Cutting ties with the Democratic party would be folly. After the Whigs perished and the Democratic Republicans split, we’ve not seen a third party overtake the principles, and that includes Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Progressives. That includes Ross Perot’s independent run, which was pretty darned convincing.

But as Alexandria Occasio Cortez observed, the Democratic party is struggling to raise the minimum wage. Long-term goals like abolishing prisons or abolishing the Senate are not likely to come up in the foreseeable future, even if they are able to secure the House, Senate, Presidency and SCOTUS. Heck, implementation of universal healthcare (which is popular throughout the US) is going to be a process that will take many years, even if it doesn’t get sabotaged by Republicans the way the ACA did.

Also, centrist Democrats have some extreme ideas. They generally want to do the things that serve their lobbyist masters, so maximizing intellectual property law, overregulating social media so that newer, smaller platforms can’t compete with the big ones in place, blocking kids from accessing the internet, deregulating landlords and so on.

And then there’s the stuff that the Republican party is actively working to do, like securing a permanent Republican majority across federal branches of government, hobbling elections, stripping non-whites of rights, stripping women of rights, making Protestant Evangelical Christianity a national religion, replacing income tax with tariffs and so on.

So no, I wouldn’t be too worried about the Red Star Caucus becoming too powerful and dominating US politics. And if, by some time-travel meddling, it did, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the mess we’re in right now.