The Spanberger Paradox: Don Quixote Goes To Washington

The modern progressive Democrat has more in common with Don Quixote than with Karl Marx.

That thought crystallized after hearing the victory speech of Bernie Sanders’ former national political director, lifelong activist Analilia Mejia.

Mejia is set to succeed Democratic Governor Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, a seat padded by roughly 60,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. She claims she is “running to bring common-sense leadership to DC and deliver results for our families, not push a far-left agenda.” Translated into plain English, that means she ran as a “moderate” to assure success but intends to go batshit crazy and govern exactly as her record suggests, which is to embrace the same far-left positions she now pretends to distance herself from.

Her career has been defined by ideological activism, not moderation.

We used to call that lying, or at least a bait and switch. Now it is practically a electoral/governing strategy. Call it the Spanberger Paradox, the ritual in which a Democrat campaigns as a “moderate, common-sense” figure and then, once safely elected, reverts to the ideological instincts that got them there in the first place.

Bernie Sanders himself is now well into his eighties, an antique of the movement who has managed to build a long political career while producing remarkably little lasting substance. That is no small feat. It takes a certain talent to rise to the political equivalent of three-dacha status after beginning a career in a commune that reportedly asked you to leave after three days for failing to carry your weight.

The irony is thick. The generation that spent decades railing against “the man” has, through time and power, become precisely that—the man. What follows is the inevitable collision between youthful revolutionary idealism and the constraints of governing reality. It is one thing to protest systems, quite another to run them and that collision is visible in policy. The same voices that once celebrated the passage of Obamacare now insist it did not go nearly far enough. They declare healthcare a “right,” expand the role of government to provide it, and then construct a sprawling web of mandates, restrictions, and bureaucratic controls that dictate how individuals must navigate that system. Freedom, in this formulation, is carefully managed.

When progressives speak of freedom, it often resembles the freedom of a steer in a loading chute. The animal is free to move, but only forward, and only in the direction prescribed. Never mind that chute leads to the slaughterhouse and some dude is behind you with a cattle prod stuck to your hindquarters urging you forward with a little electric motivation.

I have little sympathy for the younger generation of progressive activists. It is hard to be a radical while living in remarkable American prosperity. They have not been meaningfully oppressed by an establishment—quite the opposite, actually. The establishment has subsidized their ascent, turning activism into a viable and often lucrative career path. Agitation has become a profession where loyalty to the cause is well rewarded, and unlike other systems, this is one commune from which you are unlikely to be expelled.

In that environment, truth becomes secondary to narrative. What matters is the mythology they construct about themselves. They are cast as the righteous underdogs, the noble resisters, the aggrieved class battling unseen forces. It is a modern retelling of Don Quixote, except the windmills have been repainted as villains, and the crusade is sustained by the need to keep believing they exist.

The internal contradictions required to maintain this worldview are significant. Call it cognitive dissonance or doublethink, it amounts to a constant reconciliation of competing realities. They denounce power while exercising it. They claim to defend freedom while expanding control. They insist they are outsiders while operating comfortably within the system’s upper tiers.

For the older generation, railing against “the man” has become awkward now that they occupy that role. For the younger activists, the solution is simpler. If the dragons no longer exist, you invent them. If the threat is not real, you redefine it until it is.

Donald Trump becomes a tyrant, regardless of constitutional limits. Successful figures like Elon Musk are recast as villains, regardless of what they produce. Economic reality is dismissed in favor of ideological promise, even when history repeatedly contradicts it.

It is not analysis. It is narrative maintenance.

Miguel de Cervantes gave us a man who mistook windmills for giants and charged them with unwavering conviction. He was called mad because he could not distinguish between imagination and reality. The modern progressive movement increasingly resembles that story, not as metaphor but as method. The targets may be different, the language more contemporary, but the impulse is the same. The crusade continues, sustained not by what is, but by what must be invented and then believed.

This is not merely Quixotic. It is the institutionalization of it.