accelerate the endgame” and nudge Sanders out of the race, clearing the way for Biden. If the Democratic Party embodied a principle of neutrality, we’ve yet to see it. 

It’s clear that the establishment is willing to abandon any pretense of neutrality the moment it becomes inconvenient, usually whenever a corporate-friendly candidate is at risk. Former State Senator Nina Turner, a national Sanders surrogate, who ran for the House in 2021 and 2022, was buried under a tidal wave of AIPAC and DMFI money, with party elites like Hillary Clinton endorsing her opponent, Shontel Brown, who raised funds by meeting with pro-Israel donors on junkets abroad. In Buffalo, India Walton, a Black working-class nurse and democratic socialist, won her primary against four-term Democratic incumbent Byron Brown, only to have Brown refuse to concede and mount a write-in campaign for the general election with the backing of establishment Democrats like Tom Suozzi, as well as Trump-affiliated Republicans, which ultimately resulted in Walton’s defeat. It was one of the clearest examples of the establishment closing ranks to crush a progressive insurgent, even after voters had made their choice. And in perhaps the most cynical, disgraceful display of Democratic Party sabotage in recent memory, Jessica Cisneros—a progressive immigration attorney challenging anti-choice, NRA-backed Henry Cuellar—was thwarted by Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn, both of whom endorsed Cuellar even after the leaked Dobbs v. Jackson opinion. Pelosi also recorded robocalls for him even while he was under FBI investigation. Cisneros lost by just 289 votes, while Cuellar went on to be indicted on conspiracy and bribery charges after winning reelection. 

The issue isn’t that Democrats lack young talent, as Hogg might want you to believe. It’s that anyone who threatens the party’s donor class or foreign policy consensus, young or old, is filtered out. When party elders crush insurgents from the left, it’s written off as a strategic necessity. But when David Hogg threatens to use his PAC to bankroll primary challenges to ineffective Democrats, it’s treated as an existential threat to the party’s integrity. At this point, we should know better. The Hogg-Martin dispute looks like a savage debate over the future of the Democratic Party, but it isn’t really anything of the kind. It’s just a factional intergenerational power struggle. Neither side intends to change the party’s core politics—only the faces representing them. 

As the historian Howard Zinn said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Things are already moving in a certain direction, and you are either for it or against it. You are either for inequality, concentration of wealth and power, the climate crisis, and genocide, or you are against them. 

Today, the most urgent problems we face are not strictly caused by gerontocracy. They are the outcome of a political system that is designed to preserve elite control. Any meaningful insurgency would name those responsible, refuse their money, and organize to dismantle their power. Instead, Hogg is launching a talent search within the same narrow parameters that have long excluded meaningful alternatives. No candidate who seriously threatens the donor class, challenges U.S. empire, or demands the redistribution of wealth and power will emerge from the pipeline he’s building. Leaders We Deserve is not a betrayal of Democratic Party norms, it is their logical extension. And in a moment that demands moral clarity and solidarity, brand management is not enough.

notes

^{1 Notably, Hogg has said almost nothing about the genocide in Gaza—the most urgent moral crisis of our time—apart from a meandering, nervous response when pressed by Bill Maher to condemn student pro-Palestine protesters. In a Rolling Stone interview, he acknowledged that Gaza was “emblematic of the fact that people felt like we were not listening to them—that we didn’t care.” But it’s still strange that someone who became an activist after surviving a school shooting would have so little to say about entire universities being leveled by U.S.-made bombs.}