For years, conservatives have drawn a distinction that often gets lost in ordinary political arguments: A liberal and a leftist are not necessarily the same thing.
That distinction is becoming considerably harder for Democrats to ignore as the Democratic Socialists of America gains electoral influence and forces longtime party figures to decide exactly where their own boundaries lie.
Chris Matthews has apparently decided it is time to draw some.
The 80-year-old lifelong Democrat and retired television host appeared Wednesday on MS NOW’s Morning Joe, where he urged mainstream Democrats to explicitly distance themselves from the DSA rather than relying on the familiar argument that theirs is simply a “big tent” party.
Matthews began by suggesting the DSA had inadvertently done conventional Democrats a favor by making its positions clear.
“I’ve been thinking this for days now,” Matthews said. “The DSA has done a favor to non-DSA Democrats, to regular Democrats who are regular members of the party. They’ve listed what they believe in. Their chair made that clear.”
Chris Matthews lists everything the DSA believes on MSNBC, then calls it CRAP.
Even he can’t stomach what’s happening to his own party.
MATTHEWS: “We’re going to get rid of ICE. Not just ICE. We’re going to get rid of the border. We’re not going to have a border anymore. We’re… pic.twitter.com/xt5gXySJzE
— The Vigilant Fox (@VigilantFox) August 12, 2026
Matthews then rattled through his characterization of several DSA positions, including opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, existing border enforcement, prisons and the Pentagon.
His point was not that Democrats needed to defend those positions. It was exactly the opposite.
“All these positions can be denied by any regular Democrat,” Matthews said.
His suggested response was remarkably simple: Tell voters where the disagreement begins.
“Thank you, DSA, for telling us what you believe in. I don’t believe in that stuff,” Matthews offered as the message Democrats could deliver.
Matthews became even more animated when the conversation turned to Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who is affiliated with the DSA.
“I like AOC, generally,” Matthews said. “But she came out and said, ‘We’re just a big tent party.’”
For Matthews, that answer doesn’t solve the political problem. It creates one.
“The problem with the big-tent defense is, every Democrat has to defend all this crap coming from the left,” he said. “They’ve got to say, ‘I believe in all this CRAZY STUFF, and that makes me a Democrat.’”
Instead, Matthews argued, individual Democrats should explicitly tell voters that they are not DSA members and explain why.
That is a significant argument coming from someone with Matthews’ history in Democratic politics. He isn’t asking Democrats to become Republicans or abandon traditional liberal priorities. He is telling them to define those priorities separately from democratic socialism.
Later in the discussion, Matthews provided his own version of what that distinction could sound like.
“This is why I’m a Democrat,” he said. “I’m for labor unions. I’m for opportunity for everybody. I’m for civil rights. I’m for all the things I believe in as a Democrat, but I’m not with this crowd.”
That gets directly to the liberal-versus-leftist distinction conservatives have been talking about for years.
A Democrat can support organized labor, civil rights programs and traditional liberal economic policies without automatically accepting every proposal associated with the socialist left. Matthews’ complaint is that Democrats risk erasing that distinction when they treat ideological disagreements as nothing more than different occupants of the same political tent.
The timing, however, is difficult to overlook.
The DSA is no longer merely an activist organization operating outside electoral politics. Its members and aligned candidates have won Democratic primaries and elected offices, while figures such as Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani have given democratic socialism a prominent place in Democratic political debates.
That makes Matthews’ prescription both clearer and harder to implement than it might have been years ago.
It is easy to separate yourself from a political faction when that faction has little power. It becomes more complicated once its candidates are winning elections, its members hold office and its supporters constitute an important part of the coalition.
Still, Matthews is arguing for something remarkably basic: political candidates should tell voters what they actually believe and, just as importantly, what they reject.
The “big tent” defense can accommodate substantial disagreements, but it cannot make those disagreements disappear.
Matthews appears to have recognized that problem. The question for Democrats is why drawing those lines became urgent only after the DSA had already established itself inside the tent.
